Saturday ramble

Customers are managing to get to my bookshop today despite the rain, frankly apart from shopping in the multiples, which probably means browsing books there and buying them online from a large company that avoids UK taxes the options are very limited.

The former Alexandra Hotel’s scaffolding has come off sorry about the picture mobile phone in the dark, if it ever stops raining I will go and take a better one.

I managed to get out and get an Isle of Thanet Gazette it seems Cllr Shirley Tomlinson is standing down from her role as cabinet member and offering to stand aside from the Conservative group while she faces her drinking and driving charge.

The Conservative group don’t seem to have found a new shadow cabinet member and appear to be carrying on one down for the time being.

The ongoing Royal Sands on the Pleasurama site is rumbling in the letters, I guess it is looking increasingly unlikely it will ever get over the cliff top. I always thought it would be the safety aspects, particularly building on a high risk flood zone that would do for it. Now it is looking much more likely to be the credentials of SFP the company behind it.

Here is Cllr Driver’s letter from the previous week’s Gazette:

Dear Editor

I read with interest (Thanet Gazette 2 November) Terence Painter’s claim that the developer of the former Pleasurama site at Ramsgate Royal Sands, SFP Ventures UK Ltd, “has a strong track record of (managing) similar developments in Portugal”. I understand that SFP Ventures UK Ltd  also claims   to have managed  large developments in Ipswich and Lowestoft.

I spent several hours Googling to substantiate these claims.  I found no evidence to prove that SFP Ventures UK Ltd  have managed developments in Ipswich, Lowestoft, Portugal or anywhere else for that matter. I also understand that Thanet Council has never been provided with independent, corroborative evidence which demonstrates that the company have managed any building development projects.  

I checked SFP Ventures UK Ltd  vital statistics on the Companies House website. According to it’s latest accounts it had a turnover of £1.9million in 2011. After paying its creditors the company made an operating loss of £859.

These are not the type of accounts  I would reasonably expect to see  from a company which Mr Painter describes as having a “strong track record” of managing large building developments in Portugal. 

SFP’s  lacklustre financial performance, coupled with its  long record of inactivity at the Pleasurama site,   leads me to wonder whether this company is the right partner to work with Thanet  Council to  deliver  this major £36 million regeneration project.

I also discovered on the Companies House website that  SFP Ventures UK Ltd  recently appointed  a second director who is a 23 year old student. Not wanting to sound ageist,  I doubt whether the vast majority of  23 year olds would have the experience, skill or  knowledge to be a Director of a  company which according to Mr Painter has a “strong track record”  of managing large multi £million building projects in Portugal and elsewhere.

SFP Ventures UK Ltd the current developer, its predecessor company SFP Venture Partners Ltd and it’s parent company SFP Services Ltd  (both of whom are off-shore companies which have never been registered at Companies House)  have been involved in the development of the Pleasrurama site for more than 10 years. In that time precious little work  has taken place, apart from turning a large piece of publically owned and valuable real estate into a disgraceful eyesore.

I note Mr Painter’s suggestion in his capacity as SFP’s official spokesman and sales agent, that to overcome the decade of delays your readers “should be shouting at Councillors” to encourage them to reach a new agreement  which includes the Council handing over the freehold of an extremely valuable plot of prime site public land to his clients for the princely sum of £3 million.

I totally agree with Mr Painter about the shouting!  However, I suggest that your readers should actually be shouting at Councillors to encourage them to carefully review how the blot on our landscape we fondly call the Pleasurama development  came about, and  give thoughtful consideration as to whether  Mr Painter’s client is actually the most suitable organisation to continue the development of this site.

Failure to take  a long hard look at the proposed new agreement with SFP might, despite the £3 million, cost the Council and the people of Thanet dear.

 Cllr Ian Driver

I think this is the first time that a Councillor has publicly gone as far as to say the company behind the venture doesn’t appear to exist in any real sense.

I guess this really does leave the onus on those supporting the development to show us some evidence of the other developments this company is responsible for.

Another taxi office opening in Ramsgate town centre, that’s two in two weeks.

Last nights sketch in The Belgian Café didn’t go that well, my excuse being that people kept moving 

I will probably ramble on here

Pleasurama minor update

Work has started laying the pipe for the roof rainwater drainage for the Pleasurama development, this pipe runs from the site to the inner basin and draining the roof in this way conforms to environment agency guidelines.

One aspect of the Pleasurama development that has always interested me it that much of the work undertaken so far hasn’t made much sense.

The new access road from the Granville Marina is a case in point where the developer has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds getting a contractor Knight Developments to build it, without first investigating the structure of the access road, to find out if it will last long enough to provide access to the building.

Even when the EA report came out saying that they strongly recommended a flood risk assessment, work carried on laying lose slabs on sand, on top of the sea defences, well I have been through all of this before and anyone who missed it can click on the links at the bottom of this post, to read all about it.

Well now another contractor http://www.oatmor-harris.co.uk/ are digging up the new roundabout laid by a previous contractor Knight Developments http://www.jlknightroadworks.co.uk/index.html

Do I have a problem with the work going on at the moment, well the answer to that one is no, Oatmor Harris are a quality contractor based in Deal, laying a pipe that has to be laid.

You can see from the photographs that they have turned up with the right kit to tackle the problem of laying a pipe through the concrete remains of the old railway turntable.

But still the question remains, why not lay the pipes and wires for the new development before laying the new roundabout?

Here is the link to this morning’s photographs http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop5/id8.htm it was a wet and gloomy morning and on reviewing them I have run them through a program to lighten them as they looked rather gloomy to me click on this link for the brighter ones http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop5/id9.htm I don’t know why when I publish pictures to the web from my notebook they don’t come up in the right order so I am sorry about that one.

Pleasurama, Royal Sands Ramsgate, Thanet’s largest residential development part 1 1997 to 2003.

Pleasurama, Royal Sands Ramsgate, Thanet’s largest residential development part 1 1997 to 2003.

Since the council press release announcing that work was about to start this month, I have been trying on and off to find out what’s going on.

This is a slow process with answers being cryptic, if you can get any at all, so as we are now on the fourth contractor, something like the seventh set of plans and the sixth definite start date, I thought I would put up a series of posts explaining what has happened with this site over the last eleven years since it burnt down.

I first became interested in this site about 12 years ago when the amusement arcade there closed, at the time we were told that it was going to reopen as a factory outlet.

The council altered the road layout ostensibly to fit in with this, in practical terms what they did was to remove nearly all of the main seafront car parking, how this factory outlet was to survive without any customer parking was never explained.

The more cynical among us decided that it was an attempt by our district council, based in our main rival leisure town, to bring our economy to its knees to their economic benefit. Rumour was that our EEC development grant had been used for this.

About 11 years ago the building burnt down as the result of an arson attack, a disaster for Ramsgate, there then ensued a long period of time when the council that owned the site tried to get back the leasehold interest from the tenant.

Somewhere around 2001 I think this was achieved although what happened to the insurance money claimed for the destroyed council owned building remains a mystery to me.

Early in 2002, I think it was, Whitbread the brewer came along with a proposal for a development on the site, it looked like a fairly good development and was in scale with other developments in the area. If I had to be critical of it, I would say that it wasn’t sympathetic to the surrounding architecture.

Some details from the documentation submitted to the council.

Developer Whitbread and SFP Venture Partners Ltd.

Architect PRC.

Building contractor Featherstone Construction Ltd.

The development was for two buildings, building 1 between the lift and the roundabout and building 2 between the roundabout and Augusta stairs.

Building 1 comprised 80 private flats, hotel Whitbread Brewers Fayre and commercial units. building 2 comprised 20 private flats.

Click on the link to view the documentation http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts10/id5.htm as far as I understand it this was the documentation that most of the TDC councillors representing Ramsgate had seen and thought they were agreeing to when the plans for a much larger and taller building somehow got slipped in during the change of administration from Labour to Conservative.

I am doing my best here to present an accurate account of the saga of this development so far and would appreciate any corrections or additions as they come along.