Watercolour Painting of Deal Timeball from Dunkerleys Hotel and a bit of a retail reflection.

Here is the painting of Deal Timeball and some fairly typical Deal buildings

And here the photo for art critics

Cheese sarni and pot of tea about £7

Shopping in Deal today, a town that is still hanging in there with numerous independent shops, the other side of this coin is more shops closing at Westwood Cross H&M are the latest and will be closing on 6^th June.

I guess the difference I notice most with WC is that the closed shops have a striking resemblance to the closed shops in “The Centre” in Margate. I guess this partly down to modern building that aren’t that well maintained looking pretty tacky when closed and partly due to newish shopping centres just not aging well. 

From my point of view as a retailer it is still fairly difficult to see where retail is going, sales in my bookshop started going up around the middle of last year after decreasing year on year for years. I have to admit to not really having any idea why, I would doubt that people are reading more physical books, or that my shop represents significant competition to Amazon, although I do try to make sure that my book prices are less than online book prices.

I do wonder just what the future is for fairly small out of town shopping centres like WC, I only have a reasonable understanding of the bookselling side of retail and everything I know about the book trade suggests that the W H Smith and Waterstones there shouldn’t really work. By this I mean that they replaced the two Albion Bookshops in Cliftonville and Broadstairs and I can’t see how book sales in Thanet would have increased by that sort of proportion.        

Here are a few Deal photos

A few books for my bookshop 

Something for our councillors here in Kent to live up to?

There has been some suggestion on some of the blogs that not all of the councillors in Kent are serving the electorate as well as they could be, so I thought an historical perspective here could be of some use.

During the 1700s the parishes of Kent were governed by the clergy and churchwardens, fortunately Archbishop Wake kept a private notebook in Latin (Notitia Dioces Cantuar,) here is what he wrote about some of Kent’s clergy at that time.

Patten of Whitstable kept a mistress and did not pay his debts; Bourn of Ash was "allied to the sons of Eli" ; Roberts of Queenborough, ale-house sot and debtor, "so impudent as nothing is like him"; Bate of Chilham, "proudest and stiffest man" in the diocese, allowing corpses to lie unburied for want of fees; Burroughs of Kingston, "most horribly covetous" ; Ansell of Stowting and Cade of Sellindge, Jacobites and taven-brawlers; Edward Dering of Charing who fought his own sister at the Swan Inn and threw her "head-cloaths" into the fire; Hobbs of Dover, who amassed pluralities; Isles of New Romney a notorious sot and Jacobite; Nicholls of Fordwich who preached that King George was a Foreigner, a Lutheran, and a Beggar-"a wicked, swearing. Lying, Drunken man".