You don’t always get what you expect at Kent Terrace in Ramsgate.

My lunchtime walk was added to by the fire brigade practicing for an incident on Augusta Stairs, the last one of note being in 1967 when the cliff collapsed there, particularly embarrassing as this was just after they had had a major survey, saying that the cliff there was sound and safe.

This next bit is a game of spot the difference, just after I pointed out that there appeared to be some disparity between the plans passed by the council and the building under construction on Kent Terrace, the developer put tarpaulins over the front of the scaffolding there so that you couldn’t see what was going on.

I had assumed that this covered up them quietly changing the building to conform to the plans, however the tarpaulin has partly blown away revealing windows not quite where the plans say they should be.

The pictures should expand if you click on them.

As you can see the top of the top floor windows of the new building there are supposed to be at about the same level as the top of Pier Castle, or the Belgian Café if you navigate by bars.

With the bottom floor being at the same level as the house next door and the top floor being so much lower I wonder what happens on the floor in between, perhaps this is a floor for dwarfs, perhaps in this politically correct age I should say the vertically disadvantaged.

The rest of the pictures are here http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/211/ the other main thing of note was work on the Pleasurama development, I will probably be corrected on this one but they seemed to laying concrete foundations, in the form of a load spreading pad, at the north eastern, Augusta Stairs end of the site.

Interesting to me as I assumed that the whole construction was to be the steel cage type supported on bored piles.
Perhaps there has been another design change or perhaps they are concerned about causing vibration so close to the cliff façade.

Ramsgate Seafront Developments a bit of ramble

Having just phoned the architects for the slipway because their flood risk assessment just doesn’t make any sense, this is really case of time is running out to comment on the application and the flood risk assessment appears to have errors in it.

What is seems to be saying is something akin to the tallest person is four feet high, therefore we propose to build as house with all of the ceilings five feet high.

There are several examples of this in the document, here is one of them; it actually says on page eleven of the document is. “Spring tides can reach 5.4m above chart datum”.

This weeks tides see http://easytide.ukho.gov.uk/EasyTide/EasyTide/ShowPrediction.aspx?PortID=0102&PredictionLength=7 Thursday 5.4m, Friday 5.6, Saturday 5.7.

Now you would think that the architects would have something to say about this, some sort of explanation, but know it would seem that my only approach here is to use this as part of my grounds for objecting to the development.

Next door to this site is the pavilion and here they seem to be painting and filling the cracks in the outside, with no real reference to the problems inside the building.

Also this work seems to be going on without any thought to the flood protection, it would seem that a lot of money is to be spent on Margate’s flood protection, but nothing on Ramsgate’s.

I wonder if the council have read the wrong figures for a high tide in Ramsgate too, this is something that would explain quite a bit.

Over the road the building on the back of the Belgian Café is still proceeding with the windows about a metre lower that they should be according to the plans.

Back to my conversation with the architects for the slipway development, they really don’t seem to appreciate that what they are building is in fact a short pier and that the building of piers is a specialist business.

I asked about wave heights and the architect that I spoke to said that this wasn’t a problem with the Clock House, he didn’t seem to understand that the stone apron at the back of the Clock House dissipates the waves, something that doesn’t happen with a pier.

On to the Pleasurama site, all work seems to have stopped there now, understandable really now I know the sequence of events, which is.

Cardy Construction the people building the development started clearing the site about a month ago, this has exposed the bottom of the cliff wall, which frankly looks a bit dodgy.

I now know from the HSE that they expressed concerns about the cliff wall, foundations, weeds, cracks, strange damp patches and so on to the council.

The council reassured them saying that the cliff wall was perfectly safe and work continued.

Then a lump of it fell off that was big enough to kill someone below.

Now they have stopped work and left the site.

The HSE have now told me that they are going to send one of their construction engineers to visit the site.

During the war cliff maintenance, weed removal, keeping the drains clear and so on didn’t happen as people were busy fighting Hitler and after the war we had several cliff collapses in Ramsgate.

Once again and I don’t really know why cliff maintenance seems not be happening quite as it should, this is an example from another part of Ramsgate.
The picture above is of another blocked drain and illustrates what I mean about recent cliff maintenance about as clearly as I can.

The pictures below are of when this part of cliff in Ramsgate collapsed just agter the war.

The pictures apart from the one I took at the top, are courtesy of Margate Museum, click on them to enlarge them and click on them again to make them even bigger.

I should stress that this was only one of several cliff collapses in Ramsgate and that the most likely cause of them was poor maintenance.

The trouble is that once water has damaged the chalk cliff it stays damaged. It doesn’t really matter what is done to the cliff facades, it is the condition of the thousands of tons of chalk behind them that causes the problems.

In a natural state it is the sea undermines the chalk and the cliff steadily collapses at about the rate of a foot a year, so if man hadn’t intervened with sea defences then most of our famous cliff top buildings in Ramsgate would have already fallen into the sea.

I don’t fully understand the business of building foreshore and under cliff developments here in Thanet recently.

We had a spate of this mostly in Victorian times when either these were leisure buildings, most of which have now vanished, like Ramsgate and Margate piers or most of the other Thanet pavilions. Or they were major pieces of civil engineering integrated with the cliffs, like Westcliff Hall, The Winter Gardens or the arches in Ramsgate.

Now we seem to have a group of developers that only ever seem to have experience of building inland who seem to think that they can ignore the major civil engineering challenges posed by these sites and just build any old thing there.

Work starts on the Pleasurama site and other reflections on building work

There is much activity in Ramsgate from the men in overalls with their Transit vans, I seemed to confront this wherever I went today.
Pugin looks out under a much scaffolded Granville, it would seem that the roof on the new bit has never been quite right.

There was early morning activity on the Pleasurama site, they appear to be clearing the ground prior to constructing the Royal Sands Development there.

The only place in Ramsgate that residential development has occurred in front of a cliff face in the past is Kent Terrace.

At the moment there is some sort of dialogue going on between the council and the residents there about who is responsible for repairing the cliff wall there.

This design of cliff wall in Ramsgate has given problems in the past, so it is an important dialogue, particularly if you live in front of one.

There were a – what is the collective noun for Transit vans – a taggle or perhaps an encumbrance, lot of them about as you can see.

The trouble in this case is that I don’t think any amount of rodding will stop the buildings there filling up with sewage when it rains hard.

There is a strange anachronism relating to environmental regulation here, it isn’t possible to put an emergency drain into the harbour although the sewage pours into there too, when it rains hard that is.

There was also much work going on the slipway that apparently we don’t need.

Where this work will take place when the slipway is built on is unclear, of course while a slipway isn’t economically viable while some sort of pub eatery would be, there is the question. Is the harbour viable if there isn’t anywhere for the windfarm vessels to be mended.

The pavilion is having much attention from the taggle, it is strange doing all this work on the outside of the building, without giving it a sea defence to protect it or resolving the problems inside.

Much activity around the new development in Kent Terrace too, it is very obviously about a metre shorter that it should be, just suppose you had to explain to your partner why the garden shed’s height was out by a metre.

Sorry I digress, some of the Pleasurama site clearance seems to be revelling some unusual aspects of the cliff façade, but I won’t say anything about that as I have done so enough before I think.

I think it’s time to look at the historical aspect here combined with today’s pictures.

The guys in the picture above are looking for people buried in the rubble when part of the cliff near the Pleasurama site collapsed in 1957.

The Brick pillar in the picture above is part of the structure that collapsed then.

The picture above is another one of this series of collapses, I say series as it collapsed again halfway through the rebuilding process, taking the new concrete support with it, a few hundred tons of chalk tends to get its own way.

Now most of these collapses are caused by water leaking in through the top surface, blocked drains, cracked surface, that sort of thing.

The clump of weeds growing by the fence in the picture above is all you can see of the drain that is completely blocked, next to the top of the brick pillar.

And the brick pillar is seventy feet high and twelve feet away from the new development that will have people living inside.

I have mentioned this today to both the council and the contractor who is going to build the development there, just in case you were wondering.

Oh the rest of today’s pictures are at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/910/id4.htm and http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/910/id5.htm I nearly forgot.

Kent Terrace new house shorter than expected

If you compare the plan above

with the picture above, you will see that the windows in the new building don’t seem to have come out at the level they should have done compared to the buildings each side.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Some thoughts about Kent Terrace and other pictures

I have just returned from a pleasant day out and sat down in the living room with the rest of my family we have one guest staying, a board game is in progress, one of us is playing guitar and I have just put the camera card into my laptop to see what the pictures on it are like.

The board game is Go For Broke, the object being to lose all your money, my two youngest children are having some difficulty coming to terms with a game where the object of the game is to lose, something that is mildly amusing.

The first page of pictures to publish is at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop910a/id3.htm the first picture is of the new development at the bottom of Kent Terrace, I assumed that anything going between the Regency houses there and the Belgian Café building would be in keeping with the buildings on either side.

The building that has the Belgian Café and Pete’s Fish Factory on the ground floor is in the style of a castle, built I think in about 1820, I assume it originally housed The Castle Inn as an engraving of 1817 shows a different building there of that name.

Looking vaguely at the picture I realised that the levels of the windows of the new building don’t line up with the rest of the terrace, a look at the council’s planning website reveals what is going to be built there.
OK it isn’t particularly unpleasant looking, just total out of keeping with the style of the buildings around it, the obvious question here is, why not fill in the gap with another bow fronted Regency style building like the other ones?
This sort of thing depresses me and it frankly doesn’t make any sense, oh well there wouldn’t be time in life to examine every planning application and object to all the daft ones, perhaps one day we will have government sympathetic to the town, until then there is only a limited amount one can do.
There is some activity on the Pleasurama cliff façade, thanks to Gerald for this picture and letting me know about this one, I am not sure what is going on there as by the time I managed to get out and take some pictures the chaps with the cherry picker were having a break. Next time I got out they had gone, it is obvious that they didn’t weed it like last year, my take is that anyone looking at the condition of this thing before building work starts can only be beneficial.

Another squirrel, this time on Plains of Waterloo.

Blocked drain adjacent to the harbour, by the bus stop, after the recent flooding both in Harbour Parade and York Street, it seems incredible that this drain that has been blocked for about a year, still hasn’t been dealt with.

Once again numbers one and three slipways are occupied, there are plans to build a development on numbers two and three slipways, there is a mock up picture of what this development will look like in the town council’s offices, but nothing I can find on the TDC planning website. I have to explain here that the TDC planning website is a very strange website indeed, if you were going to design a website deliberately to conceal information it would make a pretty good starting point. So it may be there and I just haven’t been able to find it.

Anyway back to this development, what no one can tell me is how the harbour is supposed to operate with only one slipway.
On to Westgate and Birchington where a nice old Norton single was parked up, it looks to be about 1955, as around 1956 alternators started to replace dynamos I think it is an ES2, the external oil filter is a modification.

We went for lunch at Quex Barn today, I opted for the £10 two course option in the pictures.

The next page of pictures at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop910a/id4.htm were taken in the gardens at The Powell Cotton Museum in Quex Park.

Cliff collapses in Ramsgate

One of my customers came in with some pictures of the collapse at the Paragon in the late 50s today, copies above. He recons the date to be about 1958 or 59 going by his age, he is the lad in one of the pictures and claims he didn’t do it.

He had seen the pictures of the other cliff collapses on my website and thought that it would be interesting to add these, any further information would be appreciated.

You may also wish to comment on the cliff behind Kent Terrace that I believe to be in danger of collapsing at the moment.