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 Thanet District Council and The Freedom of Information Act

I have just recieved the Pleasurama development agreement, as you can see from the picture there is a lot of it, probably over 1,000 pages, so it will take me a while to peruse.

This was the first time I have used the freedom of information act, so I can’t tell if my experience was representative.

The whole process of getting this document took nearly a year, god alone knows how much of my time and the council’s it took. I hate to think about what obtaining it cost the council.

What I also found pretty horrifying was that I didn’t get an electronic file but printed documents, as did the information commissioner who tells me that they will all have to be scanned onto their system.

It is obviously that all of the documents were originally produced as electronic files and then printed out.

This makes me wonder how many forests are being cut down, as one part of our government types out documents in MS Word prints them out and posts them to another part of our government, where someone then scans them back into a computer so that they can be accessed without government officers being buried under the mounds of paper.

As far as I understand the whole document is now in the public domain, although I doubt you will find it on the council’s website and you may encounter some resistance if you ask for a copy too.

I haven’t yet decided if I should put the whole thing online or not, does anyone want me to?

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.

Casino complex in Ramsgate, Pleasurama, Maritime Museum, Sunday Ramble

Happy Easter to one and all.

I was interested to see an article in The Times about property in Broadstairs http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/article6060988.ece the article seems to have been derived from local estate agents and says that Ramsgate has a new casino complex under construction.

I wonder is it possible that there is something the local estate agents aren’t telling us, news is a funny thing however I often get the feeling that quite a lot of it is made up, and some things like whatever happened on the St Peters Margate road yesterday just don’t seem to appear.

From a local history point of view where a great deal of information is derived from newspaper archives this can present some problems, I can imagine a Ramsgate historian trying to answer questions about this nonexistent casino in 100 years time.

I believe negotiations are still ongoing in getting Preston Steam Museum http://www.thesteammuseum.org/ to take over Ramsgate maritime museum the problem here being the time that it’s taking, the councils slow grinding bureaucratic machine isn’t suitable for getting anything done in a timely manner.

They have been at it now for 6 months and now it’s Easter the museum is closed and the Cervia still sitting on her moorings.

It isn’t going to help much if it takes so long to get an agreement that we don’t get any program of events this summer or the Cervia sinks on her moorings.

I have been pressing the council fairly hard this week over the Pleasurama development firstly to get the site cleared for the summer and to ensure that we don’t go down another 5 years of unworkable plans and inaction.

With the money laundering regulations that have come in since the plans were first approved 5 years ago it seems fairly uncertain that the council can legally deal with a developer where the funds are derived via a British Virgin Islands company, the council are now looking into this and promise a reply about it next week.

I also believe that both the council and developer are coming round to the idea that the public transport access is unworkable, I think a problem here is that the whole western undercliff area from the pavilion to the car park where the marina pool used to be really needs to be restored and developed in an integrated way.

The mock up pictures of the development on the architects website still show the original gull winged building that relates to the first set of plans I can't link to the page on their website as it’s some strange flash production click on the link http://www.prc-group.com/index.php?id=0 then portfolio, sector, mixed use and then click on the picture of the development.

Mind you it’s still on the Robert Leonard group website http://www.robert-leonard.com/ they were the first contractor to pull out several years ago, there is a certain unreality about the developments presence on the web as though various companies have come along to make some money out of it, realised how bad the project is and departed.

I notice nothing appears on Knight Developments website http://www.knightdevelopmentsltd.co.uk/INDEX.asp they were the second contractor that were to have built it, they decamped after their sister company Knight Roadworks http://www.jlknightroadworks.co.uk/index.html built the road layout without the flood risk assessment strongly recommended by the environment agency.

Mind you this could all be a bit embarrassing for the parent company Knight Environmental http://www.knightenvironmental.co.uk/index.htm I quote from their website.

“Knight Environmental Limited has recognised the need for this with many of our customers and have developed the in-house expertise for undertaking flood risk assessments using Environment Agency accepted methodology outlined in the 'flood estimation handbook' (FEH). Knight Environmental Limited is able to assist our customers at the earliest stages of the planning process thus minimising delays, the number of specialist sub-contractors and streamlining the environmental inputs for our customers.”

Well know it’s with Cardy Construction http://www.cardyconstruction.co.uk/ nothing on their website either, one would have thought one would have thought a project of this size would have warranted a mention.

Pleasurama

I would like to remind you all that the builder that intends to build the Pleasurama development is still laying lose slabs on lose sand on the edge of the sea defences, the pictures tell the story better than anything I could dream up.

Pleasurama where do we go from here

Pleasurama is the largest development in the Thanet towns at a Quarter of a kilometre in length it dwarfs projects like the Turner Centre. Now my fears over the safety of the project needing thorough investigation have been confirmed by The Environment Agency, I have to consider what action to take next.

Obviously to stand back while the equivalent of the Titanic without lifeboats is built on my doorstep is not an option. It would seem highly likely that a flood risk assessment will recommend that the building will need to be on a higher sea defence, set well back from the seaward edge with pedestrian escapes to the cliff top.

There are two obvious factors here, the first being that there is no space between a higher sea defence and the cliff top for the proposed 5 story building, second that if there are going to be escapes to the cliff top that go through the cliff these ought to be made as part of the work that is being undertaken on the cliff at the moment.

I consider it highly unlikely that the builder Knight Developments a subsidiary of the Knight Group both companies of good track record will ignore the recommendations of the Environment Agency report, however they are at the moment building a roundabout for busses to turn at the end of a road where it appears very dangerous to take a bus.

Now at the moment money is being poured into the project, much of which is coming from TDC however because there doesn’t appear to be anyone in overall charge of the project, it is likely that much of this money is not being wisely spent.

It would seem that the whole project will have to be reconsidered and in all probability the building redesigned and yet at the moment the infrastructure is still being built at what is almost certainly the wrong height above sea level.