Maps and Death in Ramsgate and Margate

This 1934 map of Ramsgate should enlarge if you click on it, if it doesn't get big enough to read the roads I will work out something else. Like this perhaps

I have had a few issues with FaceBook recently, well who hasn't, with me it's been putting something on the bookshop website so it's big enough to be useful and Facebook deleting it from their site if I put the link to it in a comment there.

I think some sort of robotic reader at Facebook thinks that because mine is a bookshop website I am trying to get a bit of free advertising so if I put a link to a large picture in a Facebook comment it automatically deletes it.

  Some time ago I bought a hand coloured version of the 1849 map of Ramsgate and have subsequently developed various strategies to share it with other people.

One of these was to publish it onto the bookshop website as a very big picture

Here is the link to the map  

And another one to the same map in a different place

So I have 2 maps published on two different websites and I may well see what Facebook's robot thinks.

For anyone who is having difficulty with this you can just come into the the bookshop here in Ramsgate and buy the map on a large sheet of paper

I am in the book business but the death business interests me too. Back in the dim and distant past I was in the religious business, in fact I was called "a religious" and down the road there was a convent fullish of other religious. Back then the nuns there were getting older, so periodically one would die and the community I was part of would go to the funeral. They didn't need a hearse but had a hand drawn bier to get the successful - death being part of the goal in religious football - from the convent chapel to the convent cemetery a winding steeply sloping path thought the woods. I half expected to see HAMMER writ large across the sky.  This Margate undertakers calling card or advert has a certain appeal and possibly similar evocations.

I think a more lively and cheerful next this is the Lido Cliftonville in the mid 50s

Sorry there was no blog post yesterday I ran out of time.

1822 Map of Ramsgate, Map Monday

I have just printed a few of my next large format map, by large format I mean it is about three feet by about two foot six inches.

As it is a black and white one it doesn’t use as much ink as the 1849 one so I am pricing it at £6.99.

The only map of Ramsgate I know of that predates this one is the one found in Lewis’s history and dates from about 1723.

So while the 1723 one is really Ramsgate’s Mappa Mundi the 1822 one is really the first map of Ramsgate produced from a proper survey.

Here in my bookshop people often ask me for much earlier maps, the latest being have I got a Saxon map of Thanet i.e one dating from the fourth or fifth century.  

The first maps date from about 1300 this is one of the world  

This detail shows the UK bit, I don’t have much trouble with the Latin Londinium for London and Durovernum Cantiacorum or Cantuaria for Canterbury I have marked this one up as things could be although you can make your own minds up.

As you see it is the problem often associated with the early confused period of history, you can see roughly where the people who were alive at the time were coming from, but obviously the past is a foreign country.   

All of the maps should expand when clicked on and possibly the expanded version will expand if you click on it again.   

1872 and 1849 street map of Ramsgate.

As many of you will know I published a copy of my 1849 map of Ramsgate at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/map1849/ it’s a fairly good scan and as I have put it up as a series of pages, should you so wish you can right click on each of them, click on print picture, print them all out and stick them on your wall.

I have just done this with the 1872 map of Ramsgate at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/map1872/ and am printing it out as I write, Phil published it at http://www.ramsgatehistory.com/1872_map_index.html but I found it fairly difficult to copy and print from there. So many thanks to Phil for letting me republish it in this way.

This is part of the 1872 Ordinance Survey of Kent it says that it is 10.56 feet to one statute mile, if any of you come up with any of the missing pieces of what would make a truly remarkable jig saw puzzle please send them this way.

The Maps are fairly large files especially the 1849 one, if you think I should have put the 1872 one up bigger let me know and I will oblige.

To make the maps bigger or smaller press + or- while holding down Crtl use the arrow keys to navigate around.

Update I have just opened both maps in Firefox and I am afraid to say that they don’t display properly as they do in Internet Explorer. What happens is that all of the map sections appear beneath each other, instead of where they are supposed to, I had assumed that not putting breaks between the ones I wanted to appear next to each other would work for all browsers.

Any help on this one would be appreciated, I hardly ever use Firefox as there are difficulties when pasting from MS Word into Blogger when it is open in Firefox.

As I have said before I have to use Windows based programs as the secondhand book trade standard database, will only work in windows.

Sunday ramble

It’s been a busy week, keeping up with the Christmas demand for local books, with 120 titles in print and manufacturing them as I go it gets a bit complicated.

Internet wise Christopher Scott’s book The Ripper in Ramsgate has sold better than any of the others, I hadn’t considered the international demand from Jack the Ripper collectors.

Shop wise the most demand has been for two quite old titles, Dave Richards book Ramsgate August 1940 and John Huddlestone’s 400 Facts and Curiosities About Ramsgate, I think that price is a major factor here as they are £3.99 and £2.99 respectively.

As far as general shop sales go we are having a fairly good December, the recession means that I can buy better quality books cheaper than usual and I don’t have to engage in all the discounting that is going on at the moment, as our prices are still lower than the other bookshops in the area.

I went and had a quick look at Westwood Cross on Thursday it really is a parking and traffic nightmare and it’s difficult to see an obvious solution, even if the roads were improved considerably there are far too few parking spaces. Perhaps by charging for the parking there at a variable rate to help even out peak times, combined with a scheme where retailers could refund parking charges when one purchased something could help.

It certainly looks like it needs some sort of scheme to maximise the sales there, within the restraints of an inadequate infrastructure.

The share price of Commercial Group Properties the company behind China Gateway has fallen from £2.10 a year ago to 20p now, so it seems unlikely that anything will happen there for a while. The whole thing has always struck me as decidedly odd as the experts consulted produced a drainage plan that they must have known from the outset would be wholly unacceptable, both to Southern Water and the Environment Agency. I do wonder sometimes whether they ever intended to build anything and I still can’t see that there is any way that they could deal with the surface runoff water in a way that will be acceptable.

I wonder what has happened to the work on the cliff façade behind the Pleasurama site that was due to start this December, perhaps the half a million of our money put aside for the repairs has run out, or they have encountered some other difficulty.

It is of course the same architect as the one used for China Gateway, again with no explanation as to how plans that defy the laws of nature could actually be built.

My in house expert has reconditioned my colour laser printer, which was getting a bit stripy, this means that I can put together a booklet of the 1849 map of Ramsgate click here to look at it, the intention being that people can cut the sections out and stick them on the wall or get them framed.

Laser printing doesn’t fade like inkjet, and as the original is paper sections pasted onto linen, the assembled reprint will look pretty much identical.

One of our old Dell computers died of leaky electrolytic capacitors this week and my in house expert seemed very dubious at my suggestion that soldering replacement capacitors onto the mother board would be a better bet, both financially and environmentally, than replacing the whole board. Frankly he seemed amazed when the computer booted up again with no problems. These capacitors are a bit like batteries that only hold their charge for a fraction of a second and are used in all electronic equipment.

It’s strange really you could see these capacitors were no good because they had swollen up, so no technical expertise was needed apart from the ability to use a soldering iron, obviously it is also necessary to wear an antistatic bracelet. As they only cost a few pence there is nothing much to lose if the cure doesn’t work either.

It’s an odd reflection on today’s throw away society, a few years ago had it been a radio the option of replacement rather than repair would probably never have been considered.

My new website still won’t show the latest comments on some of the local blogs although I don’t know why yet I promise to try and get it right in the end.

Map Madness

I got sucked into one of those local history puzzles that emanated from the Thanet Life blog this week. The puzzle involved dating the map shown.

I thought I had solved the conundrum of the map, it is a prime example of how local history is inclined to tell us lies, because the further back one goes in time the less people are able to produce accuracy added to this is that one book tends to copy the mistakes of the previous book.

I think what happened that around 1800 someone did a fairly decent private commercial survey of The Isle of Thanet, all the earlier maps that I have ever seen show something that is essential the wrong shape, see the map of 1732 at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/id51.htm
The earliest fairly accurate map or Thanet that I can put a date to, that I have is 1800 it comes from my copy of Hasted’s History of Kent http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tol/map_of_thanet_about_1800.htm as you can see it is considerably more primitive than Hinds’s map, the earliest Thanet map I have that looks the right shape is in my 1809 guide produced by Hogben Surveyor Margate http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/id213.htm
Anyway you have to appreciate that no one surveyor prior to the triangulation of the whole country and the publication of the Ordnance Survey map in 1819, made one survey and got the shape of Thanet right.

Looking at the 1819 OS map I don’t think Hinds used this for the basis of his map so either he drew it before 1819 or was scared of the copyright implications.

Anyway once he had drawn his map he stuck with it, here is the 1872 edition of the same map http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/id211.htm copied from Charles Busson’s The Book of Ramsgate. With railway corrections showing the railway built in 1863 rather proving the point.

So how much Mr Hinds copied from other maps and how much he surveyed himself is a matter of conjecture, however I suspect when he drew the map of Ramsgate in 1849

he may have had more than a passing glance at Collard and Hurst’s map of 1822 http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tol/map_of_ramsgate_in_1822.htm

However it is as well to remember that the first triangulation survey of England in 1787 was made for military purposes the first survey using trigonometry was started in 1791 so in the late 1700s and early 1800s was pretty much rocket science.

Why your house doesn’t appear where it should I just don’t know, I can’t however imagine that either Hogben or Hinds could have cover the whole island with theodolite and compass.

Well I thought that was that but something about the 1872 edition of the map niggled at me last night, it was that it shows the parish boundary or St Lawrence and the boundary of Ramsgate Cinque Port but it doesn’t show other parish boundaries. Now these two boundaries are not on the earlier edition of the map I was trying to date. So I looked in the main history of St Lawrence written by Charles Cotton and published in 1895 facing page 14 is the map that Busson calls the 1872 map of Thanet. It is fairly obvious that the parish boundaries were added to the map in 1895 as it is facing a page about the parish boundaries. It is also obvious that this is where Busson copied it from, although he doesn’t say so. Why he should call a map published in 1895 an 1872 map of Thanet is beyond me.

Now looking at the first map I am fairly certain that it was drawn between 1791 and 1810 this hinges on the way Ramsgate Harbour is shown. If you look carefully you will see that the harbour cross wall has two gates and a further opening at the western end. Now in Smeaton’s plan of the harbour in 1791 http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/Smeaton/ you will see that the cross wall has only one set of gates but does not extend quite as far as the west pier. The next plan of Ramsgate Harbour I have is 1817 this shows two sets of gates and the cross wall extending all the way to the west pier. As Hinds was a Ramsgate surveyor I don’t think he would have made a mistake about the shape of Ramsgate harbour and I feel this map must date from between when the second gate was put in the cross wall and the cross wall extended to the west pier.

My guess is that that Cotton wanted in 1895 to use a map of Thanet that was not subject to copyright and so drew the parish boundaries and the railways on and that Busson when he used the map from cotton guessed the date of the map from the railways.

The final act of misinformation that I have found so far is that in section 8 of The Ramsgate Millennium Book where the map is dated 1872 so there you have it, our main source of Ramsgate history patently wrong.

I should add that it would have been most unusual to write an s in the shape of an f after 1820.

You have to be rather tenacious to make any progress with local history.