The Marina Arches

Photos of progress on the development at The Marina Arches

I guess my main concern with this one has always been maintenance of the council owned arched structure that supports the road there for the life of the development, assurances were made that the seaward face of this would be dealt with before the development prevented access, this clearly hasn’t happened.

My guess is that we will now be looking at a much larger bill eventually and that this will be funded out of everyone’s council tax.  

Photos courtesy of Ben Kelly author of the two books I publish about the Granville http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/the_granville_hotel___the_story_of_the_granville_hotel_ramsgate_1869_2012.htm and http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/the_granville_hotel___revisited.htm 

Gimme Shelter a ramble a about charity, shops, shelters and the stuff of local news.

The Ramsgate shelters project is taking shape with several almost restored to their former glory, lets hope the survive, metal thieves, vandals, caught shorts and so on.

Work has started on the new development at Granville Marina, the one on the bend near where Nero’s was.

The bank of earth at the front of Quex Park has been removed considerably enlarging the car park for Quex Barn farm shop and Restaurant.    

Pleasurama still seems to have ground to a halt, cliff problems, flood risk problems, financing problems, development agreement problems? Who knows? 

Can a charity shop go bankrupt?

This one apparently has, do the bailiffs come in and take away the donations?

This shop in Queen Street has closed for the second time in about three months. 

Jimmy Godden’s arcade had been refitted and reopened. 

Jimmy Godden’s other arcade has closed and rumour has it that Terry Painter will be taking it over as an estate agents concentrating on selling The Royal Sands.

Yesterday, beside the fair,
I sold flat that wasn’t there

It wasn’t there again today

Oh yes and I bought a new pencil, much more difficult than you would think, the new one is an American Venus the old one nearly down to the stub is an English Venus, the American ones have thicker leads.

I have just been trying it, pencil sketches don’t photograph well for me, but you get the idea.

I may ramble on, as there is loads more where that lot came from if I get the time. 

Development at the arches, Granville Marina or Marina Esplanade Ramsgate.

The council planning committee turned this one down recently, it has been to the planning inspector for appeal, here is the link to their decision http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop212/id4.htm which was to allow the development to go ahead. 
 I didn’t oppose this development as I guess almost anything would be better than what is there now, I would have preferred something in the style of the original Granville Marina but planning in this country doesn’t work that way.

I do have some concerns about developing this site, one relates to the drain in the arch behind it. 

The other relates to the condition of the arched inclined viaduct behind it and access to this structure for maintenance.  

My understanding of the drain, which may be inaccurate, is that this is a mixed surface water and sewage pipe that comes down the cliff here and is connected to an emergency outfall pipe into the sea, this has a pressure relief valve on the seaward end that has a tendency to get stuck.

What is supposed to happen here is that in normal circumstances, the sewage and surface water is piped down the cliff, goes along the frontage of Granville Marina, through the Pleasurama site and along Harbour Parade. During heavy rainfall the system can’t cope with the flow of water and the pressure relief valve opens discharging the excess into the sea.

What appears to happen in practice is that when we have heavy rain the valve gets stuck and the force of sewage and water lifts the manhole cover, under one of the arches, in the picture. Harbour Parade also floods although this may be purely coincidental.      

The other problem is the structural integrity of the arched viaduct, this one is a bit complicated, but I will do my best to explain it, there may be some errors in this explanation as the local councils haven’t been very forthcoming in sharing information.  

Granville Marina was built by JT Wimperis in 1877 as a development of a beach resort for Edward Pugin's Granville Hotel. As originally devised, the development consisted of shops, houses, shell grottos, tea rooms and a 'wintergardens'.

The basic structure is in the form of an inclined brick arched viaduct against the chalk cliff, most of the original frontage was a timber framed façade, covering what is effectively a line of short tunnels in the front of the cliff.

The underlying problem here is that the structure wasn’t built for modern vehicles and has suffered various minor collapses over the years.    

The road on top of the viaduct is to be the main vehicle access to The Royal Sands development including the public service vehicle (bus) access.

My understanding is that after the big cliff collapse at the top of the incline in the 1960s, the then borough surveyor decided it wasn’t safe to allow traffic to go down the hill, because of the stresses cased by a line of vehicles breaking hard down the hill.

So this was turned into a one-way road, up hill only.

Normally an arched brick structure like this would be constructed with engineering bricks of uniform hardness and it would be easy to calculate the loads and stresses it could withstand.

The inclined arches on the waterfront of Ramsgate Harbour are a good example of this, these arches also have the advantage of concrete infill between the arches and under the road above.

The Granville Marina arches are made of Victorian house bricks with varying hardness’s and has a loose chalk infill.

There is no weight limit imposed on this structure at the moment, so it is perfectly legal to drive 38 tonne lorries up and down it.

Anyway I did some calculations and came to the conclusion that the point at which the structure would be likely to fail would be around ten tonnes per axel and pointed this out to KCCs engineer.

He responded to me that the structure was safe with no weigh limit on it, but wouldn’t tell me what he calculated the maximum axel weight to be, the safety margin he had used, or what program he had used to calculate it.

My main concern however is about the stresses cased by a train of vehicles travelling down the hill and having to brake hard in an emergency. The whole structure vibrates when one lorry does this.

Now we come to the planning references and the planning history of Granville Marina, the planning reference for this application is Planning ref F/TH/11/0244

Because of the peculiarities of the council’s planning website I can’t link to the application, you have to go to the planning website http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet and paste the application into the search box.

You can find the various planning applications for Granville Marina by doing an alphabetical street search on the same website, some are listed under Marina Esplanade and some under Granville Marina.    

 Anyway this is what this area used to look like. In case you are wondering the picture was taken from Ramsgate pier.

China Gateway and Marina Esplanade Ramsgate two interesting new planning applications

China Gateway and Marina Esplanade Ramsgate two interesting new planning applications

You can see form the picture above this enhancement to the Victorian Granville Marina will be highly visually stimulating. Planning ref F/TH/11/0244

The China Gateway development that has been awaiting compliance with a stringent agreement mostly to do with the original plans that were for a series of individual Chinese companies with there own septic tanks, processing their own sewage and poring the results into our drinking water reservoir, has now come up with whole new raft of plans.

Oddly enough I couldn’t find the ones stating how they intend to deal with the drains, planning ref F/TH/08/0400 

1 Granville Marina Ramsgate 2nd floor goes in and a day off ramble

After taking the children to school today I noticed considerable activity on Marina Esplanade, this was due to another floor going into the Marina Restaurant project.

There are a few pros and cons to this project, on the positive side there has been a flood risk assessment and this has caused the ground floor level to be raised up by about a metre than the Pleasurama development ground floor level.

This should make the building reasonably protected from a combination of high tides and storms, the negative side to this is that there is no emergency escape for the people inside to the cliff road above, so if there is a big storm they remain inside the building until the storm is over.

Also on the positive side the quality of the building work seems to be of a high standard, I have been keeping an eye on this one and haven’t seen any nasties going on there, no covered up shoddy workmanship, building waste dumped in building voids and so on.

My main concern relates to the part of the building that wasn’t there before and the cliff behind it, this is a large concrete covered lump of chalk, as far as I can tell, the top of which is in a bad state.

Here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id9.htm published using my small netbook so I didn’t get a chance to look at them before publication.

Another reservation I have is the heavy lorries using the Marina Road viaduct, I am not sure it is really up to taking the weight, the signs at the top saying NO CONSTRUCTION TRAFFIC are all very well, but there really isn’t another way of accessing the site, because of the way the Pleasurama site hoardings make the promenade too narrow.

I will add to this post as the day continues and if I get a WiFi connection also add some more pictures, uploading a hundred or so pictures via a mobile phone connection isn’t really viable.

You can also see the work on the Pleasurama site from above, the concrete pads could conceivably be for a tower crane, I have asked the contractor to tell us what they are up to and am hopeful that I will get a reply.

Herne Bay today, interesting if you live in Ramsgate or Margate as like Deal it's a very close about 14 miles town centre to town centre.

Taking photographs as I do the first thing one notices is the absence of dog's mess on the promenade, this can be a major problem when looking at the world through a viewfinder.

Here’s the first batch of Deal pictures, published in the café while eating my lunch http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id10.htm

Another thing I noticed was the parking, the first 2 hours on the seafront was free and when I moved the to a car park nearer to a shop I had bought a lot of heavy books from, the parking charge was £1.10 for all day.

Not as many pictures after lunch as I would have liked, due to the amount of books I had bought, combined with the problem of getting back to collect the children from school.

Café brunch, very fast service and good value at £4.99, right in the middle of the town centre, green blinds, I think it was called Greenfields, good WiFi connection too, I was in a hurry and published the previous lot of pictures while eating.


Anyway here are the rest of the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbook211/id11.htm

I don’t know exactly where the problem lies here in Thanet, the truth is that both Ramsgate and Margate both had town centres at least as good as Herne Bay’s or Deal’s, when I first opened the bookshop in Ramsgate 23 years ago, and not all of the shops that have closed in Ramsgate Margate have any competition in Westwood Cross.

Something I notice particularly is the independent antique and junk shops that have mostly closed in Ramsgate still seem to be thriving in Herne Bay have mostly gone in Thanet.

Sewage leak in Ramsgate

As some of you will probably remember I have been expressing concern about the safety of the Marina Esplanade incline viaduct arches for some time. My main concern is that there is no weight limit on this fragile Victorian structure that is in a poor state of repair.

Click here to view the pictures that graphically illustrate what I mean.

Earlier today I was talking to one of the property owners down there who said that when we have heavy rain the manhole cover, in the picture above, which is under one of the arches is blown off by the pressure and a mixture of water and sewage is spread over the area.

He also told me that when he had a survey done the professional surveyor said he thought that there should be a weight limit of no more than seven or eight tonnes on the incline road.

I think my greatest concern here is that as there is obviously a problem with the drain that runs under the arches, any leakage may be undercutting the arches foundations.

During the Second World War maintenance wasn’t carried out on the Victorian arches on the Westcliffe in Ramsgate click here to see what happened when two of them collapsed in 1947.

I have tried alerting several members of the council to this problem, the only answer I have had is that it is safe for busses and any weight of heavy goods vehicle, you only have to look at the pictures to see that it isn’t, does anyone have any idea what to next, before there is an accident?

Even the part of the road surface above is sinking so it is very obvious that the chalk infill is on the move, to me the whole thing is a stupid justification for removing our seafront car park to make way for a huge roundabout for busses and large goods vehicles to turn.
The fact that this roundabout and the associated roadworks were done in a high flood risk area without a flood risk assessment and that their construction is of lose cobbles and paving stones laid on sand doesn’t make me any happier either.