Waterstone’s St Margaret’s Street Canterbury photos, the end of an era, some old pictures of Ramsgate Harbour and Thanet Internet.

Are you local internet savvy? How do you use the internet to find out what’s going on locally? Here in Thanet we seem to lack an obvious social media site where people can comment about local matters – that is unless I’ve missed it.

The main (largest number of members) Facebook Page was Thanet Chat, which has now closed, the remaining viable pages with more than 1,000 members seem to be:- 

New Thanet Watch https://www.facebook.com/groups/747896371999294/

Friends of Ramsgate Seafront https://www.facebook.com/groups/1591056714503080/

We Love Ramsgate https://www.facebook.com/groups/516220578418850/

Thanet - It’s Rubbish Here Isn’t it? https://www.facebook.com/groups/257762494415612/ 

Does anyone know something I don’t? is there somewhere else I should be looking, is there somewhere else I should be posting my eclectic posts about local history, local books and local matters?

Next the photos of Waterstone’s St Margaret’s Street Canterbury, which is closing today, this was the largest bookshop in East Kent and I think it closing is a significant milestone.

Why do I think this is important given that you can get all the books it had in stock on the internet? I think the key here is that you can’t have a proper look at them before you buy them. And yes I do know we have other Waterstone’s bookshops, Rose Lane in Canterbury, Westwood Cross, Folkestone and Ashford, but none of them awe anything like as big.

For me this is the second really bad shop closing in Canterbury, the last one was Chromos the main artist’s material supplier in East Kent, fortunately we still have Lovelys in Cliftonville Margate.

We do now of course have lots of other places selling artist’s materials but they just don’t have the high-end range.

Finally the old photos of Ramsgate Harbour

X marks the spot

People are so kind and I have just received by email some more amazing pictures this is the first

Summer Season

Couple of American tourists in the shop just now, presumably they came through a wormhole in the space-time continuum or something, speculating on the practically deserted beach. They bought The Picturesque Pocket Companion To Margate Ramsgate Broadstairs & Parts Adjacent 1831 an 1849 Isle of Thanet Directory and Pictures of Ramsgate in the 1800s. They are apparently staying in an hotel with a view across the harbour and can’t quite understand why an equally attractive Ramsgate isn’t as busy as San Tropez. I won’t put the links to the books on this post as I am having a bad printer week with stock running a bit low it seems best to discourage sales while I do battle with the errant technology.