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

A few pictures of Ramsgate

One again a few pictures Don and the others who may not be able to get out.

This lot are Wednesday morning and mostly show the terrible state the pavement in King Street in Ramsgate has got into http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id11.htm I was talking to one of our road sweepers about it and he said that of the main town centre roads in Thanet this one is the worse.

Sorry it was too wet to get far on Wednesday.

I believe I have already done Thursdays.

This is yesterday mornings, the main thing of note was the complex machinery evidently doing something to our drains, at first I think the chaps operating it thought I was up to no good with my slr but once I explained what I was up to they were very cooperative hence the picture down the drain http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id16.htm

On to this morning’s pictures sorry the first few seem to have got to the bottom of the page, one thing they show is how badly silted up the harbour is, you can see the boat that was on the slipway next to her sister ship well and truly aground with props mostly out of the water. You can also see the route the fishing boat has to tale to get out of the harbour.

Here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts119/id17.htm another think I have noticed is a slight movement in Augusta Stairs, by this I mean the platforms between the various sets of steps used to all be level and drain properly. Now some of them have puddles on them, I don’t know if this is significant of anything.

The crew of The New Moss Rose

Many thanks to Sheila who emailed me this picture of the crew of The New Moss Rose to join the other one I put up the other day below). It will go into volume four of my series of Ramsgate postcard books, when I finally get there, it is proving more and more difficult to avoid duplications because of the large number of images of Ramsgate I have already published, so it’s taking longer than I expected to get into print.