Blackburn’s bite the bookseller.

Coincidence is a strange thing, first this morning I received the picture above with the following email

“Dear Michael, saw this on the net and wondered if this bookshop used to be your's or has the photo been wrongly labelled as Ramsgate. If it was your shop, where was it as I can't remember seeing it, the nearest building that I remember looking like this is along from your present bookshop opposite The Hamilton pub. kind regards Ron”

It is of course a picture of Blackburn’s furniture shop and undertakers in Ramsgate taken in about 1910 which has had the signage modified.

Then later this morning I had a historical enquiry about Blackburn’s furniture shop in Broadstairs which is due to cease trading at the end of the month. I should stress here that this isn’t related to Blackburn’s the undertaker in Broadstairs which is continuing to trade.

My guess – an informed guess because I am a shop assistant – is that the story will go something like this, sometime in around 1960 the landlord bought the freehold of the shop for around £10,000 or in around 1970 for around £20,000 – pick your year and amount, it doesn’t really matter. And since then the value of the site has appreciated to around £300,000. well for most of that time the landlord will have received a rent of around 10% of the site value, this is a bit like Monopoly you understand, and worked fine while the goods the shop was selling and the value of the shop all appreciated at about the rate of inflation.  

Westwood Cross property inflation rates related to property values and the internet mean however that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming the other way.   

Of course this is beginning to bite the property landlords too, the picture above is of Blackburn’s Shop in Ramsgate now, its been empty for about seven years when the freehold for the whole lot sold for around £90,000 it went in the auction about three years ago with a reserve of £170,000 failed to sell and sold after the auction for £106,000 it comprises three shops larger than mine and market forces suggest that each of these shops has a real value of £20,000. this would suggest a rent of £2,000pa or £40 per week with rates of around £20 per week, dream on though.   

Get your hair cut! Two new shops in Ramsgate.

The shop next door to my bookshop, which has changed hands more times that I can remember in the last few years, has reopened as a barber this time.

Interestingly their neighbour on the other side is a barber that has been there for a long time, I hope this doesn’t saturate the haircut business in this part of Ramsgate and cause them both to close.

Slightly further down on the other side, the pet shop that closed some time ago has just opened selling washing machines and other white goods.

I guess the problems of revitalising our town centres are reflected here in King Street Ramsgate at the point where the town contracted to after Westwood Cross, and now a very sensitive area because of internet shopping.

What the solutions to our ailing town centres are I don’t really know, my guess is that the change if it ever comes will have to come from a mixture of government taking the taxation to a level playing field and manufactures ensuring that their goods continue to be displayed where people can handle them.     

Margate and empty shops, a Midweek Ramble

 I guess the main local news item this week was that Margate has the most empty shops in the UK, which I guess means that despite The Turner Contemporary the viability of the town is getting worse and not better.

Running a bookshop in Ramsgate for the last 25 years I am only too aware of the problem, but don’t see a solution to the problem of closing retail shops. I guess the problem is worse in seaside towns where the decline started earlier, sometime in the 60s with the coming of the package holiday abroad.

 The problem is twofold at the moment, one part being that with most products there is a greater range and cheaper prices to had online, the other part being the knock on effect of having less shops open in a town, meaning fewer shoppers go there so the existing shops are less busy.

I only suffer from the latter in my bookshop as I look books up online when I price them now and make sure my prices are competitive.

 I would guess though the problem of goods being much cheaper online than they are in shops will cut through retailing in all locations changing our society, which for the last few hundred years has been people living clustered around shops, forming what we now call towns.

My guess is that the out of town shopping centre will be a fairly short-term aberration soon to be made unviable by the internet, the only real exception being places selling food and services like having a haircut. 

 In my area of expertise, the bookselling world, the other side of the coin is the new bookshop, shopping there has for the most part degenerated to going to Waterstones, browsing the books there, finding the one you want, pointing the camera of your iphone at the barcode on the back, pressing the buy it now button, leaving the often shop soiled copy in Waterstones and buying the book for much less that Waterstones hoped to sell it for.

As far as our town centres go, this raises the problem of what you do with the shop buildings, I guess the out of town shopping centres will eventually be bulldozed and returned to farmland.

 One solution here is to convert the shop buildings to residential buildings, I would say a wander around any UK town centre late on a Friday or Saturday night would be enough to show most people that living next to the pavement of a UK town centre, won’t exactly be a bed of roses.

One solution is to fill the resultant residential property with benefit claimants and people who have histories as bad tenants so have very limited options relating to where thy can live.

 The options for landlord of empty shop properties are outlined on various websites, this is an example http://www.lawpack.co.uk/landlord-and-tenancy/commercial-leases/articles/article5459.asp

What they recommend is an interesting insight into some of the problems of empty shops.

5 tips for landlords on how to avoid tax on empty buildings

Here are some tips on how to get tax relief on your business rates:

1. Use a charity

As mentioned, leasing a shop or empty building to a charity can help you to avoid landlord tax in the thousands as charities pay no or reduced business rates.

2. Demolish the building

The reduced tax relief on business rates was nicknamed the “bomb-site Britain tax” as many landlords scrapped projects and demolished buildings to pay less tax when the levy was introduced. If the building is at the end of its useful life, this may be a way to avoid landlord tax.

3. Vandalism

Buildings that can no longer be occupied don’t pay business rates, but the ‘vandalism’ must be relatively dramatic. It can even include stripping a building back to its shell or taking the roof off. The other option to save landlord tax is to start redeveloping the building, but never finish it.

4. Intermittent occupation

Buildings that have been occupied for six weeks qualify for another three or six months’ tax relief from business rates when they are empty. To let landlords avoid tax, there are companies that are springing up which offer to occupy buildings on short-term leases. To pay less tax, the landlord will pay the tenant to occupy the building rather than the tenant pay rent to the landlord. 

 I guess here in Thanet we are all too familiar with developments that never seem to finish and buildings that get demolished and the sites just left. Seeing that some sort of act of vandalism could have financial advantages to the landlord puts an interesting perspective on property speculation.

I am rambling on here and may add some more thoughts as they occur to me.      

The pictures above come from the book I publish “Margate and Westgate With Birchington 1903-04” you can buy it online at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/margate_and_westgate_with_birchington_1903_04.htm

What you can’t do is buy in Margate as I can’t find a shop there to stock it, if anyone reading this runs a Margate shop I can offer reasonable trade terms and full sale or return.  

Looking at the picture above, click compulsively on it to make it big enough to read, I wonder what the famous Thanet Motorcycle was, I have never encountered one, has anyone else?  

Back to the problem of shops, you can have shop buildings selling food where there is no or little internet competition, you can have other businesses in them where the profit margin is very large, betting shops are a good example here, you can have something subsidised by charity or government grants.  

The problem though is that the main reason that people go to shopping centres is to buy goods at a reasonable price, the betting shops restaurants, barbers etc are there because the real shops are there, without them the shopping centres will die.

To get the real shops back into the shopping centres the expenses of being there have to be comparable to the expenses of selling goods online, that is rent rates insurance light heat etc. 

There is a very long way to go with this one, a tube of artists quality watercolour that costs me about £5.50 both in the local independent art shops and the multiples at Westwood Cross can be bought online at about £4 including postage. 

Day off ramble, Tracey Emin, Westwood Cross, Ramsgate Town Centre.

Tracey Emin has just got the highly prestigious post of Eranda Professor of Drawing at The Royal Academy Schools of art.

One of my problems in life has been my drawing ability, I would say that the victims generally don’t like it very much, I very nearly got expelled from school over it and have only recently taken it up again. Well of course I wouldn’t dare use one of Tracey’s drawings to illustrate this post because of the copyright implications, so I have used one of my own.

Christopher Le Brun, president of the Royal Academy, said he was "delighted" with Emin's appointment and Eileen Cooper, keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, said: "In the history of the Royal Academy, we've never had a female professor before. I'm proud and delighted by this development."

I have to say I wish Tracey all the luck in the world with this one, it isn’t something I would like to have to teach as often the results are unpredictable.

I went to Westwood Cross today, something I rarely do and once again was struck by the restrictions of the infrastructure, having spent about half an hour in a traffic jam we eventually managed to park. One is only too aware that the number of shoppers there, is limited by the number who can actually get there and park.

The net result of all this is when we got into the shops they weren’t especially busy.

With all of the depressing news about shops and traditional town centres, I really can’t understand what is happening in Ramsgate town centre at the moment, nearly all of the previously empty shops seem to have been taken, a lot by national chains and have either reopened or are about to.

I am learning to sew at the moment so you can say this post is the displacement therapy while I work what I work out just what it is I have done wrong.

So be warned I may ramble on some more, in fact if the piece of fabric I am working on at the moment doesn’t soon respond to the fine tuning sledgehammer it may be a very long post indeed.   

Three New Shops in Ramsgate High Street, some thoughts and photos

Ramsgate’s self regeneration seems to be moving on a pace despite local government, by this I mean most of our council owned prime sites having gone pear shaped.

Anyway this is an optimistic post so I won’t go there today.

The first is Specksavers http://www.specsavers.co.uk/stores/ramsgate/ this is now open.

The next is Greggs the Bakers http://www.greggs.co.uk this looks like it will be open in a few days.

Last Phones 4 u http://www.phones4u.co.uk This is now open.

There is quite a bit of other stuff around the town, that really needs a mention, something I will do if I get time.

The rest of the pictures, taken this morning and yesterday morning, the good with the bad, for those who can’t get out for a walk in Ramsgate for one reason or another, click on the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/111/id4.htm

Using the pictures to jog my memory, The Marmalade Café in Harbour Street, looks as though it will open soon.

JGs in Harbour Parade, the amusement arcade owned by Jimmy Godden, has closed, no libellous comment here please. 

Rumour is the Jimmy is very ill and not likely to last for long and that the building is to have a new incarnation as cake shop.  

Using the pictures to jog my memory, The Marmalade Café in Harbour Street, looks as though it will open soon.

JGs in Harbour Parade, the amusement arcade owned by Jimmy Godden, has closed, no libellous comment here please. Rumour is the Jimmy is very ill and not likely to last for long and that the building is to have a new incarnation as cake shop.  

David Cameron and a plea for UK towns

David Cameron

Retailing’s not such a good thing-

It has its little ways.

And now sometimes no one buys much

For days and days and days.

A little more policing,

And slightly better roads

Some better cheaper parking,

Could help us loads and loads

And Oh! Mr Cameron, if you love us at all.

Walking around our town centres today, it’s my day off, I was struck by how few shops are actually real retail businesses, and how at some point the rest, charity shops, eateries, estate agents, solicitors and so on will work without the ordinary retail shops that brought them there in the first place.

I think this is a problem that is beyond local government, so I am considering a direct appeal to the national government.

Whops sorry about that I seem to have left his left lapel off.

Gone for a Burton

Burton’s in Ramsgate High Street have closed.

Once again beware of big chains that are decamping and damaging our towns.

Shop activity in Ramsgate from the 5p book up and some thoughts on competing with internet booksellers.

With the recession biting more severely by the week one of the more active sections in my bookshop is the recession section where all of the paperbacks are 5p and all of the hardbacks 10p, the very low prices in this section cause some rather unusual reactions from some customers.

When I first started in secondhand bookselling most secondhand bookshops had a section something like this and most customers used them without comment.

I have just been up Ramsgate High Street where the old Woolworth shop is due to reopen as a 99p shop tomorrow and all things considered Ramsgate doesn’t seem to be faring too badly at the moment.

Interesting as Woolworth’s started out as a shop where everything was 6d 2½p in new money and in value probably fairly similar to 99p today, things seem to have come full circle.

Very cheap prices are not always what they seem particularly online.

Most popular paperbacks are available secondhand on Amazon priced a 1p, this is because of the fixed price postage charge of £2.75 that Amazon has for secondhand books that third parties sell through their site, as it costs the seller about £1 to post an average paperback if they sell it for 1p they receive £2.76 less the cost of listing on Amazon leaving them with about £1.50 so there is still a profit to be made from the sale.

This also means that about the cheapest you can buy a paperback online is £2.76 in the bookshop I overcome this competition by pricing most popular paperbacks at £2.50 or less. The same usually applies with Ebay where the staring bid and postage usually come to at least £2.50.

It also has the advantage that any title that is always in short supply I can price above the Amazon price to improve the range and quality of the shop stock.

Walking back along King Street with the camera I took some pictures of some of the shops that have opened recently click here for them I did a post about this recently and am surprised that it is still going on.

Ramsgate Regeneration

Having just posted the press release about the opening of Harvey’s Fish Market & Oyster Bar on Ramsgate’s Royal Harbour at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2009/06/kent-hotel-restaurant-operator-bucks.html Richard Martin also intends to develop the Royal Victoria Pavilion which is very good news.

I am pretty sure this isn’t a new press release, as I believe I read it somewhere else the other day but I only just received it and put it up as it is illustrative of the revival that is going on here in Ramsgate.

Here in King Street we have seen a quite a few new shops opening recently the latest being a small supermarket due to open next door to my bookshop on Sunday.

Quite why Ramsgate is bucking the trend at the moment is beyond me, I am not talking about the plethora of middle of the road eateries and gift shops that are replacing the real shops in Broadstairs and Canterbury at the moment.

These are real quality shops in king street alone a fishmonger who catches his own fish, a cycle shop that does repairs, a domestic appliance shop that also does repairs.

Then today I heard a rumour, from a usually reliable source, that Tesco are considering returning to the town.

New shops opening in Ramsgate.

Although a few large shops have closed recently in the centre of Ramsgate, most notably Woolworth, where my bookshop is on the edge of the town centre quite a few new shops have been opening, the latest two being a cycle shop and a washing machine and domestic appliance shop.

The large shop next door to me, that was vacated by the chemist that moved to the Montefiore medical centre when it opened about two years ago and has been empty since is being fitted out as a general store.

The recession is a peculiar thing as it tends to work in favour of some of the shops, particularly when they are cheaper than the out of town shops.

Although King Street in Ramsgate is fairly scruffy and has quite a few closed shops it also has a good share of cheaper than the out of town shops, butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger, my bookshop, several secondhand furniture shops and Iceland.

Whatever it is that’s causing this I don’t really know I have been trying to puzzle it out, I wouldn’t have thought with all of the empty shops around that this would be the most desirable available place to start a new business.

Whatever it is that is happening it seems to be bucking the general trend anyone else got any ideas about this?

One to go at Westwood Cross ?

With Barretts shoe shops in administration, it looks like we will see the closure of their Westwood Cross shop.

I know that there has been a lot of concern over shops closing in the towns recently and I wonder how Westwood cross will fare in what looks like being an 18 month long recession.

I am wondering with there being so much spare retail capacity in Thanet, how the cards are going to fall on this one. Particularly I think how much of the out of town shopping expansion was reliant on credit will be a big factor.

Manchester Congestion Charge

The government offered the people £3bn to vote for what it thought was good for them and the people turned them down.

Here in Thanet we have created our own congestion by centralising all the large new retail and leisure developments in one place, based on the assumption that people will use public transport to get to them.

Now there just isn’t good enough road infrastructure or parking to cope with this situation.

The turnover and hence the profitability of the businesses at Westwood Cross is limited by the parking and infrastructure.

The sensible solution to people not wanting to use public transport is to keep the shopping and leisure facilities in the towns where most people live.

We haven’t so where do we go from here?

Retail Recession Ramblings

There is a rumour doing the rounds that the council is going to give Margate shopkeepers some sort of reduction in their business rates, I don’t believe this is true however if anyone knows different please let us know.

I think it may be some confusion about small business rates relief if you pay non domestic rates you are eligible for this relief if your rateable value is less than £1,000 and if your rateable value is less than £5,000 you ate eligible for 50% rate relief.

Click here to determine your rateable value.

I think it is pretty obvious with the growing number of empty Thanet shops, shop rents must fall and therefore rateable values, which are based on them, should follow.

Talking to other shopkeepers here in Ramsgate I am getting mixed responses as to how much business they are doing, from those who say they are on the verge of going under to those like myself who are doing fairly well at the moment.

Books are a sort on nonessential essential, by that I mean that if you normally buy books you don’t stop because of a recession or anything else, you just buy them from somewhere cheaper.

Property Business Recession

I was going to do a reflections from the book trade post and as a lot of this comes from talking to customers when I should be working, not gossiping.

The bookshop is doing much better at the moment which I put down the worsening economic climate, people who a month ago were happy to go to Westwood Cross and pay £30 for a large format illustrated book are now making the extra effort to come here, where they know it will be considerably cheaper.

One customer a landscape gardener told me that his customers, who for the most part are extremely wealthy, are cutting back on the work they are having done, many have lost large sums as the value of their shares has fallen others don’t have confidence in their economic future.

Another customer who is a contractor to the building trade said that many of the building firms are weatherproofing and securing partly finished developments with the intention of leaving them until the situation improves.

The big “real estate” problem is although lots of people have made a considerable amount of money out of property one way and another, mostly benefiting from the huge increase in prices, however for most ordinary working people this means that too large a proportion of the money they have made from producing goods and services goes into paying for their home, we are effectively engaged in buying our own country. For us in the retail trade, it means that because the values of the buildings we trade in have increased considerably, increasing rents absorbs a very large proportion of profit; this situation is particularly bad in Thanet at the moment where most shop’s sales have been reduced by the effect of Westwood Cross.

Click here for more pictures of Ramsgate shops in 1904

Meanderings of a confused shopkeeper

I have published some pictures of shops and shopping in Ramsgate for you all to enjoy, they come from one of my reprints of old guides, Ramsgate and Broadstairs by Camera and Pen 1904-05 you can of course buy it post free from the michaelsbookshop.com website or come into the shop (closed Thursdays and Sundays) browse buy, as is your inclination.

I was talking recently to one of the local surveyors part of his job is to assess shop rents in Thanet and obviously we discussed the situation in Ramsgate and particularly Margate town centres, where there are too many empty shops at the moment. Now at the moment shop rentals are assessed on the position of the shop and the area of the shop part of the building, business rates are calculated from average the shop rental values per square meter in any given part of the towns.

For the most part this is all sill being calculated as though Westwood Cross hadn’t happened, this is also not helped by the fact that most shop leases stipulate that rentals can only rise at rent reviews.

It is obvious that something has got to give, pretty much the only thing that can survive and afford the current rents and rates are the bars and restaurants that make up our emerging café culture. However there is a big problem here, that is the café culture is dependent on the towns having interesting shops, both in terms of the shops attracting their customers and also a lively town centre having a safe and comfortable atmosphere.

My feelings are that both local and national government need to act on this issue, however I am really uncertain how, we currently have a situation where a betting shop, late night takeaway etc has the same overheads a towns bookshop while the libraries art galleries theatres are heavily subsidised. Now the bookshops in Broadstairs and Margate are closing so what is the solution?

Our society has got into a situation where a very large proportion of our earned income is spent paying for buildings and land, and another large and increasing proportion is being taken in taxation. We are, as it were spending too much buying our own country. All of this hangs on the small proportion of people engaged in the production and distribution of the goods and services that we all need.

Click here to look at the pictures

More Model village and shopping experience

I post with some trepidation as my last post on this subject prompted a senior councillor to comment that he thought Ramsgate was horrible place to shop, not particularly helpful in what are difficult times for town centre shops.

Perhaps some of you have thoughts on the local shopping experience both in the Thanet towns and the miracle that is Westwood Cross, yes of course I can sympathise I don’t imagine that the businesses in the ubiquitously abbreviated WC can be entirely happy with the infrastructure.

Car parking is an issue also raising some problems, free parking experiments for Margate, although not for Ramsgate as one would expect and at WC the shops not exactly teeming when all the parking spaces occupied.

Well enjoy the pictures of the model village

You can also avoid the whole business of shopping and buy our local history books online post free. However personally I consider a good browse in a bookshop a much more gratifying experience.

Endangered species

Most of us live in towns, it is has been the favored human environment for many years, and it think we have reached the point where our species needs its environment protecting.

Apart from any consideration about our social needs as a species, road travel to shops, jobs, leisure facilities, schools etc. isn’t environmentally sustainable.

As a retailer I am in a position to explain why the shops are going in our towns, my brother recently closed his bookshop in St Albans and now my father has closed his in Wimborne Minster and I have noticed a lot of shops are closing here in Ramsgate.

When I moved back to Ramsgate 20 years ago King Street was a much busier street and Ramsgate had a lot more shops and places to park it also had leisure facilities to atract tourism. Back then the shop takings were about £1,500 per week or £75,000 per year as the town disintegrated as a leisure and shopping town this figure fell at its worse to about half. It has now gone back up a certain amount to about £1,000 per week or £50,000 a year. Unlike many other retail businesses, in the secondhand book world one is able to compensate for these sort of fluctuations a certain amount, by when the shop is quiet using the time to engage in postal business which although much more time consuming, is more profitable.

Now we and the other shops have a new problem because most shops are rented on long leases, the rents tend to stay fairly stable for long periods of time until the leases come up for renewal. 20 years ago the building I rent was worth about £25,000 and the rent was about 10% of this freehold value, this is all usual practice.

Now however this building is worth about £200,000 maybe more, this wouldn’t be a problem if the planning regulations meant that it had to stay a shop, as I doubt that any other type of shop in this building would do much better, so the rent, rates and ultimately the value of the building would have to reflect what it could make as a shop.

10% of £200,000 is £20,000 per year or £400 per week converted into 4 flats with rents in the region of £100 per week it would easily generate that sort of income for the landlord. The gross rate of profit for bookshops shop sales is generally in the area 40% if it is very well run it might be possible to get 50% but not very likely and this applies to most small shops where the initial discount on what they buy to sell varies between 20% and 50% as of course not all the stock one buys sells for the amount one hopes for.

Our average book selling price is about £2 which means we buy and sell about 500 books a week, a lot of books all re used the majority of which would otherwise been thrown away.

So the bottom line is the very best the shop is likely to make to pay all of the expenses rent, rates, heat, light etc is about £500 so you can see with a rent of about £400 per week and business rates related to this figure, it’s not worth a candle.