Council U Turn on Westcliff Hall Auction

I have just noticed that the mayor of Ramsgate has left a comment on ECRs blog to the effect that the council have withdrawn Westcliff Hall (The Motor Museum) from the residential property auction that they had put it in.

The picture above (click on it to enlarge) shows the cliff being cut out for its construction.

Westcliff Hall was built in the early 1900s and opened on the day the First World War broke out, not an auspicious start.

It was last used to house Ramsgate Motor Museum see http://www.thanetonline.com/RamsgateMotorMuseum/index.htm and has been empty for a number of years.

As far as we understood here in Ramsgate negotiations were well underway with a local group supported by Ramsgate Town Council, with Thanet District Council the owners, to convert this into an arts leisure facility.

Then last week signs appeared on it saying that it was to be auctioned by a well-known residential property auctioneer.

Westcliff Hall is one of several prominent council owned sites that have fallen into disrepair and partial or total disuse here in Ramsgate.

Others are, The Maritime Museum, The Grosvenor Casino, Pleasurama, Nero’s, Tiberius, The Marina Swimming Pool and Albion House, to give them the names that we last remember them as.

I will be charitable here and say that it is an unfortunate coincidence that all of these are council owned.

Recently I have tried to find out from the council the status of these and frankly I haven’t been very successful, my understanding of the situation at the moment is as follows.

Please feel free to correct any information here.

The Maritime Museum, after first offering the museum operators security of tenure and then withdrawing it the council have again offered them security of tenure, I believe this will subject to various council committees meeting.

Grosvenor Casino the council have had negotiations with the leaseholder, The Rank Organisation who have agreed to carry out external repairs to the building.

Pleasurama, this ongoing carbuncle on our seafront has presented the council with various problems, apart from the obvious physical ones of the proposed development’s proximity to an unsupported chalk cliff and the intention to build in a high risk flood zone without a flood risk assessment, I think the council’s main concern here has been to protect its financial interest in the site.

Last year after delays starting the development because the developer couldn’t meet the council’s financial criteria, as set out in the development agreement I believe that the council officers decided it was time to get out of this one.

The council’s director of finance made recommendations that the council should pull out of the development on the grounds that the developer hadn’t upheld the terms of the agreement.

These recommendation were put to a full cabinet meeting and the cabinet decided to go against the recommendations of the director of finance and let the developer go ahead with a revised and less demanding agreement.

The last I heard is that the council have given the developer a 199 year lease on the site, so it could be some time before anything much changes there.

Nero’s although this was an important Victorian theatre, and a critical part of the Granville Marina complex for some reason it wasn’t listed.

With this one the council decided to demolish it without any public consultation and without any public warning.

Tiberius, this was previously the home of the casino, I was away from Ramsgate when this was dilapidated and destroyed, so I don’t really know what happened there.

The Marina Swimming Pool, I am pretty sure that this was destroyed by poor maintenance, this happened long enough ago to publish one of the funny stories about the council’s actions that contributed to its demise.

The story goes that the swimming pool was run by the maintenance and engineering side of the council and in some reshuffle – I expect the word stakeholders was used – the council decided to transfer it to their leisure department.

A large ferro cast structure in the sea is a complex piece of civil engineering, the forces of the sea acting upon the structure partially balanced by the water in the pool.

Anyway the long and the short of the story is that the council’s engineers gave instructions to the council’s leisure officers not to empty the water out of the pool.

No prizes for guessing what happened.

Albion House, this is still a rather sensitive one, but the story is that Thanet District Council offered it to Ramsgate Town Council under terms that were unreasonable, particularly considering the dilapidated state of much of the building. It is thought to be the only UK royal residence that has nets on it to prevent part of the crumbling structure falling on people as it crumbles off.

Over the years I have watched the significant council owned sites in the town destroyed one way or another and now I have reached the point where I have started to speculate on what there is that council be next.

So what else is there:

The Sailors Church, I am pretty sure this is council owned, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one go under the hammer in one sense or another.

Oh yes and Eagle Café, certainly prominent, disused and council owned, there was a rumour that there was some sort of court action, which was started and then dropped.

And another one the Tourist Information Office, also council owned, disused although not really in a prominent position, so perhaps I shouldn’t include it, I don’t want anyone to think that I am being unreasonable.

Having said all of this one would expect the privately owned properties in this part of Ramsgate to be similarly disused and derelict, particularly as private owners aren’t funded by council tax, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Blogs and stuff

I have just noticed that the counter that I put on this blog about two years ago has passed the 100,000 mark, so a thank you to all of you who have put up with my ramblings.

Here follows a fast touch-typed rant during lunchtime in the bookshop, that will be in need of correction if I ever get around to it, very much thought as I go along tha something really intended for publication.

Looking at the various posts here and on the other blogs, one is very much aware of a sense of dissatisfaction with Thanet District Council, particularly over asset disposal and leisure facilities.

I am not really sure how much of this is real and how much of it is perceived and talking to people in the shop it is obvious that this feeling extends outside of the blogs and is almost universal.

I think much of the problem stems from poor communication with local people and frankly whith the internet this really shouldn’t be happening, the council has a whole press department that is supposed to tell us what they are up to.

Frankly it shouldn’t be difficult to extract the major things that are likely to effect peoples lives, from the masses of information the council publish, and publish information about these somewhere on the internet.

My last posting is a case in point, the planning application to decimate Hartsdown Park in Margate was hidden in plain view on the internet, published among the masses of planning applications for double glazing, shop signs and so on and I missed it.

The business over putting Westcliff hall into a residential property auction see ECRs post http://eastcliffrichard.blogspot.com/2010/07/flog-your-assets.html is another case of dreadful communication and bad pr, I asked Ramsgate Town Council about this yesterday and I know that they have been involved in the plans by local people to rejuvenate this.

The sad truth here is that Ramsgate Town Council hadn’t been told about putting it into this auction by Thanet district Council, so if they can’t be bothered to tell the town council what hope do local residents hope to have of finding out what is going on their town.

Another one is the Margate Caves site see my post about it http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-plans-for-margate-caves-site.html something else that I hope Margate people will take up, however I am not sure that what looks like impossible access to what should be an important tourist attraction, would be grounds for objecting to the planning application.

The development on the slipways in Ramsgate is another one see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-development-in-ramsgate-harbour.html although it is being talked about in Ramsgate as a done deal already, I can’t find anything about it on the council’s planning website. Once again the problem here isn’t likely to be something that would be somthing to object to it on planning grounds, nonetheless the question, will the harbour be viable with only one slipway? Is a vital one to the economy of Ramsgate as a town.

There is quite a bit of comment on the two posts about Manston airport see http://eastcliffrichard.blogspot.com/2010/07/oozalum-bird.html and http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/2010/07/manston-airport-is-it-issue.html and once again I find there is very much a sense of the council not taking local people with them.

It is quite ridiculous for people to suggest that the noise issue in Ramsgate is a new one, over fifty years ago the problem was such that the American air force decided that Ramsgate was only suitable coloured troops, who at the time they considered racially inferior or some such thing, possibly deaf. All of the officers were billeted in Margate away from the aircraft noise see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts2/id71.htm

Perhaps the council are suggesting that Ramsgate people are racially inferior now, or possibly deafer than those in Margate, how it can be down to a council governing Ramsgate from what always has been and always will be our main rival town can decide fairly that Ramsgate should or shouldn’t have night flights passing over it is beyond me.

The question being asked here to our council dominated by cabinet members and Conservative members on the north of the island is; your biggest problem is Margate a large town with a leisure and shopping based economy that has collapsed, the main rival town Ramsgate appears to be regenerating from within, will you allow disruptive night flights over it?

Always for me though the airport issue comes down to our water supply and there are two aspects that won’t go away.

One is replenishment of the aquifer, by this I mean that amount of Thanet that can be concreted over is finite if we want to retain our essential water supply, this water supply has already been severely effected by various major pollution incidents and the low level but widespread pollution caused by the high level of population and associated infrastructure above.

The remaining mostly green bit of Thanet has Thanet Earth, with plans for expansion, China Gateway and the business park all with plans for more concrete and roads, the new road from Ramsgate to the main London road and the airport expansion.

The problem here is that you can have some of these things but you can’t have all of them and still have enough of a water supply for our domestic, industrial and agricultural needs.

The other problem is that over the commercial life of the airport there has been a lax attitude to water pollution safety issues, there is some information about this on this website I put up the last time I looked into the water pollution issue, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/drink/ if people consider that there isn’t enough information here I do have some more I could publish too.

Truth is that I don’t want to scupper aspects of the airport that could be commercially beneficial to Thanet but on the other hand I don’t want us to go down the road to something that makes neither environmental nor economic sense.

One thing I find worrying here is that it is obvious that the airport has a long history of a lax attitude to safety in terms of water pollution and any airport with a lax attitude to safety in any area is a matter for concern.

Anyway is suppose I had better go and do some work now.

Bank Holiday Ramble

Another dull and dreary Bank Holiday on the type of weather front, we took the children to a boot fair this morning and I have just finished doing a few chores and reading the local blogs.

A few rather rambling thoughts here on this and that as I try to work out some sort of strategy to get a bit more for Ramsgate out of local government, in terms of the council owned assets in Ramsgate.

First the council leadership and cabinet reshuffle, I gather that the intention here is to reshuffle it again and that Simon Moores will probably not retain the Ramsgate Marina portfolio.

I think the intention here is to move this responsibility to the leader of the council Cllr. Bob Bayford, at the moment this presents me with something of a problem as so far he doesn’t appear to acknowledge or respond to emails.

To be fair this is just as likely to be due to some glitch in TDCIT as any intention to ignore local people. I do think however that there is some something wrong with the way that the leaders office is working when emails from local people about local issues to leader@thanet.gov.uk don’t get any response at all.

The harbour and most particularly the marina is the key to regeneration in Ramsgate and at the moment it is in a fairly rundown state, there are some fairly controversial plans for closing two of the slipways and building a leisure complex on them.

The problem here is that with competition from the ports on the coast of northern Europe it is becoming increasingly difficult to run the slipways at a profit, conversely the slipways are essential for profitable aspects of the harbour, like the expanding windfarm business.

There is also the council’s peculiar attitude to heritage, failure to grant security of tenure to the maritime museum and the reduction of the concessionary mooring fees for historic vessels, meaning that they have all left their dedicated pontoon.

I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding in local government about the way the marina and royal harbour relate to the town, tourism and heritage.

The heritage aspect of the harbour, if properly managed should attract considerable grant funding, bring plenty of tourism and make the harbour more a more desirable place for people to keep their boats than other harbours without the strong heritage aspect. Driving the heritage part away, not only makes it less interesting for tourists but also is likely to mean less revenue for the council.

Partly I think the problem is that the council has got itself into a situation where it considers that the greatest return and therefore the best way out of the present financial problems, is to view every council asset as something where they are looking at the maximum return in terms of either disposal or rental return, that will produce the most overall short term return in terms of income for the council.

The Council legal bill for fighting the Montefiore Village Green Application see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2010/05/council-legal-bill-hits-80k-fighting.html is a case in point. Now I know this is an opposition press release and as such may have over stated the point, the problem is however one looks at it, when adding up the figures, it looks like there is an uncomfortable parity with the amount of money the council has spent so far in a legal wrangle over selling it and the amount they would ultimately realise if they sell it. I say this setting aside any thoughts about what local peoples wishes are and just looking cold and hard at the balance sheet.

I would imagine that the council’s legal and financial departments must have understood the cost that would be incurred before embarking in this procedure.

Management of council owned assets in Ramsgate seems to have gone a bit wrong, Westcliff Hall, The Café on the end of the east pier, the dry dock, slipways and winding houses, the marina, the maritime museum, Albion House, the pavilion, the Pleasurama site, well the list could go on. Perhaps one or two of these could be excused but all of them seem too much to be a coincidence.

I am hoping that the new cabinet will have a new direction when dealing with these things. Perhaps the first step should be much more openness about what they are doing and why.

To expand on this a bit more, the thing in terms of local council assets that I have the most in depth understanding of is the Pleasurama development. Information about this comes my way in dribs and drabs and frankly much more of it doesn’t make sense than does.

Now one aspect of this that is pretty much beyond me are the financial arrangements between the council and the developer, unlike the cliff façade and the flood risk problems that I understand, up until now I have had to take the councillors word that they are taking the best advise and acting in the public interest.

Now I have firm written confirmation that the council’s director of finance advised the cabinet not to proceed with the development and that the cabinet in a secret closed meeting decided to ignore that advice and allow the development to proceed.

It is now almost a year since that decision and still we have the situation that we have had for the last few years, when asked the council says the development will start within weeks.

No proper consultation, no accurate information for the people of Ramsgate, nothing approaching open government, but worse of all when things like this leak out and as open government becomes more widespread they surely will, no sensible explanation.

I have put this to two cabinet members, past and present, one who normally replies didn’t and the other replied with, no comment.

I should remind people that at this time the cabinet members were aware that the environment agency had strongly recommended not proceeding with the development without a flood risk assessment and emergency escapes to the cliff top.

I believed their position on this was that although they didn’t like the situation they had no alternative but to let the development go ahead even if the environment agency considered that it could be dangerous.

There is of course the issue of the cliff façade too but try as I have there doesn’t seem to be any government agency willing to comment on that one. I should point out that the various faulty bulging bits get this way because of cliff falls building up behind the concrete until there is a sufficient weight of chalk to shift and crack the concrete.

Let’s suppose that there is nothing much wrong with the cliff façade for a moment, if any of you have a few moments to spare go onto the TDC planning website http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet and look at the latest plans F/TH/03/1200 ground floor sheet 23 Jan 2009, take a kook at the lorry in the 70 foot deep 13 foot wide canyon and consider what would happen if it caught one of the protruding support pillars, for the cliff façade.

The picture is of the café on the end of the east pier, one of the long-term empty council owned assets.

The Freddy Hargraves Band

I received the picture above this morning, can anyone answer Geoff’s question?

I called into you bookshop about a week ago and said that I would send you the attached picture. My sister, who is now in her seventies found this postcard with some old photo's. I imagine that it was taken in the Westcliff Hall in the early 1950s.

Having spent several holidays in Ramsgate in early to mid 1950s. My dad was, at that time a keen fan and would drag us along to either the St Lawrence bandstand or the above mentioned hall several times during our annual one week stay to hear this band play. Bearing in mind that I was still quite young, I was born in 1946, I seem to remember that their musical standard was every bit as good as dance bands heard on the radio at that time the usual bit of bawdy seaside comedy thrown in for good measure. By the late 1950s their style of music had gone out of fashion and they had gone also. Do you know if Mr Hargraves/ Hargeaves was a local man? There is a passing reference to him in This England's book of dance bands Vol 2 and minor reference to him Who's who in British Jazz.

Regards

Geoff