A painting of Tesco Extra from Sainsbury’s at Westwood Cross Thanet and some thoughts.

Here is the painting of Tesco’s

and here the photo for any budding art critics.

An ocean of coloured gravel seems to be developing between Sainsbury’s and WC, with my children shopping in the one and me painting in the other I wondered if they would ever make it back.

Anyway in the end they were guided back by the Belisha Beacons.

Strangely there has been no sign on the pwc report on Manston due by the end of the month; perhaps they are working on it over the weekend.

Mamas and Papas are the latest shop to announce they are leaving the increasingly Titanic WC, perhaps given a little more time I may get a better view while the members of the fairer sex in my family engage in shopping. 

A new site has appeared which is endeavouring to get some idea of the proportion of people for and against the airport, vote at 
http://manstongrounded.com/ and results at https://twitter.com/manstongrounded  I should point out there that having voted you get an email that you have to click on to confirm your vote. In some cases this email takes several hours to appear of winds up in your spam folder.  

From a blogging point of view it's pretty much a case of no nes is good news today, I will endeavor to ramble on here if i think of anything else to say 

Painting of Westwood Cross shopping centre from the café in Sainsbury’s supermarket, another Broadstairs view?

Here is the Painting of Westwood Cross shopping centre, done this evening while the ladies in my family shopped.

I guess in times passed they would have spent the evening dancing around a maypole, and I guess that May Day falling on Freya's day, well at least The Lady’s day although not Lady Day would have been considered particularly fecundate.

The business with Sainsbury interested me, £1 for a very good pot of tea and of course the view across the large and deserted car park, as a shop assistant I couldn’t help but notice the staff pretty much outnumbered the customers.

I guess this is more pronounced in the photo than in the pen and watercolour sketch, of course working in a shop, I don’t get to shops during what would have been considered normal shopping hours, so don’t really have the comparisons.

Judging from the cars in the distance WC shopping centre was much busier, well fortunately I wasn’t there.  

Pen and Watercolour Sketch from Marks and Spencer at Westwood Cross Broadstairs

This Pen and Watercolour Sketch from Marks and Spencer of Westwood Cross Broadstairs painted today while the fairer sex in my family were shopping, used a size S Pitt pen Winsor and Newton artists quality watercolours, mostly cobalt blue, paynes grey for the bluey grey and ivory black for the window frames grey.

As you see the window frames are actually straight, the idea of the curve was that it could either be a curve in or a curve out, depending how you perceive it.

There is a sense here of taking a grey Volvo to Marks and Spencer and looking out on purgatory, I guess purgatory isn’t so bad as long as you are allowed paint, paper, brush and water.  

The New Sainsburys at Westwood Cross Thanet and possibly more rambling.

I guess most people will know that the new extra large Thanet Sainsbury’s got planning permission this week at 155,000 square feet that makes it about 100 times the size of my bookshop, so one very large shop.

 1  this is the picture from Sainsbury's website I will add a few more maps and plans for people like me who may be a bit on the dim side when it comes to visualising what we are going to get.

2   this first one covers the general area

these next two a bit more zoomed in

3

4

5 The red lines show where the outside walls will go

the next two are pictures of the outside walls 

6

7 I guess over the years as supermarkets have become larger, so that one eventually has to spend a considerable amount of ones leisure time in an air hanger sized shed, I have slowly realised how much I detest them. 

Reading the first comment made me realise that I hadn’t been clear enough in this post, so for clarity a new map with coloured lines on it.

The blue square is the existing Sainsbury supermarket, which will be demolished.

The red square is where the new Sainsbury supermarket will be built.

The green line is the new road intended to relive the traffic chaos at Westwood Cross.

  

8 Hopefully the map below is closer to accurate, see comments.

9

Eating at Westwood Cross, Frankie and Bennys, a Sunday ramble.

The moral here is don’t put the food processor bowl on the bottom shelf of the dishwasher, wash it on the top shelf. Hence the shopping mission to Westwood Cross to buy a new food processor.

Anyway a new experience for me, eating with children at Frankie and Bennys, this is next to the Vue Cinema, casino et al.

Two adults, two children, drinks main course and sweets, the meal was good and under £40, I hope the sketch I did there gives you some idea of what to expect.

I think with more practice sketching in public places, I am slowly getting better at it, it certainly keeps me occupied while the children do their eating up, complete the questions in their entertainment packs and so on.

Handy too as you aren’t allowed to photograph Westwood Cross without special permission.

I genuinely wonder if there is any situation where you aren’t allowed to sketch what is going on, anyone know the answer to that one.

I will ramble on.

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.   

Thanet Tesco and the human environment and a bit of a ramble

In Thanet at the moment there are plans for two new Tesco stores, one in Margate, the subject of some controversy on several of the other Thanet blogs and one in Ramsgate where Busy B’s is in Hereson Road.

The one in Margate needs planning permission, however I doubt that that will be an obstacle, as the one in Ramsgate is going into an existing shop building it only needs planning permission for ancillaries, like signs and air-conditioning fans.

The strangest aspect of this though is the parking in this area, this part of Hereson Road already has a school in it, very dense and often dangerous on street parking and frankly no available extra parking at all.

Anyway from my point of view here the main question is what are Tesco up to, here in Ramsgate they have a history of causing damage to the town, both architectural and commercial, so my feelings about their latest projects are filled with scepticism.

Back in about 1970 they built what was then the largest supermarket in Ramsgate (the building is now Wilkinsons) this along with the other supermarkets did considerable damage to the town, closing butchers, bakers, fishmongers and the small specialist shops that thrived among the more essential town centre shops.

Because of this Ramsgate town centre started to contract, what happened next was the movements of the supermarkets out of town, something that eventually closed down most of Tesco’s rival supermarkets in the town.

Sometime around about fifteen years ago Ramsgate town centre hit an all time low, two of the biggest multiples, Tesco and Marks & Spencer, moved out and I believe the feeling within the guiding management of the big multiples was that the town was ill enough to be left to die.

From the large multiples point of view, what they would like to achieve is to have all of the advantages the wholesaler and the retailer. By this I mean they would really like to trade in huge out of town industrial units and have the retail customers drive to these central distribution units. This had been largely successful in America where small town centres and the associated communities have often been destroyed, with all of the associated environmental damage caused by people driving to get their shopping.

However some towns in the UK seem to have bucked this trend, Ramsgate is a case in point, the large retail units within the town are for the most part occupied and even a new greengrocer and fishmonger has opened.

Margate as a trading centre seems to have collapsed and has moved into a state that appears to be beyond hope.

Now one has to consider Tesco’s strategy for dealing with the situation in both of these towns, in Margate this seems to be to try to create a new shopping centre away from the remains of the town centre, where Tesco control the parking.

Parking is a very big issue here as the more that can be achieved in terms of reducing and controlling the parking close to the town centre the more chance there is to force people out of town for their shopping. It should be noted here that one aspect of the new plans for Dreamland is to remove Margate’s largest car park.

In Ramsgate however they seem to be trying a different approach, that looks like a series of satellites stores in areas of high-density population in the suburbs of the town.

As I have said one needs to look carefully at the ultimate motives of the big chain retailers and remember that when you spend your money with them you are supporting their intent, which is to destroy your environment as a human being. Most of us have a habitat that is called a town, where that habitat is damaged, even to the point that it becomes uncomfortable or even dangerous to us our first though should be, who benefits?

Photography banned at Westwood Cross Shopping Centre.

Several people have asked me to take some pictures of Westwood Cross, some of these are completely disabled and will never get to see it, some are people who have moved away from Thanet and are curious to know what people are talking about.

Anyway it’s my day off today and although the gloomy winter weather does bring to mind a phrase popular among teenagers of my generation; “today has been cancelled due to lack of interest,” I thought I would get the shopping from Sainsburys, take the bookshop recycling to MPL at Westwood and take a few hundred photographs of Westwood Cross.

After taking a few a couple of security men appeared and told me I would have to get permission to take photographs, they said that they would use their radios to get permission from head office and asked me why I was taking pictures.

Obviously I explained that I had started taking them last year to make an historical record of Thanet and that when I had started publishing them to the internet in the order that I had taken them, this became as close to going for a walk in their home town as some people could get, and when I stopped doing this I got a lot of emails asking me to carry on doing so.

They relayed this to head office in the simplified for of taking pictures for a website for disabled people, frankly they seemed more stunned than I was when the answer came back as no.

One of them said to me, “I would say to you have a nice afternoon shopping with your wife, but now I just don’t know what to say.”

The only picture I didn’t publish was the one of the security guards, as they were so pleasant about the whole affair that I don’t want them implicated.

Now I am not sure of the legal position here, the security guards said that this ban could be enforced, as Westwood Cross Shopping Centre is private property.

Firstly it begs the question of what constitutes a public place? I would have though anywhere the public have unrestricted access to.

More important here to my mind is that there should be one law for this shopping centre and another for the rest of Thanet, with its own private police force enforcing a constitution that isn’t made up by an elected body or producing laws that are not made by precedence based on the courts and the jury system.

This is a very slippery slope to go down and could have an effect on our basic human rights.

The last time that we had a constitution in England was when Oliver Cromwell reigned, his slippery slope lead all the way to regicide.

They are certainly quite happy to use the law of the land when it suits them it says on their website http://www.westwoodx.co.uk/terms/ “6 Governing Law and Jurisdiction
These Terms and Conditions will be governed by and construed and interpreted in accordance with the laws of England and Wales and you agree that the English courts shall have exclusive jurisdiction in any dispute.
If you do not agree to be bound by these Terms and Conditions, please leave this website now.”
Here are the pictures I took before I was stopped http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/Laptop5/id5.htm

Oh and the top picture is of a CCTV security firms van at Westwood they seem to think that they are above the law too, as they have no number plate.