Pleasurama minor update

Work has started laying the pipe for the roof rainwater drainage for the Pleasurama development, this pipe runs from the site to the inner basin and draining the roof in this way conforms to environment agency guidelines.

One aspect of the Pleasurama development that has always interested me it that much of the work undertaken so far hasn’t made much sense.

The new access road from the Granville Marina is a case in point where the developer has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds getting a contractor Knight Developments to build it, without first investigating the structure of the access road, to find out if it will last long enough to provide access to the building.

Even when the EA report came out saying that they strongly recommended a flood risk assessment, work carried on laying lose slabs on sand, on top of the sea defences, well I have been through all of this before and anyone who missed it can click on the links at the bottom of this post, to read all about it.

Well now another contractor http://www.oatmor-harris.co.uk/ are digging up the new roundabout laid by a previous contractor Knight Developments http://www.jlknightroadworks.co.uk/index.html

Do I have a problem with the work going on at the moment, well the answer to that one is no, Oatmor Harris are a quality contractor based in Deal, laying a pipe that has to be laid.

You can see from the photographs that they have turned up with the right kit to tackle the problem of laying a pipe through the concrete remains of the old railway turntable.

But still the question remains, why not lay the pipes and wires for the new development before laying the new roundabout?

Here is the link to this morning’s photographs http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop5/id8.htm it was a wet and gloomy morning and on reviewing them I have run them through a program to lighten them as they looked rather gloomy to me click on this link for the brighter ones http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop5/id9.htm I don’t know why when I publish pictures to the web from my notebook they don’t come up in the right order so I am sorry about that one.

Pleasurama, Royal Sands Ramsgate, Thanet’s largest residential development part 1 1997 to 2003.

Pleasurama, Royal Sands Ramsgate, Thanet’s largest residential development part 1 1997 to 2003.

Since the council press release announcing that work was about to start this month, I have been trying on and off to find out what’s going on.

This is a slow process with answers being cryptic, if you can get any at all, so as we are now on the fourth contractor, something like the seventh set of plans and the sixth definite start date, I thought I would put up a series of posts explaining what has happened with this site over the last eleven years since it burnt down.

I first became interested in this site about 12 years ago when the amusement arcade there closed, at the time we were told that it was going to reopen as a factory outlet.

The council altered the road layout ostensibly to fit in with this, in practical terms what they did was to remove nearly all of the main seafront car parking, how this factory outlet was to survive without any customer parking was never explained.

The more cynical among us decided that it was an attempt by our district council, based in our main rival leisure town, to bring our economy to its knees to their economic benefit. Rumour was that our EEC development grant had been used for this.

About 11 years ago the building burnt down as the result of an arson attack, a disaster for Ramsgate, there then ensued a long period of time when the council that owned the site tried to get back the leasehold interest from the tenant.

Somewhere around 2001 I think this was achieved although what happened to the insurance money claimed for the destroyed council owned building remains a mystery to me.

Early in 2002, I think it was, Whitbread the brewer came along with a proposal for a development on the site, it looked like a fairly good development and was in scale with other developments in the area. If I had to be critical of it, I would say that it wasn’t sympathetic to the surrounding architecture.

Some details from the documentation submitted to the council.

Developer Whitbread and SFP Venture Partners Ltd.

Architect PRC.

Building contractor Featherstone Construction Ltd.

The development was for two buildings, building 1 between the lift and the roundabout and building 2 between the roundabout and Augusta stairs.

Building 1 comprised 80 private flats, hotel Whitbread Brewers Fayre and commercial units. building 2 comprised 20 private flats.

Click on the link to view the documentation http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts10/id5.htm as far as I understand it this was the documentation that most of the TDC councillors representing Ramsgate had seen and thought they were agreeing to when the plans for a much larger and taller building somehow got slipped in during the change of administration from Labour to Conservative.

I am doing my best here to present an accurate account of the saga of this development so far and would appreciate any corrections or additions as they come along.