Here is the painting of Deal Timeball and some fairly
typical Deal buildings
And here the photo for art critics
Cheese sarni and pot of tea about £7
Shopping in Deal today, a town that is still hanging in
there with numerous independent shops, the other side of this coin is more
shops closing at Westwood Cross H&M are the latest and will be closing on 6th
June.
I guess the difference I notice most with WC is that the
closed shops have a striking resemblance to the closed shops in “The Centre” in
Margate. I guess this partly down to modern building that aren’t that well
maintained looking pretty tacky when closed and partly due to newish shopping
centres just not aging well.
From my point of view as a retailer it is still fairly
difficult to see where retail is going, sales in my bookshop started going up around
the middle of last year after decreasing year on year for years. I have to
admit to not really having any idea why, I would doubt that people are reading
more physical books, or that my shop represents significant competition to Amazon,
although I do try to make sure that my book prices are less than online book
prices.
I do wonder just what the future is for fairly small out of
town shopping centres like WC, I only have a reasonable understanding of the
bookselling side of retail and everything I know about the book trade suggests
that the W H Smith and Waterstones there shouldn’t really work. By this I mean
that they replaced the two Albion Bookshops in Cliftonville and Broadstairs and
I can’t see how book sales in Thanet would have increased by that sort of
proportion.
Here are a few Deal photos
