Ruth Atkins at The York Street Gallery in Ramsgate,

The current Exhibition is by Ramsgate based artist  Ruth Atkins. Ruth has 57 works on display. Ranging from large to small canvases. The exhibition runs -  15th October - 22nd October.

Pleasurama Thanet District Council, Ramsgate shopping and other stuff.

I really shouldn’t be writing blogs at all at the moment I am far too busy with my bookshop, the bookshop world has changed and the effects are coming my way in terms of extra work, more of that later on in the post if I get the time.

So starting with the council cabinet meeting about Pleasurama, my take here is that all the political side of Pleasurama counts for very little and ultimately it is the physical problems related to the site.

One of these is the cliff and I have added some pictures and newspaper articles which will expand so the are big enough to read if you click on them and then click again once expanded.

Anyway here are the videos of the part of the council cabinet meeting that discussed Pleasurama.  

Part 2

Well the meeting certainly shows that the councillors are interested in confronting the councillors of other political parties, but i am less certain they are interested in what the people they represent actually want.

Obviously this site has to be dealt with in some way and it does seem likely that however it goes it will be some sort of privately financed development there. In terms of local developers Cardy Construction are one of the best, so if there is going to be a developer involved then we are very unlikely to better than them.

I have had a bit of a look at the various things on the internet about the cabinet meeting and so far the impression I get is that there was supposed to be a big save Manston airport demonstration outside but only about 100 demonstrators turned up.

I am yet to be convinced that there is strong local support for the TDC cpo it does seem that less than 50 TDC council taxpayers turned up, I am still convinced that TDC shouldn’t be going down the cpo path without first holding some sort of public consultation to find out what it is that the people who finance TDC through their taxes actually want.

This is a bit like the Pleasurama problem inasmuch as no one has convinced me that either the RiverOak plans for an airfreight hub or the Discovery Park plans for a fairly high proportion of industrial use are actually viable due to the physical limitations of the site.

Personally I am not that good on political ramifications, but when someone says they want to engage in developing something that doesn’t make sense, like building igloos on the beach, then I do look for an ulterior motive.

In Victorian times seaside towns had piers so that people could get on and off of paddle steamers. Here in Ramsgate there was a – well still is in a derelict – sort of way a paddle steamer quay ant the end of the harbour wall, so we didn’t need a pier. 

This didn’t stop a company being set up and a pier actually being built, followed by it and several other companies that got involved going bankrupt, I publish a book about this see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/id122.htm  

Back to the books, I bought a reasonably large collection of industrial archeology books last Thursday, loosely described as my day off, interesting because most of had been bought secondhand during the last thirty years and most of it still has the prices penciled in the front.

Now in the days before the internet, which is when the book collector put this collection together, you could only really do this by a mixture of travelling from bookshop to bookshop buying books on this subject and getting specialist catalogues from booksellers that specialised in books on history, engineering and crafts.

There wasn’t very much money in all of this but everyone seemed to enjoy it and the prices of the books settled around making sure that the booksellers involved didn’t go bankrupt.

By this I mean that a books the size of an ordinary hardback novel about say the industrial archaeology of East Anglia would first come out new at a price around £25 at today’s values. The print run would have been pretty short and I would doubt the author or the publisher made a large amount of money.

When it turned up in a general secondhand bookshop it was probably priced at around half price, about £12, but in practice this type of book was mostly sold on to a specialist bookseller. Usually for a price somewhere in the £8 to £10 ball park who then put it in his catalogue and sold it for around £15 to £25. Mostly depending on whether it was out of print or not.

Now the internet means that all of this has gone and for the most part you could buy a great many industrial archaeology books at less that £3 with very few costing more than £10 each including postage, so I have spent all day rubbing out prices from ten fifteen or twenty years ago and writing in mostly much lower ones.

I still have a great deal more of this to do so there isn’t much time for blogging at the moment. 

I will add to this post as I get the time.

A small midweek ramble about libel and stuff you may be better off not publishing online.

The murals at Abbots Hill are coming on a treat and jollying the town centre up so some pictures of this and the harbour in this post, they will probably expand if you click on them, they usually do.

Cllr Ian Driver has been having more confrontations with the TDC officers detailed on facebook https://www.facebook.com/ian.driver.7?fref=ts and in the Gazette http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/VIDEO-Councillor-chased-leaving-meeting-secret/story-23187514-detail/story.html there is more to this story than meets the eye as the Gazette had published a story about the content of the documents which now has mysteriously vanished, the Gazette apparently says due to technical reasons, but I would say this is more about the grey areas surrounding what you can and can’t publish.

In this case I think not so much about libel and more about preserving the paper’s relationship with council officers, by not publishing the content of their secret documents.

Item and comments on this post removed for legal reasons.

Apparently this is information the council want to keep secret 

Then there is all the stuff about the new Manston owners that has appered on the internet, here is the Gazette article http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Manston-airport-owners-aware-online-allegations/story-23182563-detail/story.html you note no link to the online information they are talking about and comments are not allowed on the news post.

I have just been through the comments here removing the links to it as frankly it looks as though it may be libellous and linking to or endorsing a libel can cost you a few thousand pounds which I would rather spend on books for my bookshop.

I guess while on the one hand we are all encouraged to add stuff to the internet, and there is nowadays a very real sense that if you haven’t contributed to the internet, the from the point of view of the future looking at this point in history, then you won’t have existed.

My guess is that when your ancestors search in the future to find out about you, if there is nothing much there then they will wonder what was wrong with you.

On the other hand the rules for what we can and cannot do are not clearly defined, this is particularly marked near the boundaries, and as humans are interested in boundaries it is a major issue.  For instance the Gazette story about Pleasurama is much more interesting because it has gone.

I would guess I try to manage this blog by using a mixture of common sense and caution but the comments can be a pain to manage, I get some rather twisted things in comments like links that say one thing and lead to another, I guess sooner or later I will make a mistake and either have to face legal action or the blog will get removed because of a legitimate complaint to Google.

As quite a lot of the blog content is used by people as a local history resource, it won’t be long before I move on to another blog site to ensure what is here stays here.  

My general take is that anything published online that isn’t endorsed by connecting to a real life person in the real world it highly suspect and endorsing such things with your real name has an element of risk.  

I may ramble on here 

The King Street Carpet Shop Planning Application comes up for decision tomorrow.

I guess with the concerns about the future of the Manston Airport site and concerns about the future of the Pleasurama site it may be that most people have had their eye off the ball with this one.

Personally I think that turning one of the largest shops in Ramsgate into social housing is likely to have long term implications for Ramsgate as a shopping centre, to say nothing of the poor wretches who will have their bedroom windows fronting onto King Street.

Anyway having talked to some of the councillors about this one, I got the recommendation to email all of the members of the planning committee with my objection.

Here are the members of the planning committee, clicking on their names should bring up their email address.   

Meeting attendance

Attendee	Role	Attendance
Councillor Jack Cohen	Chairman	Expected
Councillor Clive Hart	Vice-Chairman	Expected
Councillor Steve Alexandrou	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Mrs Rosalind Binks	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor John Martin Edwards	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Michelle Fenner	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor William A Hayton	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Thomas King	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor John D Kirby	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Mrs Ela Lodge-Pritchard	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Mrs Jennifer Matterface	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Pat Moore	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Brian M Sullivan	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Mrs Shirley Tomlinson	Committee Member	Expected
Councillor Miss Linda Wright	Committee Member	Expected

This is what I sent them in blue.

Hi Linda I am writing to you and hopefully, computer allowing, to all the other members of the planning committee about the council’s planning application to turn the ground floor of one of the largest shops in Ramsgate into housing which comes up for decision at tomorrow’s planning meeting.  

 

I would guess that you either know me because of my having run the bookshop in Ramsgate since 1987 or because I write the thanetonline blog, anyway I do feel that I have some insight into how Ramsgate works as a shopping centre.

 

I also understand, which I didn’t know when I put in my objection, that TDC are drawing up a consultation document for regeneration of this part of Ramsgate and that this is nearly ready for public consultation and may impact on the future use of the largest shop in the street.

 

Anyway I would appreciate it if you could read through my objection below.       

 

 

72 King Street

Ramsgate

Kent

CT11 8NY

U. K.

Telephone (01843) 589500

 

Application Number F/TH/14/0660

Attn Emma Fibbens

Objection to planning application for change of use from retail to housing at 69-73 King Street, Ramsgate CT11 8NX

 

I am mainly objecting to this application on the grounds that all of the shops between this one and the centre of the town are let and running as shops, with the exception of one that is being refitted and one that was recently closed after a council health inspection.

 

That deliberately damaging a functioning busy fully occupied shopping street by converting the largest shop in it into social housing is contrary to town centre regeneration.

 

Brief history dates and amounts may be inaccurate as I am writing this from memory

69-73 King Street traded for many years as a furniture shop, a significant part of their business was supplying furniture to residents of social housing and when they lost the contract about 15 years ago they went bankrupt.

 

The shop remained empty until about 12 years ago and then traded as a carpet shop until about 6 years ago when the carpet shop closed and the shop was sold at auction.

 

The building was sold for around £90,000 and was then marketed for around £250,000 and failed to sell. It then went back into auction about 4 years ago with a reserve of 170,000, failed meet its reserve at the auction, but was sold after the auction for £160,000.

 

At the end of 2011 the new owners applied for planning permission to convert the upper floors to residential and the ground floor from one large shop to 3 smaller shops.

 

These seemed sensible plans and I don’t think anyone objected to them.

Most recently it was bought by Thanet District Council.

 

It is important to appreciate that this is the largest shop in King Street and it being closed for the last 6 years has had a very damaging affect on the other business in this part of Ramsgate town centre.

 

Despite this King Street still remains in a busy shopping street, with the shops on each side of it trading and the shops opposite also still trading apart from at one end of it where it is opposite part of the shop that the council closed down after their health inspection unit visited it.

 

Ramsgate shopping centre

 

The most vibrant and successful part of the shopping centre is based around the only viable public car park; Staffordshire Street Car Park Ramsgate 200 spaces. The other large town centre car park is; Leopold Street Multi-story Car Park Ramsgate 394 spaces, somewhere that few women (who do most of the shopping) would venture into, if driving alone.

 

Ramsgate is the main food-shopping town in East Kent, it has 3 butchers, 2 greengrocers, 2 bakers, 1 fishmonger, within the town centre and all a short distance from Staffordshire Street Car Park.

 

I have been trading in King Street, opposite 69-73 as a new and secondhand bookseller since 1987 and can confirm that food shoppers from Thanet, Canterbury, Sandwich, Deal and Herne Bay; all town centres with far fewer independent food retailers use the town and car park for their food shopping.

 

Councils

 

KCC has a strong vested interest in their large investment in Turner Contemporary and making the shops in area around it survive.

 

TDC has a strong vested interest in their large investment in Dreamland, a strong desire to see Westwood Cross Shopping Centre succeed and are more focussed on Margate and Westwood than on Ramsgate. 

 

RTC would like to see much more activity around their offices in Harbour Parade and are trying to move commercial activity that way, although this is hindered by the two nearest retail premises (at the harbour end of Harbour Street) of any consequence being empty, probably because they are too far from Staffordshire Street Car Park.      

 

The net result of this has been:

 

The removal of all of the free on street parking in the immediate area of the King Street shops e.g. Turner Street no-through-road and Belmont Street, while on street parking is allowed on narrow streets adjacent to school entrances in Ramsgate e.g. St Ethelbert’s School.

 

Rubbish and recycling collections taking place in King Street on market day the busiest shopping day there.

 

The pavement in King Street being in an appalling condition.

 

Part of the shopping centre within King Street being removed from the town centre for policing purposes.

 

I should reiterate here that despite these hindrances all of the available shops in King Street between Plains of Waterloo and High Street are open and trading apart from one which was closed by the council and one which is being refitted.

 

Social housing

 

King Street in Ramsgate has several late night takeaways licensed until 4am and the street is often very noisy and lively until then. The removal of the town centre police beat means that most of it has the same level of policing as an out of town residential area, so inevitably drunken fights break out in the early hours of the morning.

 

Since 1987 I have had about 50 late night – early hours shop window breakages.

 

This is compounded by the situation in Trove Court and Kennedy House, where there is no doorman, so people use the corridors to rough sleep and for drug abuse, means that there is a lot of late night and early hours noise at street level in King Street

This development would mean housing people on the ground floor next to the street, perhaps this sort of social housing is intended by the council as some form of punishment, personally I think it inappropriate.

Recommendations.

 

As this shop is in the main food shopping town centre in the area and very close to the only public car park that most shoppers feel safe using I would recommend that the council approach, Quex Farms and other local food producers with the proposition of turning it into and indoor market, primarily a farmer’s market.    

 

 

Best regards Michael

Something Horrible Happens in the Children’s section of our Bookshop, the Author Author sketches, Manston cpo Decision Delayed.

This was the situation on the table in the children’s section at close of play today, what can you say?

More of my very small sketches from the photos on http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ it’s often difficult with this sort of thing to tell if they are getting better or worse.

And yes the wretched airport, some frustrated people who want to say something and mostly don’t know what to say so the comment is leaking into yesterdays post about the new exhibition at Turner Contemporary.  

What can I say about this? Well first chatting to locals in my bookshop there doesn’t seem to be much local interest in the airport issue, it certainly isn’t something that a lot of people are talking about, in the way that some local issues have been in the past.

Nationally, that is those people who are UK residents that appear to support the airport to the extent of signing an online petition seem to number around 2,500 see http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/62738 to put this into some proportion the minimum number of signatures needed for one of these UK gov petitions to be considered is 100,000

In terms of all of the airport petitions that there have been it is only the UK gov ones that I have a fair amount of faith that it is difficult to sign more than once.

Within reasonable driving distance support for the airport would seem to number around 400 people judging form the numbers who turned up for their three day event this weekend, to put tis in some sort of proportion the population of Kent is around 1,500,000

Anyway this coming Thursday’s cabinet meeting the council were supposed to be discussing furthering the cpo, normally the documents relating to this would have appeared on the council’s website by last Thursday, well at the time of writing they still haven’t appeared.

I did phone the council up and they said they expected them to appear soon, but as the delay went on I have talked to the councillors and council officers that I have bumped into.

Various schools of thought, the main one being that virtually none of them can see just what grounds a cpo could be based on, this is made more difficult because some of councillors have promised that the council will do everything in their power to start cpo proceedings.

The problem and it’s a big one, is that if the council wanted to cpo my bookshop to widen the road, then they wouldn’t have much of a problem, however if someone came along wanting to use my shop to sell cds based on the public interest that people listen to music, well they wouldn’t have a cat in hells chance.

At the moment most of the councillors I have spoken to seem to keeping their heads down and waiting to if anything spectacularly entertaining happens to the councillors who have been very publicly supporting the cpo.

Anyway now the leader of the council seems to have issued a statement via the SMA facebook page saying: “from Iris Johnston, Council Leader. Thursday's cabinet "report will be purely on progress so far on market testing as we give interested parties an opportunity to provide outstanding information" and they are also awaiting advice from the government to advise on "national asset" status in light of the recent vision from Grant Shapps government minister.”

The Isle of Thanet Gazetted have put up a news item about this, see http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Thanet-council-set-delay-verdict-Manston-airport/story-23136612-detail/story.html  

Obviously the first stage of any cpo would be getting a site valuation and as the council haven’t commissioned one yet, although they have discovered that one would cost around £75,000, money which the council can’t really afford.

I will try and think of something more to say about the issue, but generally when things at the council go a bit pear shaped and one group of councillors start looking speculatively at the other, one can expect a sort of slow fizzling out of an issue.

The real indicator here being not so much what the councillors who regularly contribute to the internet are saying, or even what they are not saying but that for the most part they are not saying anything at all unless confronted with a direct questions that they can’t really avoid.  

Jeremy Deller English Magic @ Turner Contemporary Margate some attempt towards a review.

Overall the exhibition is a pretty good one, the previous one – Mondrian http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mondrian – was a pretty hard act to follow and one of the best the gallery has put on so far.

So first impressions here and please remember I am a pretty slow thinker, so I will probably have some more to say about this one when I have visited the exhibition a few times.

This is the first of the exhibitions there arranged like a one way street, it’s spread through four interconnected galleries with signs telling you which way to egress and which way to is ingress.

So you start in the room where the balcony is overlooking the pots of the heir with the amber eyes, instructions in a leaflet for all the rooms apart from this one, so big Man Who Sold the World banners and no explanation, which was fine by me as I have already made my mind up about Bowie.

The first gallery, ok to be technical The West Gallery has Bill Morris making a socialist gesture with the yacht that blocked the view.

Some Ruskin sketches on the wall which are interesting and the enviable Joe Turners of Venice, the Giardini connection.

The high point in the WG for me was the William Morris fabric printing set, the more ICTitious can of course photograph the wooden – rubber stamps, until someone comes up with a better phrase to explain them – and do a great reprint in paintshop.

I lifted the veil and took a picture, sorry about the reflections.

The next bit is a film of the English not being Johnnies, or perhaps they are. Then Bowie tour photographs. Then drawings by UK prisoners, all part of what is the political cast of this exhibition. As I said I am a slow thinker so it will be some time before I have sorted out these aspects in my mind.

You then come to the last bit in the North Gallery where you come face to face with Circus Cyaneus fine tuning the royal Range Rover.

This works up to a point and I would think it would work a lot better when it is dark outside as there is a ruddy great window over it, the effect of the light making it look a bit like it’s flying backwards.

Then you turn round and there is the Jersey tax haven 2017 riot fire mural, fantastic at the top – for me as it bends the wall – badly displayed at the bottom where it joins the floor. The colour of the mural and the floor throw the white grout between the two into high profile, tacky execution. The best way would have been to bring the floor colour up onto the mural or the mural colours onto the floor, perhaps even enhancing the slope at the bottom of the buildings to help bend the wall at the bottom too. But even a bit of grey tape over the cracked white grout would make a considerable difference, come on Jeremy, or the artists who painted the mural, or the gallery management. 

Interesting exhibition, the dark political messages got across a bit, but I think it will take me some time to relate to them.

At the end of it I stood in balcony gallery for a bit trying to line up the horizon with the tops and bottoms of the hanging vitrenes, wondered about being more educated, then went round again.               

Drawing somewhere in the Adams Family of authors

This is perhaps to do with the art of Fantastic Fiction, the idea being to sketch very small likenesses from the also very small pictures on Fantastic Fiction website http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/

The end I have in mind is that when I am out and about sketching the people, very small, in my sketches so they will look better, perhaps in some cases be recognisable. Today I have moved up the ladder from pencil to pen. Pros and cons here but sketching out and about, I think the technical term here is “plein air” means it is very difficult to use fixative which stops the pencil from smudging.

I won’t bore you with the miles of authors whose names being with A that have got me as far as Adams, but here are a couple of sheets from today which I think show both how badly and how well things are going.

I clipped a 50p on to one of the sheets so you can see what I mean about small size, clicking on the pictures and then clicking on them again should make them considerably bigger than they are in reality.  

A ramble from the bookshop, new Ramsgate directories, I consider the business of bookshops in the uk, nearly finish The Alex Cross Novels of James Paterson and work up to seeing the new Jeremy Deller exhibition at Turner Conteporary.

Here in the bookshop in Ramsgate we are still busier than expected for the time of year, it probably won’t last but it is strange to be running an ordinary shop and having sales increase.

I guess Tesco may be right when they say that shopping is going back to smaller shops, with shopping being done more often in the town centres. With my bookshop I am inclined to look for reasons for trends and the years of trending downwards caused by out of town shopping, the big retail chains taking over bookselling, the internet and the Kindle certainly explain the downwards trend since about 1995. Explaining the upwards trend now is a tad tricky, though I think there are a number of reasons, the main one being that there isn’t much shop shopping left once you have done the food shopping, the clothes shopping and the internet shopping. 

Not really sure what the chain bookshops are up to, my guess is that the number of people buying physical books at the full price must be very small now, as I said I am near the end of the James Patterson Alex Cross novels, this a run of around twenty books published over the last twelve years or so and frankly if you have never read them then it is best to read them in order. The recommended retail price of each of them is around £8 each, so if you bought them at that it would cost you around £160 to read them. we had nearly all of them on the shelf in the bookshop, none of them priced at more than £2 with an average price of around £1.75 so reading all of them, if we had all of them would cost around £35 as it was I bought one of them in a charity shop and two online, so as a customer the overall cost of sourcing most of them from us topping a few up from the internet, using our exchange scheme would probably have meant it costing around £40, buying all of them cheapest you could online it would probably have come out around the same, but the effort involved in buying 20 different items from 20 different sellers, with a high probability of at least one of the orders going wrong, well you know…

On the non fiction front sales in our shop seem to be holding there own too, although there is a bit of a strange one going on here. The average non fiction customer seems to be buying much more narrower field in depth books now, with the books that have contents very similar to websites not really selling at all. And yet. What? I had a major browse in Waterstones the other day and a great many recently published non fiction books seem to have contents very like websites.

Another new Ramsgate directory out today, Ramsgate Private Residents Directory 1971, click on the link to buy it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ramsgate_private_residents_directory_1971.htm an apology about the one I did the other day Ramsgate Street Directory 1971 here is the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ramsgate_street_directory_1971.htm I took it out for a walk and some of the print was so faint I couldn’t decipher it, this may have been a senior moment with reading glasses issue, but it seemed pretty bad to me. Anyway it has been re scanned and if you bought one of the very feint ones I will replace it with an ok one.   

I have the 1963 ones in the pipeline and they should be ready in around a weeks time.

I have just had a bit of scan of the what’s on Thanet site http://www.visitthanet.co.uk/what-s-on I was surprised to see that the Manston Airport event wasn’t there, perhaps it’s for airport supporters only a quick scan of Twitter https://twitter.com/search?q=%23manston&src=typd and facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/savemanstonairport suggests it has been a bit of a flop. I guess this is partly down to it not being well publicised and partly down to it not being at all clear what you get, does the entrance charge cover the cost of the rides? What rides are there [Dad anything worth going on and how much] like I can see getting there with the children, forking out £20 to get in and then finding it's about £3 per ride, which translates to £60.  

Anyway being very sceptical of a TDC cpo, not at all keen on an airfreight hub, but very keen on the historic aviation side and vaguely supportive of an airport I could actually fly from, I really don’t know if I would be welcome there so I think I will give it a miss tomorrow.  

What the visit Thanet site did have to say is that the new Jeremy Deller exhibition http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/jeremy-deller-english-magic has opened at Turner Contemporary, I have just watched the video a couple of times.

Sketched Jeremy Deller in felt tip pen while watching the video and yes I did pause it a few times, sorry it’s not a very good likeness, but I think famous artists are fair game when you are trying to do this sort of thing.

This business of sketching artists is a strange one, if you believe The Guardian then this is a portrait of turner as a young man, see http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/aug/15/jmw-turner-portrait  

Artists tend to get drawn quite a bit so the pictures of them by different artists are interesting if you try to draw portraits.

Plenty of portraits of turner on The National Portrait Gallery website at http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp04566/joseph-mallord-william-turner

I quite like this one. 

I will try and get there tomorrow and do some sort of a review here.