Arabella Dorman artist, Canterbury Cathedral, Mrs Organ Morgan’s Dreams, old Thanet photos, cold weather, some sort of Sunday Ramble

 I am starting with pictures of the frozen sea at Ramsgate and Margate in 1963.

If you were a child in 1963 then the very cold winter with the very deep snow is something that you probably remember. Useful in a way as it serves as a definite time marker in childhood memories. I would guess the cold snap over the next few days will be the end of winter and I doubt the sea will freeze.

Canterbury today, my plan – which started reasonably well was to go to the cathedral and carry on painting my watercolour in the North Chancel Transept aka the martyrdom.

This really is a spot the difference as after not very long the organ started and the music being played was what I loosely describe as modern classical, the organ sound comes out of the pipes and the loudspeaker system – a wall of sound. When it’s loud people give up on trying to speak in the cathedral and resort to signals in the way they do in an iron foundry. Music isn’t something I understand and without a recognisable tune, I do a runner; which I did.

The visual artwork in the cathedral at the moment is hanging clothes.

I am a painter and my views on installation art are generally left like Mrs Organ Morgan’s dreams; silent. I publish plenty of pictures but talking about it is not my bag.

But this one is different as the clothing once belonged to refugees, mostly left on the Isle of Lesbos and so I concede that the exhibition works and is very much worth seeing, feeling if you can.

Here is the link to the blurb on the Cathedral’s website https://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/whats-on/news/2018/02/15/suspended-cathedral-to-host-unusual-artwork/

The artist can paint and draw too, here is the link to her website http://www.arabelladorman.com/work/

Some photos of this today on my camera card, here is the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/218l/id8.htm  

Cathedral entrance is £12.50 which if you gift aid it lasts for a year, alternately if you attend a service you can get in for nothing. The sung services 11am mass and evensong which is around 3 on Sundays have a very good quire. 

Next the rest of the old Thanet pictures 

The only one that said anything on the back was this one from 1909

 This is Grange Road in Ramsgate and I would guess from the hats Edwardian, late 1890s to 1915

These two after and before the shopfronts of York Gate in Broadstairs may interest some

I went out into Canterbury in search of noise cancelling headphones, but failed to get any - is powerful enough the right word?

Phone photos next

Canterbury once a week, for me and many other people who live in Thanet is basically because of Westwood Cross, which is the out of town shopping centre that devastated Margate and Ramsgate town centres.

So as I am essentially forced to go there so that my family can engage in shopping combined with an environment that is visually pleasing, the alternative would be painting pictures of Westwood Cross. I did try this for a bit - but you know how it is.

This really comes down to shops and particularly the chain shops being part of normal human leisure activity for a great many people.

Obviously working in a shop, as I do with the bookshop I am very aware of changes in retail, something that I think is very worrying is that during the last couple of years Canterbury has lost a huge amount of retail space, the two that most impact on me are the St Margaret's Street Waterstones which I think was the largest bookshop in Kent and Chromos which I think was the largest artists material shop in Kent.

For any dedicated followers of the bookshop here in ramsgate here is the link to the pictures of the books we put out Saturday.

On the tower pumper windmill front here is the conclusive proof that this is Margate the Google Earth link to the picture of the house in the photo, which is till there. 

The Ramsgate Society respond to the Manston Airport DCO

Just looking at the picture above you can see that historically the people of Ramsgate are totally irresponsible 

Since I have been persuaded by various Facebook supporters of the necessity for building a massive airfreight hub at Manston and how is worth sacrificing the Thanet towns and particularly Ramsgate to prevent noise and air pollution affecting the rest of the population of the southeast The Ramsgate Society has produced their response to the Manston 2018 DCO consultation. 

This is obviously a pernicious document aimed at both preserving Ramsgate's heritage and extending the lives of OAP's living the Thanet towns. My own feeling are that sacrificing a few years off the end of the lives of old people living in Ramsgate Margate and Broadstairs is a small price to pay for increasing longevity in the rest of the southeast.

To quote RSP/RiverOak's own 2018 Non Technical Summery of their provisional environmental report:- "diseases of the heart, lungs and circulation system, mental health and wellbeing, and the overall risk of premature death." This really isn't as bad as it sounds as the particulate air pollution will most likely also give the Thanet OAPs dementia meaning they are less likely to notice.

Here in Ramsgate we have take a fairly flexible approach towards modernisation, so adding plastic double glazing to our listed buildings would seem to be a reasonable alternative to just demolishing them.

Anyway the is the link to the Ramsgate Society response http://www.ramsgate-society.org.uk/ramsgatematters/index.php/component/jdownloads/send/2-ramsgate-society/25-manston-consultation-feb-2018

If you look at the photo above carefully you will see early members of The Ramsgate Society with their weapons concealed in musical instrument cases

Anyway enough of Manston

and a bit more on Drapers Mills in Margate

To me it looks like a castellated tower and not the remains of cogs around the top that could be used in some way rotate the cap. I can now see the picture comes from Watermills and Windmills by William Coles Finch published in 1933, vide plate, which says that it is the remains of the corporation pumping tower. I still feel that something is wrong and will have a go at it later

Here is another picture

I nearly missed Broadstiars out 

of course when it comes to sacrificing OAPs and the prevailing wind direction related to burning 10,000 tonnes of avgas it is Broadstairs that probably makes the greatest sacrifice, so is there a Broadstairs Society an have the responded to the consultation?    

I will be adding to this post as stuff comes up

Next  my day in the bookshop, no skiving off and painting for me to today, staff training inbetween pretending to work.

Writing websites was one of the training areas and here is the link to our nee sale website any criticisms gratefully received 

This is Margate in 1935, I think these people may be entertaining their dog

On the blogging front this blog is coming for its eighth anniversary and 3,000,000 visits. I have set the google hosted page counter, top right, which has the option of all time, 30 days or 7 days, to all time so we can see the 3m approaching

   I have great reservations about what internet statistics actually mean something like one of those humorous sketches where the millionth visitor comes out of the public toilet to paparazzi.

There is a new Facebook group for old pictures of Ramsgate that is worth joining https://www.facebook.com/groups/weloveoldramsgate/ if you are interested in Ramsgate history. 

Margate and the odd mill out at Drapers, a bit of a ramble

Among the fairly large amount of pictures of Thanet I have in various forms either on paper or as digital files I have a substantial digital archive of Margate ones coped by Mick Twyman.

So when it was announced that the mill had had a new cap and vane fitted I copied all of the ones of Draper’s Mills and bunged them at the end of yesterday’s blog post. I know that this isn’t a very scientific approach to history, but there they were and so there they went.

 But is this one of Draper’s Mills? Mick Twyman has labelled it as such, but like so many local historians he is unfortunately dead, so I can’t ask him. However I am pretty sure that it isn't, in fact I don't think the middle tower was a mill at all. I think it may have been some sort of defensive structure, however when you consider the gun tower at Quex it could have had a different use.

 I have a few reservations about this one too, the trouble is that once you start looking sceptically at a set of pictures, the chimney is likely to be for a steam engine to drive the mill when there isn't enough wind.

I would say the heyday of the milling would have been from about 1750 to about 1870 so there is a sense that dating stuff should be easy here in the bookshop, I did try and this seems to have resulted in further confusion.

The following pages come from a book published in 1825

Wetherspoons this evening, as the temperature was it was fairly low, I| think it was quieter thtan usual.

fairly fuzzy picture so you can't easily identify people out on such a cold night.

One of the bizarre things I saw today was when I went out during my lunch break, a fairly large group of volunteers were taking down the very small Christmas trees that appeared in Ramsgate town centre before Christmas.   

I had one of those bizarre conversations that one has nowadays with senior citizens, this one seemed to think this was council workers, five of them that is to take down 1 ft high Christmas trees.

An aspect of going of going out and taking photos with a camera as apposed my phone is unusual conversations about what I am photographing.    

The bookshop was fairly busy again today, and again I put this as much down to diminishing viable options on the non-food and clothes shopping front. here is the link to today's offerings 

I suppose you don’t really have to go back that far for there not to have been that much in terms of non-food shops, especially for ordinary people, so the recreational shopping period, which has gone trough towns, to out of town malls and now the internet is a bit of a narrow window.

Thinking back to a time of candles with most people getting up before dawn to do farm work or very manual housework I would imagine the people who lived to old age were more reluctant to bring back the old days.

I think the next series of local events will be the POW Power of Women Festival of Arts https://www.powthanet.com/ which is related to the anniversary of women getting the vote.  

Secondhand bookselling is word where I have dealt with independent female booksellers - ever since, Jean Pain in Cambridge, Mrs Gunyon in Sandwich to name a couple and while there were men at the helm, I think things were fairly equal.

The same with female authors, it's been a considerable time since major authors like the Bronte sisters had to use male pseudonyms.     

Visual art though is a strange one and painting, which I am beginning to understand a little bit has been male dominated - name your favorite women painters, it's the lack of one word names like Morisot or Emin that is striking.