Pictorial Amusement Guide to Margate circa 1930

The reprint of the little guide published today focuses on three Thanet attractions, Dreamland in Margate, The Lido in Ciftonville and The Greyhound Racing Track at Dumpton Park Ramsgate. I am assuming that it was produced as free promotional material funded by the organisations.

The print quality of the original is very poor, owing much to the potato school of printing, we have done our best to enhance the quality in this reprint.

The original guide was about half the page size of the the reprint about A6 size, I would guess its date to be around 1930 although I expect that Margate historians will be able to come up with a more accurate date.

I hope you will all find this a useful addition to my range of local history publications.

Click on the link to buy it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/pictorial_amusement_guide_to_margate.htm £2.99 post free in the UK, or pick it up next time you are in my bookshop in Ramsgate.

Click on this link for sample pages http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id27.htm

New development in Ramsgate harbour

I got a very brief glance of the new plans for the development where slipways 2 and
3 are today I managed to photograph them, sorry about the quality, click on the link to view them 2 copies of each sheet http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id26.htm

On the positive side the developer is the same one who has made an excellent job of restoring The Custom House.

Personally I would have preferred something more sympathetic to the existing architecture there.

The plan is that slipway No.1 will continue to be used winding houses 2 and 3 will be demolished – the positive side to this is that they are made of damaged asbestos crumbling into the car park and the negative is that they are of historical significance related to WW2 – slipway 2 is pretty much unused and in poor condition, slipway 3 has had a lot spent on it and has been used recently to repair wind farm service vessels.

My understanding is that it is only slipway No.1that is commercially viable at the moment.

Royal Sands Development rainwater roof drain into Ramsgate Harbour inner basin

After consultation with English Heritage the roof drainage pipe is to come into the harbour via the sluice that used to use the head of water in the inner basin to flush out the sewage outfall pipe.

Once again I should point out that the work down there is being done to a very high standard, causing the minimum disruption to the café culture there.

I wish the same could be said for the main building site and the cliff façade repairs, the eyesore continues as the build up to the summer season starts, one would have thought that at least part of the site could be used for leisure or parking.

Most engineers will tell you that one of the strongest forces in engineering is force of habit and as you can see even with heating up the sluice is resisting opening.

Click on the link for the rest of the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id25.htm

Pictures of the gardens at Quex Park Gardens, at Birchington on the Isle of Thanet.

A little light relief here, what with Ramsgate swarming with armed police today, the youf of today are saying that there was some sort of armed robbery in Camden Road today and some fairly heated comment on other posts today.

Something has gone wrong with the way blogger records comments so you may find my site that does this and works reliably helpful, here is the link http://thanetblogs.blogspot.com/

About 400 pictures of the gardens here are the links.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id20.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id21.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id22.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id23.htm

it will be some time before they all appear I think some will be sideways and some will need deleting like you I won’t be able to look at them until they have published as I just copied them from the camera and pasted them to the internet leaving my computer showing an egg timer for an hour or so.

This last lot have been sorted out a bit and should be better http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id24.htm well I think they are.

Bleak House not so stoned – not so bleak

The natural stonework of Bleak House is being painted white as you can see from the picture, this came as a bit of a surprise to me and I wondered what other people thought about this.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Unhappy thoughts on Thanet’s offshore wind farm

I am just starting to put together my critique of the wind farm and in trying to point out how trivial this sort of panacea is to the very real problem of climate change and rising sea levels, I had to come up with a comparison that would be easy for the youf of today to understand.

Now if you fill up your car with 10 gallons of petrol in sixty seconds, the energy transfer rate from the petrol pump to the car is equivalent during the 60 seconds to the entire output of a 25 megawatt power generator for 60 seconds.

During the time that Thanet offshore wind farm runs efficiently and at maximum power, that is when the wind conditions are right I would guess about 25% of the time the whole wind farms energy transfer rate, from the turbines to the national grid is 300 megawatts, meaning that 24 – 7 it is able to produce about 75 megawatts or the same energy transfer rate as continuously filling three cars with petrol.

I took off my shop assistants hat for this one and put on my rather dusty engineering hat, I don’t think I have made a mistake here but would appreciate any corrections.

Thanet District Council's Secret Cabinet Reshuffle

I have just received confirmation that the portfolio for Ramsgate Marina been has moved from councillor Simon Moores to Councillor Robert Bayford.

I then contacted the council’s democratic services who told me that they were unaware of this situation and like the rest of us assumed that any change in portfolio would be decided at the council meeting to be held on 15th July.

My concern here is that this is an already done deal, made by the new leader of the council. Make no mistake here I have no problem with the cabinet reshuffling portfolios and these reshuffles being the subject of a council meeting agenda and the decision being made by council vote.

Where I do have a problem though is where the cabinet is making decisions and then using the council meetings as a rubber stamp, this is the difference between democracy and dictatorship.

I suppose there is the alternative of local government by dictatorship and I suppose that this would be reasonable as long as the dictator told us about major decisions effecting Thanet.

My attempts to elicit some sort of reply from our new leader so far have fallen on barren ground once again I am happy to accept individual councillors failing to reply to emails so I am happy to accept no reply from cllr-robert.bayford@thanet.gov.uk however I find no reply not even an acknowledgement from leader@thanet.gov.uk wholly unacceptable.

I consider questions about the Maritime Museum and The King George IV Maritime Heritage Pontoon, important to Ramsgate and worthy of some sort of answer.

The Little Ship Sundowner back in the water.

As you can see from the picture Sundowner is back in the water after the disgrace of Dynamo Day see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/05/dark-and-dishonourable-day-for-ramsgate.html

With our wonderful open local government of course it will only be a matter moments before the council tell us exactly what happened and why.

Perhaps it will also only be a matter of days before the maritime museum is open and the historic ships returned to The King George IV Maritime Heritage Pontoon.

A few more pictures around the harbour this lunchtime http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id19.htm