Old pictures of Ramsgate, Margate Weastgate, Birchington, Broadstairs from 1903

 Some of these pictures will probably expand fairly well when you click on them I think perhaps some won't

 I am certain of the date to withing a couple of years and would say that if you don't know the place then you probably don't need to. However feel free to guess away at the unlabelled and if you get desperate I do actually know the where as well as the when.

 This one is labelled near the top

Just thought to add a couple of photos of the pavilion exactly a year ago

More local pictures and more Manston DCO Consultation

Pictures first, these should expand well if you click on them, Manston at the bottom as it is rather depressing.  

My plan today was to try and understand the RSP plans for an airfreight hub at Manston and to engage in some sort of dialogue with people who support the plans.

I was assuming that there would be people who were trying to read the documents and work out what RSP are saying and whether they support what RSP want to do.

I think the starting point is reading the non-technical summery, as it opens on the RSP website as pictures of the document I have re published it online as a document that should open straight away in your browser as a searchable document here is the link https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_1J5B8dPSIOu6zHFXZaIY6Zi1iO7cXpZ    

I have tried opening it in a number of different browsers and it works OK for me. You can of course go to the RSP website and download it to your device, which should make it searchable, however opening in your browser using the link above, means the big computer at Google should help your device.

The thing that worries me most about this document is that it says the air pollution from the freight hub will kill people.

Where? I hear you ask. This is a 25 page document numbered pages 1 to 22 with blue purple and greeny yellow page markers in the top left hand corner of the pages and it says it on the page RSP have numbered 19, here is the quote.

“There is health evidence drawn from the scientific literature that allows potential impacts on mortality and rates of certain diseases due to changes in noise and air pollutant exposure to be predicted quantitatively (in numerical terms). The scientific evidence shows that, depending on the level of noise or air pollution concentration, these may affect diseases of the heart, lungs and circulation system, mental health and wellbeing, and the overall risk of premature death. Whether there is a health risk and the magnitude of any impact on public health depends on the size of change in noise or air pollution and the population affected.”

Then there is the business with the local plan which RSP are trying to get rejected, it’s a complex issue and it sounds that if it gets rejected it will cost TDC which I think translates either into more bill or less services for us.

Having had a fair amount of unusual internet discussion, along the lines of – why are you making up this stuff about RSP? – Oh well we’ve die sometime, I think we need a better local internet forum.

The profusion of local Facebook groups works up to a point, I think the blogs probably worked better before they were destroyed by the spam commentators, so any ideas on that one?

The internet is becoming increasingly focused on making money which doesn’t help.

My guess is that having gone on the internet to find out about bananas, half an hour of attempts to sell you monkeys can make you a bit annoyed.

Here are the photos of the books we put out today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/love-lies-bleeding-in-bookshop.html

Manston just grinds on so I have tried to keep stuff diluted with some old local photos.

 I am beginning to wonder if the supporters of the RiverOak airfreight hub at Manston have gone to ground. I have put up a fairly tough fight with the new RSP documents today.

 Love or hate the airport I think it would be hard to find anyone who loves the online documentation, but one way or another I and some others have to read it and try and understand it because it may have such an enormous impact on our lives.

This is a shot of a paragraph in the document

 This is another quote from the 2018 PEIR "in year 20, significant adverse effects have been identified as being likely a result of an increase in noise in the following communities which are in the vicinity of the airport and flight paths: Ramsgate;„  Manston;„  Wade;„  West Stourmouth; and„  Pegwell Bay.„ 1.1.83 In these communities aircraft noise would increase to the point where there would be a perceived change in quality of life for occupants of buildings in these communities or a perceived change in the acoustic character of shared open spaces within these communities."

 The other side of this coin is that there just doesn’t seem to be anyone supporting the RSP DCO wosisname who can publicly and rationally discuss the issues in the new document.  

 RSP say that the Manston site should protected for their freight hub and other places should be built on instead, in some cases they even detail the number of houses. Land to the south of Monkton Street  60 Land at Manston Court Road/Haine Road 225 Land at Summer Road 6 Land at Tothill Street, Minster and The Length at St Nicholas at Wade 275 North of Millenium Way, Bradstairs 223 Shottendane Farm, Margate (comparably to two allocations of 250 homes) South west of Sarre Business Park 15 Manor Road/Canterbury Riad St Nicholas-at-Wade (two sites) 61 Manston Park bungalows 20 Lanthorne Court, Broadstairs 56 Between Manston Road, Preston Road and the solar farm 180 Land off Pudding Lane, Birchington 573 West of Minnis Road 109 Extra land at Manston Court Road/Haine Road 225 Mount Pleasant, Minster Sarre windmill Walters Hill Farm, Monkton Chantry Park, Sarre Sarre Court, Sarre Ridings, Cliftonville Dane Valley Enterprise Centre

This is the link to the books that went out today

Canterbury musings, Six Charming Real Photo Miniatures of Ramsgate, I think I used to call this a Sunday Ramble.

I was standing by the river in Canterbury today watching a rather intelligent looking rat. The rat appeared to have acquired a human sized sandwich cut up into rat sandwich sized pieces which it had stored nearby and every so often having finished one rat sized sandwich it would go off and get another one and then come back and sit in front of me and carry on eating.

The mixture of thoughts about bubonic plague to the little paws like human hands ran through my mind as they do, but what happens about this. I doubt Canterbury Council will be engaging a pied piper or offering a ransom per tail to enterprising rat catchers.

I can see there would also be issues over any mass extermination schemes based on poisoning the local wildlife or arming local teenagers.

Personally I find the rats more interesting to watch than the other wildlife, I also get the feeling that this is reciprocal as I am sure the rats watch me with some speculation, I am fairly certain that my reflection often appears in their eyes.

Something that interests me in Canterbury is the bookshops, recently the biggest one closed down for ever, this was the St Margaret’s Street branch of Waterstones, which (correct me if I’m wrong) was the largest bookshop in East Kent and possibly even Kent.

Now if a significant library, art gallery, theatre or historical attraction had closed it would have been major news item but being just another bookshop, or for that matter shop, there wasn’t a ripple on the waters of the major media.

Anyway off I went to the remaining much smaller Waterstone’s to browse the books, my main interest is in the history books about this area, East Kent, frankly it is not a large section, the loss of the bigger branch is very significant. Up in the lift to the general history section, also much smaller.

They did have Asser's life of King Alfred but it was well over a tenner and the physical book is available new on line for significantly less than a tenner, so I just browsed away.

We don’t have it in stock at the moment, and I have now resorted to reading the bits I want online https://archive.org/stream/asserslifeofking00asseiala/asserslifeofking00asseiala_djvu.txt

The other book I consulted while I was in Waterstones we the Kent edition of The Buildings of England, I have the current edition, but it’s too long and sticks out of my pocket, I have kept the older one and often carry it around with me, but I hadn’t got either with me.

I noticed the current edition is now £35 and speculated on living in a time where three ordinary new books could cost over £100 in a shop but would be much cheaper on the internet.

I considered like King Alfred having a moaning prayer; “he complained and made moan to the Lord, and to all who were admitted to his familiarity and affection, that Almighty God had made him ignorant of divine wisdom and of the liberal Arts” I think this is now summarised as OMG, although personally I think I prefer, made moan to the Lord MMTTL.

On to Chaucer Bookshop where I bought six old photos of Ramsgate, obviously they all date from the same date, anyone fancy guessing the date?

Back to my own bookshop and here are the books that went out yesterday http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/landscapes-of-britain-in-bookshop.html

I may ramble on after supper, I hope not to burn it like King Alfred, curry which takes half an hour cooking and preparation and costs about 30p per head – don’t ask.

1908 Large-Scale maps of Thanet and a bit more on the Manston DCO

Click on the maps to enlarge them, I just clipped them up in the shop and took the photos of them with my phone, so the ones we have printed out are better quality.   

We have done the main six sheets covering The Isle of Thanet selling price £6.99 tubed, the originals were six inches to the mile and that size the text was too small to read easily, we have done them on 42 inch paper so 42 inches or over a metre wide making the scale twelve inches to the mile.

well I did try to align them in blogger

More to come with this post but I need to look at it to see how it displays 

We publish various maps of Ramsgate, but don’t post them as the cost of a cardboard tube strong enough and postage makes them too expensive and difficult to pack.

I have tried various methods of publishing them online and I think my best result was with the 1849 one here is the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/1849map2/

The whole tenuous business of bookshops and local history publishing means that I don’t really know the profit or loss situation with map publishing, it’s a very big printer that uses very expensive cartridges.

I am continuing to look at the Manston DCO documents which have been republished by Barry James in a preview version that is searchable whereas the way the are published on the RSP website means that is only by downloading the whole 500mbs that you can search them.   

I think I smell a rat here in terms of accessibility which may have implications for the validity of this consultation.     

Anyway what I have done is to put the Manston DCO 2018 consultation files on the internet myself in a way that should work better for some people, maybe.

A double left click means the file should open in your browser as a searchable file, there should also be a download link, the whole flodder of files is about half a gig, so think if you have storage or data usage issues.

Here is the link https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bd0SthkCzVvonTPabTDRgXQD8YoAt3zZ      

New Manston Airport DCO Doocuments for the 2018 Consultation and a few old Margate and Ramsgate pictures

Initial observations related to accessing and navigating the consultation documents published 12^th January 2018. Having heard on Facebook that the documents had been published I went to the RSP website http://rsp.co.uk/ clicked on the documents page http://rsp.co.uk/documents-page/ only to discover the links to the documents weren’t there. This is made even more confusing as the first link on the page is to the Statement of Community Consultation 2018 and the documents 01 to 10 underneath it are not dated so my assumption was that these were the new consultation documents however they proved to be the documents for the previous 2017 consultation.

I eventually found the links to the 2018 consultation on the page http://rsp.co.uk/statutory-consultation/ the link from the homepage doesn’t state that this is where the new document links are to be found.

My main interest in these plans relate to human health because the previous PEIR clearly stated that the air pollution, particularly the particulate air pollution would reduce life expectancy. I take this to mean kill people, so I have written to RSP on several occasions asking for more details about this.

Instead of replying to my questions and hopefully refuting that their project would kill people, their replies have been that the information I want will be published in their future documents.

So I have used my initial search for this information to discover if the documents are published in a usable and viable way for an ordinary member of the public locally to be able to use, search and navigate.

The consultation page http://rsp.co.uk/statutory-consultation/ is an ordinary webpage, searchable by pressing Ctrl F and using the search box that appears it opens quickly and works well on my phone, tablet and laptop.

The first really bad news in terms of internet accessibility is about half way down this page where it says:-

“On the right hand side of this page you can find downloadable copies of all of the consultation documents.

To download a document, click the link to view it then click on the ‘Download PDF’ icon (a white rectangle with a dark grey downwards arrow inside it) in the grey bar above the document. By downloading the document you will be able to browse and search it more easily on your device.”

On opening the first document http://rsp.co.uk/documents/consultation/01-an-introduction-to-the-consultation-2018/ it is obvious that this website has issues. page one is the RSP logo and header, page to is a blank page with the number “2” on it. Page 3 starts about a quarter of the way down and seems to be repeated further on for instance the bottom of page 3 is repeated on another page 3 further on in the document. On page 4 the number starts again at number 1.

My problem is that I would like to search the thousands of pages of the revised PIER for words like air, pollution, particulate, mortality, and so on, to see if anyone has found a work around that would stop their airfreight hub’s fuel burn from killing off local people.

Because of the way the information has been published it isn’t searchable in the ordinary way, pdf files can only be searched by opening the file and using the viewer to search for words.

There doesn’t seem to be any index showing which of the volumes of the PIER document any given piece of information is in so to find anything you have to open all nine downloaded documents and search them individually.

To put this into a context that is easy to understand, suppose you wanted to buy a television from Argos and when you went to the Argos website there was no pattern of searchable links; technology – sound and vision – televisions and no search box either. The only way to find all the televisions Argos had for sale for sale was to download the whole Argos website in nine separate pdf files and then search each file for the word television.

Some of the content is? er. Interesting 

"in year 20, significant adverse effects have been identified as being likely a result of an increase in noise in the following communities which are in the vicinity of the airport and flight paths: Ramsgate;„  Manston;„  Wade;„  West Stourmouth; and„  Pegwell Bay.„ 1.1.83 In these communities aircraft noise would increase to the point where there would be a perceived change in quality of life for occupants of buildings in these communities or a perceived change in the acoustic character of shared open spaces within these communities."

Latest books in the bookshop link