4 Victorian Photos of Ramsgate Harbour and 4 Margate 3D pictures

Click on the photos to expand them

 I would think all of these are 1880s or before note the Royal Albion Hotel, where several Tissot paintings were painted, just to the right of the Royal Hotel

 Note the Harbour Master's house and Harbour Commissioner's meeting room built on Pier Yard, now the car park

 Note the black face of the clock on The Clockhouse now the maritime museum and the swing bridge mechanism

Note the complicated arrangement at the edge of the cliff where the red brick arches were built in the late 1800s

Next some pictures of the Cervia Steam Tug taken 10 years ago

So what did the Victorians get up to in Ramsgate

I have been making a bookcase for collectable Penguin books in the bookshop today, book collecting or any sort of collecting where most of the highly sought after items are under a fiver with absolute star items going as high as about £20 can be fun. Taking the bus, train or car and perhaps spending much more on the travelling than the collectable item was all but wiped out by the internet. Anyway reintroduced here in Ramsgate despite the naughty modern world.

Website design is a funny old business and I have been looking at the bookshop's home page.

here is the link

There is a consensus of opinion here that I should improve it, make it easier to understand, although no one seems to have any suggestions on how, any ideas anyone?

 These cards are supposed to be viewed using a special viewer to make the image 3D

 these two middle ones date from the mid 1870s

If you take a piece of card and put one edge against the line between the two pictures on you computer screen and the opposite edge of the card against you nose you can see how this works, although you really need lenses for the full effect

Anyone got a phone virtual reality viewer? I guess this would work

Ramsgate Art Club exhibition at Nice Things Harbour Street Ramsgate, a bit of a ramble and a few historic local pictures.

Art exhibition first

Formed out of an Ageless Thanet arts activity in 2016, Ramsgate Art Club is now a thriving creative hub which meets weekly to draw, paint, chat and drink coffee!  A diverse range of backgrounds within the Club is mirrored in the variety of media explored, including graphite, watercolours, acrylic, mixed media and oils.  The uniting force is a joy in being creative and sharing that enthusiasm. In addition to the three exhibitions RAC creates each year, many of its members contribute to further local exhibitions as well as solo shows in Thanet.

RAC meets every Thursday morning in the Community Room at Tesco, Westwood Cross.  The weekly fee is £2 per person which covers the cost of indemnity insurance as well as the funding of teaching and demonstrations by Kent artists.  Tea, coffee and biscuits are kindly provided by Tesco.  If you would like to join or have a taster session just pop along to the Community Room any time between 10.30am-12.30pm on Thursdays.

this link takes you to more photos of both of the Ramsgate art exhibitions I visited this week.

Next the historic photos

Wetherspoons to eat this evening steak on special offer which was about as good as we would have produced at home and not really much more expensive.

But to be honest it really isn't about the food or drink as much as the view, having worked all day and it being dark because of the clocks going, was it on?

This was the view from our table, perhaps easier to explain with the gif

 link to the books we put out today

I guess in a way the bookshop is another leisure destination that does what it says on the tin. 

Old photos of Thanet, day off looking at guitars, books, Margate Coffee Shed

 Music today, I listen to it but you wouldn't want to hear me sing.

Hence th local related song covers amongst the local pictures

As I said I'm not a musician so don't really know anything about musical instrument shops, but most of the rest of my family are and while I am not really keen on shopping apart from bookshops I don't mind shopping for guitars.

We started today in Wingham, I have to admit I didn't expect there to be a guitar shop there and on arrival I was surprised to find a significant one.

Village Guitars this is the link to their website

 An extensive range of new and secondhand guitars, more something I would expect to find in a busy town.

On to the bookshop at Christ Church University Canterbury link to the university website the bookshop there has been reduced in size to just over half of what it was last year link to the university's bookshop website 

All things considered and in the present climate it could have been worse, it still has a substantial range of non academic books and is still open to the general public as well as the staff and students of the university. I browsed bought a couple of books had a cuppa and a sarni in the cafe

With bookshops and Canterbury the loss of the largest new bookshop in Southeast England, the Rose Lane Waterstones, and the reduction in size of this one shows the trend is still downwards.

We went on to Margate where we arrived to find most things were already closed, both bookshops, as we had parked pretty much right outside we decided to give the new Margate Coffee shed a go

 Decent pot of tea and cake coming in at about a fiver, I like the atmosphere of this one so aim to go over during the day and try a paining from there.

Here in the bookshop in Ramsgate we managed to get quite a lot of books out yesterday, including a substantial top up of the local history books

link to the pictures of the books

I am in the middle of making a few more bookshelves and while I normally would buy the wood from the woodyard I only needed a small amount of planed six inch planking. Of course this is all in metric now, but essentially the size has stayed the same, the planed planks wind up a bit narrower than six inches, but I have always thought it as the most common size of plank, generally floorboards are made from it.

B&Q no longer stock it and it was much more expensive than I expected in Hombase

 
So I visited both of these huge shops at Westwood Cross on the way home, they were very quiet, not sure if this is significant of anything.

As you can imagine I took the wrong camera with me today, so the pictures could have been better, however here is the link to the photos on the card any editing is down to you I'm afraid.

I guess now we are into November Christmas shopping starts to rear its head, fortunately we have quite a few recently published local history books, meaning it should be possible to buy them as presents for people and be fairly certain they won't already have them.

To be honest I haven't had the time to promote them much so we haven't sold many of the recent ones.