Air Quality and old pictures

As you may know I have an interest Thanet's air quality, this is partly to do with local history and the perceived health giving properties of our sea air and partly due to the various air polluting activities upwind of Thanet and in Thanet itself.

Dealing with my emails from the weekend this morning one of them was Thanet Council's press release about air quality

here is the link to it

It all works very well unless you actually read it following the links to the pages they go to.

Using the first link in the release. "Thanet District Council has been monitoring the level of pollution in the area since 1993 and currently does so at 32 different locations all over the district." Seems to mean  NO2 only locations.

The second link is to a KCC consultation, I will try to fill this out if I get the time.

The third link is to subscribe to air quality alerts

The only thing the council do seem to be monitoring across the district is Nitrogen Dioxide (NO₂)

This is explained in the 2019 Air Quality Annual Status Report (ASR) linked to the press release

here is the link

My main interest in local air quality was triggered by the Manston Airport DCO and a mistake in their environmental report about how far the particulates smaller than 2.5 microns travel. I never got this one resolved, neither RSP or pins seemed to be able to deal with an outright blunder which was the equivalent of basing all of the information on 2.5 particulates on something like, air being heavier than water.

My main concern about what is usually called PM2.5 pollution is that as well as reducing life expectancy it is thought to lead to the early onset of dementia.

The worrying thing here is that so far TDC haven't got as far as measuring it anywhere in Thanet.

Recently with the councils, particularly TDC I am getting a fair bit of stuff that doesn't seem to work properly. for example in the 2019 Air Quality Annual Status Report (ASR) dated June 2019 it says :- " To view the locations of publicly available electric vehicle charging points in Thanet and nearby, please visit: www.evsoutheast.net which takes you to domain that is for sale" and makes you wonder if the council are paying for a non existent service. Of course the rest of us just look for a charging point on Google Maps.

 On to the rest of the blog post, here in Michael's Bookshop where I work in Ramsgate my bookcase building activities over the last few weeks have produced another 30 shelves in the bookshop nearly all of which have already got books on them.

Here is the link to the pictures of the books we put out today 

Supper on the sundeck of the pavilion tonight, not much on the photo front but
Here's the link

   

The Granville in Ramsgate, Westgate and a bit of sketching in Canterbury

I publish a couple of books a about The Granville in Ramsgate, worth a browse if you visit Michael's Bookshop here in Ramsgate.

The Granville was designed by Edward Pugin as a terrace of large houses for the wealthy, Pugin was a major investor in the project which eventually lead to his bankruptcy.

 The houses didn't sell, I think mainly because the UK holiday infrastructure changed from around 1870 from being dominated by the paddle steamer to being dominated by the railway. 

 Turning The Granville into a hotel wasn't enough to make it really profitable and I would say that when people talk about the decline of Ramsgate and Margate starting in the 60s they may mean the 1960s but the 1860s is more realistic.

Here is the Illustrated London News Granville supplement [advertising] for 1879 and probably the only issue, the pages will expand if you click on them or you can follow this link and read the whole thing

On to Westgate

The Westgate promotion was a supplement to the Granville one and back in the day something like spam advertising, the developers who had invested in building seaside accommodation at Westgate wanted people to buy houses there.

I was in Canterbury today, partly buying books for the bookshop and partly trying to sketch the towers on top of the cathedral.

 I find sketching these much more difficult than I expect

I am pretty sure it would be fairly easy to sketch them from a photo although I haven't tried. From life it's a landscape of shapes, shades and colours where I get lost in the moment between looking up at the tower and down at the paper.

This suites me and to my mind is an activity which slowly improves my sketching - the idea being getting into something like a state of oblivion without getting a hangover, when it goes right - the mind goes off and gets on with sending the instructions straight from the eye to the hand.

Here is the link to the rest of today's Canterbury photos