Dunkirk Little Ships in Ramsgate 2025 Photos

 Starting with the 16th May 2025. So Friday after work here at Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate. All the photos should expand with a bit of clicking. As you can see the Little Ships are starting to gather in Ramsgate Harbour.

On to 18th May 20225 this was Sunday wandering around Ramsgate Harbour

Next 20th May 2025 including Fairey Swordfish and Spitfire aeroplanes 

Next 21st May 2025 The Little Ships depart from Ramsgate for Dunkirk 

Truro Court Hotel

 

Truro Court Hotel

Many thanks for this Christmas Card from Tony in Slough

Here at Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate I have been skiving, so I just painted this picture while theoretically at work.

This is a watercolour impression based on (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) a self-portrait by the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, which she painted in Paris in 1929. I thought I would include all the painting equipment to give some idea of the nature of the skive.

Some old pictures of Ramsgate, Margate and Broadstairs and some thoughts on AI

 

Starting with the 1791 print of Ramsgate from the newly completed harbour, as a much inferior copy formed the frontispiece of Richardson's Fragments of History there are a lot of copies on the internet. This is a good copy of my 1791 original that should expand well with a bit of compulsive clicking.  

Next an undated aerial view of Broadstairs.

Next Margate Harbour in 1857

I have various interests which include painting and drawing, photography and technology. In the last couple of weeks I have been hit by AI this is because both my phone and tablet have had the new Samsung AI update. This has the facility to draw a rudimentary sketch of something and have AI turn it into a questionable work of art .

My ignorance of AI is considerable and most importantly I realised that I had virtually as zero chance of being able to identify what was produced by AI and what was produced by human being.

Anyway I have started by feeding a few of my own paintings into the AI sketch to image generator https://deep-image.ai/ so here is the first example.

This is a watercolour I painted inside Canterbury Cathedral. I fed it into the image generator and told the image generator that it is a watercolour of the inside of the chancel of Canterbury Cathedral.  

So a moderately good effort from AI apart from no alter and the pews facing the wrong way. 

The AI generator isn't vey good with facial likenesses

I fed in this sketch of Picasso, just putting Picasso in the text part

And it came up with this.

Then I tried the half finished watercolour of Donald Trump that I did halfway through American election day

I only put watercolour in the text box and it came up with this.

Back to Ramsgate, here at Michaels Bookshop where I pretend to work and at the moment I am writing this blog post, it's a reasonably busy day. A few of the days last week were very quiet indeed so I was beginning to wonder if what has happened in Ramsgate town centre was rubbing off on the bookshop the Saturday and today have been ok. Here is the link to the books that we have just priced and put out for sale 

I have to say this January but I haven't been able to buy anything I wanted in Ramsgate apart from in Waitrose comma ASDA, Aldi, elephant in the room and I can't think of anything else. I did sell all the old and redundant technology, phones tablets etc to CeX which enabled me to upgrade my tablet to a Samsung galaxy S8. I've been to Westwood cross in the last week and frankly that wasn't particularly good either I eventually resorted to shopping in Canterbury which also has lost a great many useful shops. 

 

An interesting old Ramsgate picture, a bit of sketching in Margate

 

Ramsgate Sands Station 1920s or 30s

The picture above expands normally the one below is the high res file and should expand to much larger in case anyone can get better resolution out of it.

Starting with this picture taken from inside the old station that closed in the 1920s and was situated on Ramsgate seafront where The Royal Sands development is now. I have seen it called "Ramsgate Harbour Station" and "Ramsgate Sands Station" Does anyone know which is right?

The S R Port on the side of the horse drawn wagon was a builders merchant and builder in Ramsgate High Street.

The photo just fell out of a secondhand book I was pricing here, where I work at Michaels Bookshop here in Ramsgate. Apart from being closed on Sundays the bookshop is closed on weekdays beginning with T, so yesterday afternoon we headed off to Margate for the sunset.

This is an unedited photo of Margate Sands taken with my mobile phone and I think sums up my reason for going there.

I didn't go to the exhibition at Turner Contemporary as I have seen it before.

But I did do a quick sketch from Turner Contemporary Cafe, sitting in the sunshine, which if anything was too hot. 

We did of course buy quite a lot of books in Margate mostly from The Old Bank Bookshop these should appear in our new acquisitions 

Click to expand the historic Thanet pictures, some thoughts on shops and shopping in Ramsgate and of course a Christmas ramble

 So starting with some archive photos of Ramsgate shops.

Of course back in the day Ramsgate was full of, "are you being served" shops, a situation based mostly on shop staff being paid poverty wages and real estate values being relatively low. 

Although Michaels Bookshop where I work in Ramsgate is a secondhand bookshop we do sell new Thanet local history books and maps. That is both the ones we publish and ones published by other people. Mainly though this is a secondhand bookshop and over recent years buying secondhand books for presents has become much more acceptable. Obviously in a lot of cases you can't really tell if a book is secondhand, so there is that aspect too. Anyway one way or another it's a very busy day here. 

I think the main factor is price and as most of the books we sell are cheaper than you can get on the internet we are selling a lot of books and of course with people's financial pressures we are also buying a lot of books. 

With Ramsgate itself this year, the question. Is it Busy? Doesn't have a simple answer. There are certainly a lot fewer non food shops where you can buy something tangible, so not much Christmas shopping round the town.

Christmas celebration wise Wetherspoons in Ramsgate is so busy that it is often difficult to get seats, meaning over 1,000 customers, while many of the other venues are virtually empty. Price again, with the wholesale price of cheap beer just under £1 a pint cheap beer in Wetherspoons is around £2, as you would expect. In most of the other venues cheap beer seems to be over £4 a pint and so they are mostly empty. Back in the 1960s and 70s when I did bar work in Ramsgate, the pump price was roughly double the barrel price so what's going on here doesn't make sense.

With Broadstairs and shopping I suppose that it's Westwood Cross that has substantially less shops every year but does have a lot more in terms of amusements. 


On to Margate 

Not sure if these are brewery staff outing or where outings ended up

This is the entry to the jetty and a view I hadn't seen before

 

And yes here is the jetty.

Happy Christmas all round