Monks to leave Ramsgate.

I have it from a reliable source that the Benedictine monks are to leave St Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate.

For some I suppose this will mean a real estate opportunity, after all I suppose in the strictest sense it is already a HMO.

For others this will be a sad end to this long relationship with Thanet, though I suppose for most of Thanet’s residents if there are any feelings at all it will be those of indifference.

I am thinking Eliot here not George: “No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference”. But T S “indifference abides the growth and decay proper to human experience” it wasn’t always the case.

The picture above shows their was shrine, apparently it was desecrated so often by anti-Catholics that the monks had to remove it.

Slash and burn; a quick round up for the blog.

As I have been concentrating on Pleasurama some things have been missed, here are a few of them.

Ramsgate Town council Minutes Town Council 05 October 2009 published see http://www.ramsgatetc.kentparishes.gov.uk/default.cfm?pid=minutes&minutesid=3696 if I have one big gripe with the new town council website http://www.ramsgatetc.kentparishes.gov.uk/ it is that it has no feeds, in other words there is no way of getting it to inform you or another website when something new has appeared on it.

Sticking with council websites the new Thanet District Council website is up and running http://www.thanet.gov.uk/ it is a great improvement on the old one although it still has lots of faults, most of which I take to be teething troubles.

If you write websites you will appreciate the enormous amount of work that has gone into it so I am reluctant to be critical while they sort their problems out.

My biggest gripes are that the Reports and Minutes part of the site which is where most of the new material is published is almost impossible to find and has no feeds so that you can produce a live link that changes when they publish something new.

That the licensing applications that are published in the local press don’t get published on the council’s website.

That planning drawings don’t have a liner scale on them so you cant actually tell the dimensions of anything.

Better stop here as I want to encourage the improvements, not snd the IT department off to top themselves.

One funny thing though is the councils website is supposed to tick you off if you haven’t got the latest version of Internet Explorer, however once you have downloaded and installed the latest version you will find that some of the councils new web pages don’t work properly in it.

Nuff of that here is the latest missive from Clive Hart

Copy of a formal letter passed to the Chairman of Thanet District Council
at Thursday evenings meeting of the council (where Cllr. Broadhurst once
more failed to attend) demanding a full enquiry into the Conservative
councillors actual home/residence during his years as a councillor at TDC.

Cllr. Clive Hart

28 Clarence Avenue, Cliftonville,

Margate, Kent. CT9 3DP

Leader of the Opposition - TDC

15/10/2009

Dear Cllr. Sheldrick

Since the local elections in 2007 the council has been ridiculed in the press and on the internet because of the behaviour of Conservative councillor Stephen Broadhurst who has apparently spent a great deal of time on the other side of the world in Panama.

On 30th July, at a one-to-one meeting with Cllr. Ezekiel shortly before the TDC Leader left for his summer holidays, I asked him exactly what he was going to do about Cllr. Broadhurst, his apparent lack of availability for the residents of Dane Valley Ward and the excessive time he spends in Panama? Cllr. Ezekiel responded with the words "if and when it should become a problem, I'll ask him for his resignation".



On the morning of the 27th August, in a written communication I then formally called on Conservative Deputy Leader - Roger Latchford - to take the action that Cllr. Ezekiel appeared extremely hesitant to take himself and call for the resignation of his Conservative colleague - Cllr. Stephen Broadhurst.



On the afternoon of 27th August, Cllr. Latchford phoned me to inform me that Cllr. Stephen Broadhurst would now be resigning his post at long last. Cllr. Latchford's actual words were "the resignation letter may take a little time; it's got to come by snail mail from Panama".



On the 4th September, the TDC Chief Executive confirmed in writing to Council Members that he had received a letter of resignation from Cllr. Broadhurst and that it would be effective from the 30th September.



On the morning of the 2nd October I contacted TDC to ask why Cllr. Broadhurst's resignation of 30th September was not on display at the TDC offices.



On the afternoon of the 2nd October Councillor Broadhurst's resignation letter was announced ineffective by TDC.

I was later informed that Cllr. Broadhurst has since supplied his resignation yet again (that is - since the 2nd October) but that it was this time dated for a day, well after tonight’s council meeting.

With the current feeling in the country as a whole regarding MP’s and their expenses, I therefore write to demand a full enquiry into Councillor Stephen Broadhurst, his actual home/residence during his years as a councillor at TDC and up to what point his allowance will or is being paid by TDC.

To restore any kind of confidence in TDC it is essential that these facts are made public ASAP!

Regards

Cllr. Clive Hart

(Leader of the Opposition).

Tel. 01843 298770

Mob. 07980 652 896”

Not a good time to be a politician, what with the prime minister having to pay back the money he (is nicked from the taxpayer the right word here) and one thing and another.

Every time I have dealings with our local politicians recently my mind is drawn back to the one that said the other day that he thought it was ok to let council properties out to Satanists. It makes me think that I should do some sort of opinion pole, you know the type of thing; put the following in order of those you think should be most publicly acceptable, concentration camp guards, sex offenders, politicians, Satanists, war criminals, vivisectionists, neo nazis. Oh well one could go on, make your own list up if you like, the youf of today said “na no satanists ceremonies in Fanet they all went away as they couldn’t find no virgins to sacrifice.

Anyway the dreaded Pleasurama still looms and I must get back to asking the right people the right questions, doing another post about it and answering the comments.

Trouble is that other minor issues pale into insignificance next to the prospect of something like the cliff collapsing on a building with over a thousand people in it and at the moment I can’t get the reassurances from the experts involved that this isn’t a distinct probability.

Oh yes I nearly forgot this one from Norman Thomas:

“IMS PRODUCTIONS
11 Grosvenor Rd, Broadstairs CT10 2BT
Tel 01843 604 253

PRESS RELEASE
OCTOBER 2009

THANET GOES TO WAR IN NEW FILM

Thanet erupts in war in a sensational new film which gets its first ever screening in Broadstairs on Sunday October 25th at 5pm.

The film, a black comedy called “The Singing Cowboy”, was shot on location in Thanet and features a cast of local Thanet people.

It tells the story of the singer Wesley Wheatsheaf , played by Steven Todd from Broadstairs. Wesley joins the US army in the hope of becoming the new Elvis Presley, but then finds himself in a deadly war zone

Scenes for the film were shot in Ramsgate, Margate and Broadstairs and in rural locations across the isle.

The film is the first ever feature film of Broadstairs-based production outfit, IMS productions.

Norman Thomas of IMS said: “Thanet was just great as the setting for the film – it’s got so many kinds of interesting and atmospheric places. Bits of Margate look like they’ve been a war zone for years!”

But there were unexpected finds, too. Mr Thomas said: “For example, we needed somewhere to be a prison cell and we thought that would hard, but then we found a wonderfully atmospheric cellar under a pub in one of Thanet’s towns which fitted just right.”

The film features an array of extraordinary characters including a supernatural colonel, a sadistic female torturer and a seductive con-woman.

The special screening at Broadstairs’ Palace Cinema will give people a unique sneak preview of the film – and a chance to suggest improvements. Mr Thomas said: “We will be looking for people to give feedback on the film. Any ideas and opinions will be received with thanks.”

“The Singing Cowboy” gets a special preview screening at 5pm on Thursday October 25 DATE CORRECTION: the film is on Sunday 25th at 5pm, Palace Cinema Broadstairs. at the Palace Cinema, Harbour St, Broadstairs. Admission is £4 for members of Thanet Film Society, £5 for non-members. Telephone 01843 604253 for more details."

I have used the picture attached to illustrate this post it looks a bit more promising than Holly Wood, I wont say what the youf of today had to say about that one, reminds me of when I thought I would test the filtering on one of the specialist websites that my youngest children belong to by commenting with a swear word and got one of them banned for 28 days.

Would the council be prepared to kill local residents by negligence or incompetence?

After yesterdays post I found myself once again having to defend my position in criticising the council's experts. The question raised was essentially, why do I think that I should raise concerns about the likelihood of cliff collapses instead of trusting the council’s engineers?

Civil engineering is hardly a new science, the Romans built The Coliseum using concrete, Canterbury Cathedral hadn’t fallen down last time I looked. In fact one thing I notice about the structures that have been built here in Ramsgate and round about is they very seldom fall down.
Historical records here hardly ever mention buildings falling down, hence the expression, “safe as houses”. Some times they get knocked down or burnt down and not always by accident but that is a different story.

The exception to this rule is when people mess with the chalk cliffs here perhaps the civil engineers that built this structure in the 1890s didn’t know what they were doing or perhaps the council’s civil engineers looking after it in 1926 were incompetent.

Did Pugin make no stress calculations when he designed this arched structure in the mid 1800s, it would certainly be brave of me to call him incompetent, were the council’s engineers incompetent who were looking after the structure when it collapsed in 1947?

When this one went had they actually calculated it would happen or did it come as something of a surprise to them? If you had parked your car there would they have come along and said sorry, the slide rule was upside down, I should have put more water in it, or some such thing.

When this one collapsed in the late 50s perhaps they said something like, it was the graffiti wot done it honest, not a civil engineering problem at all governor. Perhaps they said they were still learning civil engineering by trial and error and would have it all sorted by the millennium.

Of course they are very careful about cracks appearing in cliff support walls at the moment, the picture above is of the one just behind the houses in Kent Terrace, I bet civil engineers from the council are down there measuring it often so they know just how bad it has to get before it collapses and demolishes the houses below.

In this day and age conscientious council engineers are always on the alert for a build up or water on sensitive areas of the cliff top.

Ramsgate Royal Sands Development Access problems.

The various stages of the part road constructions for the different schemes that have been mooted for the Pleasurama site go back to even before the building burnt down and not only effect the access and parking for the new development but parking and access to the main sands, the existing proprieties in the main sands area and any other new developments in that area.

Historically there have been access problems to this area because of the weight and vibration problems associated with the various voids under the road between the cliff top and the sands.
What remains of Granville Marina beach resort built by J T Wimperis in 1877 is mostly the arched viaduct that forms the incline to the sands. Time and events has not been kind to this resort, the centrepiece was the council owned Victorian theatre (later Nero’s), which the council demolished despite my efforts to stop them. Next to the theatre in significance was the Marina Restaurant also demolished due to an unfortunate series of events involving the council and the developer.

The main remaining structure the brick arches were constructed before motorised road traffic and are made from a mixture of Victorian house bricks of varying hardness, road and railway bridges are made from engineering bricks of uniform hardness so that the stresses and strains they need to cope with can be calculated.

The greatest strain that is likely to damage this structure is that caused by a train of heavy vehicles braking hard when travelling down the incline.

There are several factors here one being the greater force needed to stop a vehicle going down hill rather than up, another being the vibration caused by skidding something that gives the occupants of the houses under the arches problems at the moment. Much more complicated is the way stresses work in arched structures like this that slope, this is because one arch helps to support the next one and if the next arch is lower then there is less resistance to a horizontal force acting in the direction of the lower arch, (I am not sure how technical to get here so I will leave it at that for the moment).

The old Ramsgate Town council engineer Dick Brimmell mitigated this problem by making the road one way, up hill only, when heavier and faster vehicles with more powerful brakes began to use this hill.

Some of you may remember that before the Pleasurama fire there were plans to use the building as a factory outlet, that the council were very keen to promote, I believe there was also some grant money that had to be spent in Ramsgate.

Obviously the council were very keen to become involved with this and put in a road layout for it, interestingly because this road layout made the road two way it had the added effect of removing most of the car parking in the area (spaces facing the sea and the Cliff) how the factory outlet was to have worked with the reduced parking was never explained that I recall.

The plans for the new development have an access road shown between the back of the development and the cliff face, although it is very narrow only wide enough one lorry it is shown on the plans as being a two way barriered private road for the development only.

This effectively leaves all of the access for everything east of the new development, including the access to the developments bus stop and drop off point along the old viaduct.

There are several problems with the viaduct as you can see from the picture it is in poor condition partly due to exposure to the weather of parts of it that were intended to be enclosed. Partly due to lack of maintenance and that the building materials (house brick and chalk) are not really suited to road bridge construction.

There is a further problem illustrated in this picture which is there is a drain underneath the arches which can’t cope and when there is heavy rain the pressure blows the lid off and floods the area with sewage. Not pleasant but my main concern here is that if there are any underground leaks with this faulty drain some of the foundations to the arches may be washed away.

Where the developers and the council’s plans fall down badly here is there doesn’t appear to be any long term strategy to provide access to this area, I have asked the council and the firm that surveys this sort of structure for the council, if the expected life of the arches as a road bridge is likely to be similar to the expected life of the new development and they have been unable to reply.

Perhaps it is the council’s intention to pedestrianise the whole area in the medium to long term, certainly this is the message I am getting from off the record chats with council officers.

Certainly building a large new development in a way that future access is uncertain seems foolhardy, particularly when locating the development slightly further to the east would mean that this wouldn’t be a problem.

Royal Sands Development Ramsgate, the Navy Lark and famous architects mistake.

Once the second set of plans had been passed I found out the contractor (the second of the four that have intended to build this development) wanted to pile drive on the site.

Now this area is a honeycomb of old tunnels and caves the largest that appears on old maps being Wellington Caves, this is shown as right next to Wellington Crescent and about the size of four of the houses. One of my fears was that if they started pile driving there some of the houses would vanish into the ground.

Anyway the long and the short of it all was that I contacted the people involved asking them to do a proper survey of the area to see if it was safe to pile drive.

I then set about finding out what potential problems building so close to the cliff face could have so I could offer some historical input that probably wouldn’t be available from other sources.

As you can see from this picture (photography was banned here during the war, so it wasn’t that easy to get) there was considerable activity here in World War Two.

Then I discovered this picture of 6 inch naval guns mounted near the edge of the cliff next to where the new development will be.

Two things occurred to me at this point, one was that firing them could have weakened the cliff and that there was probably some sort of underground magazine that should also be investigated.

It was around this point that it occurred to me that there was a possibility that the cliff could collapse onto the new development, which wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone inside.

This was towards the end of 2005 and at that point I managed to get the opportunity to photograph and study a radar survey that the council had, had done as part of the bandstand and dance floor restoration project.

As some of you will know before I became a shop assistant I worked in engineering, however this survey was out of my depth so I consulted someone I know with a phd in geology.

The survey shows several voids under the concrete dance floor but much more important than this, where the dance floor and the surface next to the cliff has cracked, the water draining into the chalk cliff underneath has been concentrated into much smaller areas than it would have been before it was surfaced.

The effect of the water flowing through these cracks can be likened to the effect of a cheese wire on a piece of cheese and over the passage of time it has cut vertical cracks in the chalk weakening the cliff.

Next enter Augustus Welby Pugin for those of you that don’t know he was a well known architect, probably most famous for his work on The Houses of Parliament.

Pugin designed his own house in Ramsgate “The Grange” where he died in 1872, not so well known is the gallery of caves and tunnels that he built in the cliff next to The Grange.

As you can see from the picture it collapsed quite spectacularly. If there is a moral here it is that even very famous architects should be wary of chalk cliffs especially where there is a cracked surface above them.

Unbeknown to me around this time the council also commissioned a report on the condition of the cliff next to where the new development is going to be built, this report was published in April 2005.

Unfortunately for the council the report was very unfavourable, it showed that much of the cliff façade had been poorly constructed, in many places the concrete was much thinner than the design had specified and that in the sea air it had deteriorated considerably.

Most worrying however was that the concerns about the various voids behind the façade and that collapses of these voids could put lateral strains on the façade that it hadn’t been deigned to withstand.

Much of the façade was built in 1936 and some in 1956 as far I know all in all it is not and never has been a very good structure.

This all put the council that wanted to sell the site for this development in a difficult position, the report stated that the work was urgent and should be carried out immediately and would cost over half a million pounds.

The council’s action next was rather surprising what they did was to sit on the report for nearly three years, there was none of the promised consultation about the development and the council’s actions certainly delayed the development by this amount of time.

Eventually I managed to get hold of the report in May 2007 and put some pressure on them to get on with the job.

Eventually the council put aside the money and the cliff repairs started around the end of 2007, I believe they ended up spending the best part of a million pounds of our money on these repairs.

During the repairs it was discovered that within the cliff near to the cliff face was a whole maze of tunnels and caves that formed an onshore naval station together with the old Pleasurama building, this was called HMS Fervent.

When the repairs were ongoing I realised that something was seriously wrong.

At this time it was the intention for the whole development to be built on a flat base at about 6 metres above the datum line used for maps and plans.

When they started clearing the ground down to this level at the western end of the site, next to the cliff face it became obvious that the concrete cliff façade only extended down to about a metre above this level.

Another problem being that much of the exposed area at the bottom of the façade had no foundations.

Their course of action at this point was to stop levelling the ground next to the cliff so as not to expose any more problems and to get on with the cliff repairs as though the absence of foundations could be ignored if it couldn’t be seen.

Since the distance between the new development and the cliff face must be totally arbitrary as it was determined before the problems with the cliff were discovered, I have asked the various people involved what the safe distance between the cliff face and the development should be it should be, no satisfactory reply has ever been forthcoming.

The picture above shows the results of a cliff collapse at the Paragon in the 1950s the structure in front of it used steel girders in its construction and that is what the bent things in the picture are.

Obviously one only has to look at these girders to realise that a cliff collapse could be problematic for the new development.

We now come to the work that was done just over a year ago to repair the concrete cliff façade, after only a year one would expect it to be pretty much without blemish. If you had your house painted with masonry paint you wouldn’t expect much deterioration after only a year.

However what has happened is that a lot of cracks have opened up and vegetation is growing in them, one even has a small tree sprouting.

I have put plenty of pictures of this up recently so I won’t bother again particularly as pretty much everyone in Ramsgate must have seen what has happened.

There is another problem here and that is how they access the cliff face for maintenance purposes with the narrow access road behind the building being the only one.

Click on the link for the radar survey of Wellington Crescent.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/Survey/

Click on the link for some the report on the condition of the cliff, I have all of it if anyone needs to refer to any of it.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tdc/id39.htm

Click on the link to look at HMS Fervent inside the cliff.

http://thanetunderground.blogspot.com/2008/10/wellington-caves-aka-hms-fervent.html

Ramsgate royal sands development.

After the previous posts and associated comments one thing that keeps coming up in the comments from various people is why do I feel qualified to question the various experts involved in the development.

The gist being that it is better to leave matters in the hands of the architect, council and developer, rather than listen to the views of a shop assistant.

First I would like to thank all of those that commented and to stress that I expect lively comment, don’t expect everyone to agree with me and most particularly find arguments opposing my views helpful when preparing information to discuss with the contractor, developer's agent and the council.

There are many aspects of the plans and the documents relating to the new development that have called me to question the competence of the architect, council and developer and I shall use detail from the various planning stages of one small area of the building from the plans on the council’s website to illustrate this.

The area I am going to concentrate on here is the western end of the new development adjacent to the cliff, roughly next to where the lift is now.

This is from the first set of plans that were passed by the council (Drawing PL 13-106 Side elevation West 4.11.2003) I pointed out with several other people that the development if built to these plans would tower over the cliff top, in some places by as much as 3 metres.

The architects produced a set of plans trying to resolve this issue, I pointed out to them that that the sections were 1.5 metres taller than the elevations. By that I mean that the building if built to those plans would have the Tardis like quality of being taller on the inside than it was on the outside.

They then produced this set of plans (Drawing PL 13-106 Side elevation West 18.01.2005) as you see they have lowered the ceiling height to resolve this issue and unfortunately the lorry in the picture was too high. So in the detail above you can see that the lorry is embedded in the concrete ceiling.

I pointed this out to them and they resolved this by producing another set of plans detail from them above (Drawing PL 13-106 Side elevation West 22.09.2005) this was an easy one for them to solve they did so by making the lorry shorter.

It was a novel solution so I conceded this one, frankly I had no real idea of what to say to them.

Then when they they were working on the cliff façade repairs they exposed the bottom of part of the cliff and I found the foundations didn’t come down as far as the proposed level of road where the lorry was standing.

In fact some of the cliff had no foundations at all, I put this to the chap in charge of the cliff repairs and got rather a curt reply saying that the foundations were 2 metres thick concrete resting on solid chalk.

At this point I hopped over the fence down there with a camera and a stick and sent him a series of photographs showing that there were indeed no foundations and sent them to him.

Then this year another set of plans appeared (these are the current plans the ones they now intend to build to) they have resolved the problem of the cliff façade not coming down to the level of the new development by raising the road to cover up the absence of any foundations for the cliff face.

As you can see not even the shorter lorry can fit under the building so the road for the lorries and cars has been moved to between the cliff and the back of the development.

The only problem here is as this is the main access it has to be a two way road, however as you can see it is only just wide enough for one lorry.

Now I come to old problem of the height of the building.

First the building space available.

The measurements here are given as above datum (the height above sea level on the plans) the lowest part of the cliff top behind the building is 21.7 metres high.

The lowest the base line of the building can be has appeared on the plans in various different ways and probably at various different heights.

I have taken the minimum you can safely get away with from the flood risk assessment for the new Turner Contemporary because it is the most recent proper flood risk assessment done in Thanet that I can find.

My conclusions from this are you would need to build above and well behind a sea defence least 7 meters high. This leaves 14.7 meters between the floor level at the bottom of the building and the cliff top behind the building.

Now the height of the building.

There doesn’t seem to be any actual regulation height for ceilings in new buildings that I can find, so I took the minimum that the government requires for hostels for the homeless, this is 7 feet and added on a foot for luxury giving 8 feet or about 2.5 metres in new money, which is what I will work in as the other measurements are metric.

There are four residential floors, you need about 3 metres per floor to have 2.5 metre ceilings the thickness of the floor and a gap to put all the wires and pipes into.

Now the ground floor the ceilings here are will certainly have to be more than 8 feet, for one thing shops and other commercial enterprises down there are going to have a lot more in the way of pipes and wires.

I have been wandering around looking at ceilings in shops and the various ducts and thing that one would need above them I don’t really see it would be possible to get away with less than 5 metres including the concrete ceiling and the floor above.

This all adds up to 17 metres, which seems to leave 2.3 that don’t quite fit.

Hopefully someone will spot a mistake that I have made here because if not when it is built and you stand by the top of the cliff by the lift and look towards Broadstairs I think it quite likely that you won’t be able to see over the top of it.

The Royal Sands Development Ramsgate potential for storm damage 1.

With the renewed activity on the old Pleasurama site in Ramsgate I am doing series of posts about the problems faced by the new contractor. This one is about the potential for storm damage caused by a high tide and a storm.

The factors here are the static tide height (how high the tide gets without a storm) and the severity of the storm, these two factors can be mitigated by the height of sand under the sea as this tends to dissipate the waves.

The picture taken this year shows a very high static tide without a storm.

Click hare to enlarge the picture

It is these factors that determine the severity of the damage.

There is another factor and that is if objects are swept along in the storm, as say in the 1953 storm a large crane was swept over the sea defences where the new development will be, the impact of these objects can increase the damage done.
The picture here taken in 1978 is of of the damage to Ramsgate harbour wall caused by the sea alone it also gives some idea of the type of heavy objects likely to be thrown about by the sea. The granite blocks that the upper harbour wall is made of weigh about two and a half tons.

The other factor is the wind direction, it is this that mostly determines where the damage occurs.

The particular point that I am making today is that a combination of a high tide, a severe storm and a southerly or south westerly wind could lead to severe damage to the Royal Victoria Pavilion.

Were storm damage to occur to the pavilion the resultant rubble would be swept towards the western end of the development making escape difficult.

Unfortunately the large amount of sand, in front of the Pavilion that protected it during the 1953 storm was used for the construction of Port Ramsgate.

As far as I can see there are two possible solutions to this problem, one is demolishing the pavilion and the other is improving the sea defences in front of it.

Royal Sands Development Ramsgate or the Pleasurama Saga Goes On.

As many of you will know once again there is activity on the old Pleasurama site, at the moment this activity appears to be another fence outside the previous fence, the effect of this is to leave less space on the promenade and to reduce the amount of available parking.

Obviously the question in all of our minds is, will construction work start this time and if so what will the building be like?

The official answer from TDC building control, is that the building will have to conform to the plans that they have approved, these plans are on the councils planning website. They are published as very large PDF files so before going there to look at them you need a fairly powerful computer with a PDF reader installed.

The councils planning website is at http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet should you wish to look at the plans, most of the various sets of plans produced in attempts to overcome the problems related to building between the foreshore and the cliff face are there. The planning reference is F/TH/03/1200 and I am told that those dated Jan 2009 are the ones that they intend to build to at the moment.

Recently I have had some constructive discussions with both TDC building control and the new contractor Cardy Construction, my aim in these discussions is primary to get a viable, safe and insurable development and to get the contractor to engage in public consultation so the people of Ramsgate know what is going on.

My own opinion of the fundamental problem facing the developer is that the council has passed a series of plans none of which are for a safe and viable building, this is partly because in the five years that all this has taken The Environment agency has moved the goal posts because of new predicted sea level rises and partly because the first set of plans were drawn in a way where it was pretty much impossible to tell the level of the ground floor of the building relative to the flood line or the roof level relative to the cliff top.

Once The Environment Agency were aware that the building could be at risk from storm damage there was a delay of several years before they were provided with plans that showed the level of the ground floor above sea level, this means that the didn’t report their concerns until February 2008 by which time planning consent had been given. Click on the link to read the Environment agency’s report http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/ea/id2.htm

Apportioning blame after all this time would seem to be a pointless exercise, what matters to me is trying to resolve the problems that exist now the main one being that the developer has permission to build a building that is potentially dangerous.

The closest I can get to analogy of the situation is that of a shipyard at the time of an economic recession being given plans to build The Titanic, these plans have been approved by the appropriate government departments five years ago, but in the intervening time another government department has produced a report concerning lifeboats. This other government department now recommends that an independent consultant be engaged to produce a detailed report on lifeboat provisions but can’t enforce this as the plans were already approved five years ago.

The shipbuilder has concerns that the ship will not be insurable if the ships plans haven’t been subjected to the lifeboat report, he also has concerns that if the lifeboat report is unfavourable, the whole plans for the ship will have to be scrapped, meaning that new plans will have to be drawn up and approved again. This of course could lead to the end of the contract and employment for his staff.

Back to the real world and Pleasurama, first to put some context to it, this is a much bigger development than the Turner Contemporary and it’s in a prime seafront site, commercial with residential on top, it is in fact as big as a tower block.

I suppose the nearest comparison we have in Thanet is Arlington House in Margate, what I am trying to stress by making this analogy is that if mistakes are made, they will be mistakes on a very large scale and the people of Ramsgate will have to live with them for a very long time.

So here are some of the problems that appear to need resolving:

Firstly the flood risk assessment strongly recommended by The Environment Agency, my opinion is that this should be carried out before any building work commences.

At the moment there appears to be no professional opinion as to what improvements if any need to be made to the sea defences in front of the building or how close to the sea defences it is safe to build.

Next is the state of the recent cliff repairs, it is obvious that something has gone wrong with them, cracks have appeared and there is even a small tree growing out of one of them.

Put quite simply if part of the cliff collapses it may demolish part of the new development, something that would not be good for the people living inside.

Part of the problem here is because there are no foundations under some of the cliff façade and I believe it is this that is causing so many crack to open up so soon after the repairs.

My feelings here is that the cliff façade should be surveyed by a professional expert, independent of the company that did the work and the company that supervised the work for the council.

I believe that this should be done before any construction work that involves vibration starts.

Now we come to the emergency escapes to the cliff top that The Environment Agency have asked for, how these would work needs investigation, as far as I can see they would either consist of bridges to the cliff top from the top of the building or some sort of tunnel system through the cliff.

All of the costs of these and implications like security would need to be investigated although they wouldn’t need to be added until the building is inhabited.

Another consideration is the passenger service vehicle access for the building, at the moment the plans show it as being via the inclined Victorian viaduct to marina Esplanade. I have sought assurances from KCC and TDC that this means of access would last for the expected life of the building and none has been forthcoming.

Put simply if say in twenty years time the arches of the viaduct have deteriorated to the point that they can no longer support busses it would be a simpler and much cheaper solution to move the building along towards the east to make room for a bus stop at the other end.

The probable cost of repairing or rebuilding the incline would be enormous as was the case when the westcliff arches were strengthened with concrete infill and the as this cost would be likely to fall on taxpayers it is a problem that should be properly investigated.

From the beginning the problem that this development will be viewed from above as well as below never seems to have been properly considered. Different roof treatments have been proposed and then rejected as impractical, when the developer agreed that the sheet tin roofs were inappropriate the architect suggested a planted sedum roof however since then they have decided that this would be impractical.

The sample of the intended roof material that I have seen is a sort of dark rubber like material and doesn’t fit with the cliff top surroundings, bandstand, coloured concrete dance floor and surrounding listed buildings, my belief is that the developer ought to come up with some alternatives and consult with local people especially those living there.