Chatham House Ramsgate School Entertainment Pictures

I managed to borrow these to scan in and will probably do some sort of booklet so they get preserved permanently, I don’t now anything about the pictures as there is no text with them.

Going by the hairstyles I would guess that the pictures date from around 1970.Are they all picture of boys do you think, or are some of the girls real girls?Click on the link for the rest of the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/chathamhouse/

Anyway please any information so I have some text for the book would be helpful.

Surfers Against Sewage are calling for 5 Thanet beaches to be stripped of their Blue Flag status

They are, Joss Bay, Margate main sands, West bay Westgate , Botany bay, Ramsgate main sands.

Here is the article http://www.sas.org.uk/news/2010/08/06/sas-call-for-35-blue-flags-to-be-withdrawn-from-beaches-around-the-uk/

I have had an initial look at this one and I really don’t think there is anything to worry about here during ordinary summer weather.

What they are talking about here is emergency discharge from storm drains and I think it is a problem that could occur almost anywhere in the world and on almost any beach.

It is hard to think of many tourist beaches without some sort of outfall pipe somewhere in the vicinity and from what I can find out information about what comes out of them and where they all are is a bit vague.

The way that bathing water quality is monitored is by testing the water that is actually in the sea where people bathe, working on the principle that if anything nasty is going into the sea nearby it would show up in regular tests.

Surfers Against Sewage seem to be talking about the outfall pipes near to the beaches that are properly listed and regulated and here in Thanet these are storm relief outfalls.

In simple terms, the only time that sewage is likely to be in the sea near the bathing beaches is after a very big rain storm, fortunately most of these occur in winter.

Hartlepool 1,000,000+ visitors Ramsgate 0 visitors from Tall Ships

Here is the BBC news article on their website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-10902082 and I suppose most people saw it on the news item about it this morning.

Lots of pictures of previous Tall Ships visits to Ramsgate the link takes you to the blog posts with the links with the pictures http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/search/label/Tall%20Ships

I suppose what this is all about is the way Ramsgate Harbour was allowed to fall apart during the good economic times.

To have reached the point where we are now in a very difficult economic situation with very little or no money and to have had to turn down what the BBC is calling the biggest free event in Europe is a pretty sorry situation.

The Main part of this is about dredging and communication with the council about it, despite there having been evident signs of dredging in the harbour that now seem to have stopped, the Tall Ships are not coming to Ramsgate.

There are obvious questions here, the first being, has enough dredging been done so that they could have come? Another is, is the dredging finished?

Like so many things the problem here is getting information from the council about what is actually going to be done, before work starts and then when whatever has been done is finished finding out from them if the work is fit for purpose.
We are in the first situation with the pavillion and the second with Pleasurama cliff façade.

Work Starts on The Royal Victoria Pavilion in Ramsgate

As you can see from the picture taken yesterday the scaffolding is going up, my understanding is that the work is to be external only and is the result of an agreement reached between Thanet District Council the owner and The Rank Organisation the leaseholder.

I believe the lease was granted to the Pleasurama Organisation and that they moved their “Tiberius” casino there from where it was housed between The Marina Swimming Pool and Marian Esplanade into the western end of the pavilion and opened an amusement arcade “Stardust” in the western end.

At some point the lease was transferred to Rank Organisation who operated the casino until it closed and moved to Westwood Cross, I think this was late in 2007 or early in 2008.

If you look at the picture above of the pavilion in its former glory you can see some bits are missing most noticeably the domed porch and the windows in the arched roof.

Now I am not certain at what point the windows were removed but I am certain that the porch was removed after the building was listed and while the building was leased as a casino.

What I am completely uncertain of is if the work will reinstate the outside of this listed building to how it was and looked, or if this is just urgent weatherproofing to stop further deterioration.

The damage to the structure that has been caused by years of neglect that has lead to water getting into the iron framed structure, causing the iron to rust badly, which in tern lead to expansion inside the concrete that covered much of the iron frame, causing it to crack.

This process is called spalling, the cracks mean more water gets in causing more rust that enlarges the cracks, it is difficult to remediate effectively and it may be several years after the work is done, before it is certain that the problem has properly stabilised.

Speaking here with my engineer’s hat on instead of looking at it from a historical preservation point of view I think the pavilion is probably beyond economic preservation.

The picture above shows a very high tide, fortunately we don’t get these very often and mostly we get them on a calm day, like the day the picture was taken. I suppose pretty much anyone who has lived by the sea for a while can imagine what happens on the rare occasions when a very high tide is combined with a major storm.

Since the pavilion was built in 1903-4 it has been engulfed by the sea on several occasions, causing damage and flooding and I think that it is likely that at some time in the future a storm will cause all or part of it to collapse.

Thanet District Council Snub Broadstairs Folk Week Again

When they did this last year I used a somewhat more restrained post heading see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/08/broadstairs-folk-week-thanet-district.html but frankly things are getting ridiculous here.

There is no mention of this major event on the council’s homepage although the following events are all promoted there today:

St. Laurence Church Fair - 7 August 2010

Millmead Childrens Centre Surestart Summer Fete - 17 August 2010

Lions Fete at Victoria GardensNational Blood Service - Birchington Village Centre Association

Coast along for Water Aid Saturday 11 September 2010

Quiz Night

24th Annual Model Ships Rally

Walk On The Wildside

Murderers Magicians Madmen & Monarchs

Macmillan Cancer Support- 'World's Biggest Coffee Morning!'

I don’t really know how to approach the council over this one, I did manage to get them to put Margate Pride on their homepage but this was only after accusing them of homophobia see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/07/are-thanet-district-council-homophobic.html and http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/07/stately-homo-of-england.html

I don’t think this approach will work for folk week, if an ethnic group are involved here then it’s probably the English and so wouldn’t have any protection, in terms of political correctness.

The Granville Illustrated news for 1879

I am working on copying this publication for reprint at the moment and would like a bit of help if anyone can.

The copy I am working from has some bits missing, not very much and if I have to I will, do my best to fill it in.
It has occurred to me however that someone else may have a copy and therefore know what is missing.

The largest bit missing is in the third column of the page above about a third of the way down.

The original images are very large indeed and I am not quite certain what blogger will make of them, usually clicking on the image and then clicking on it again once it has opened gives the best enlargement.

As is sometimes the case I am working from a copy and not a very good one and I suspect the original was lost in Ramsgate Library fire.

This is issue one of this publication and I can’t find any reference to subsequent issues, I would also be interested in any reference to subsequent issues.
A sizable proportion of this publication is devoted to Westgate on Sea, more to come of this soon if this bit works OK.

Unidentified Floating Object

Starting the day late having over slept, I wouldn’t say that it’s every parent’s worse nightmare when their child, like Martin Luther King, says I’ve had a dream, but this is a moving statement at 3am, moving mostly in as much as one has to get out of bed.

My son, not still a child apart from the in the sense that I still am, that is a Child, is very near the end of the teenage years, realising that something was amiss woke me with a cup of tea. I think otherwise I would still be asleep and have missed the bookshop altogether this morning.

The cup of tea started well, unfortunately before reality had entirely reasserted itself after my disturbed slumbers, something not unlike the fin of a small shark appeared in my cup of tea.

Fortunately I don’t take sugar, so didn’t start the day sticky and it was after all not Jaws 3 but the tip of PGs tip.

The day in the shop started with a book enquiry for “Better Sight Without Glasses” and took some time, as even with glasses everything was a bit blurry. I did, in the end, manage to find a hardback and paperback copy of the Benjamin and even a copy of “Better Eyesight Without Glasses” still with the elusive chart inside, by Bates.

This was followed by a phone call from someone writing their graduate thesis on regeneration of seaside towns, they had chosen Margate, the problem here is that the only fairly comprehensive history of Margate is “The Book of Margate” by Scurrell that sells for about £70.

This really isn’t an option for those suffering from that well know academic disease, acute skintitus, particularly virulent in Graduate Lane.

Then one in shop customer asking for that elusive book that they had apparently been looking for, for ages, I think the fact that we had one on the shelf in nice condition very cheaply threw this person so badly that instead of buying it they had to go off for a lie down or something.

Certainly a case of travelling was much better than arriving, I am finding now that with so few real bookshops of any size in southeastern England this is happening with increasing regularity.

Questions for the district auditor and a new restaurant in Ramsgate

Pictures at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop810a/id4.htm here are some thoughts on them.

Vista is looking, well pink, I hope it works better than the computer operating system of that name did for me.

It still smells of drains a lot of the time in Harbour Parade and I have reservations that capping off the contaminated surface drain down there without further investigation is a good idea. I have made an official complaint about this one and have been assured that it is being investigated, this is not necessarily an aggressive approach towards the council as often without an official complaint they can’t justify dealing with something.

There is certainly more muck and rubbish in the inner basin than one would like, but I am uncertain what if any of it is leaking from the old pipes under Harbour Parade.

The council seem to have upped the anti on stopping people from diving off the fish Quay, a gate and fencing like something normally associated with concentration camps has now appeared near our one and only beach hut.

I wonder what they would do if an ordinary member of the public erected something like this on a listed structure.

The problem for me though is that the people who dived there will only go and dive elsewhere and probably somewhere further away from help if something goes wrong.

What the council should be doing is using the money to provide a proper diving station like the one we lost and caused people to dive there.

No 3 slipway looks to be getting ready for another vessel, interesting as these listed slipways were built during World War Two to repair costal defence craft, it is all very time warp that appeals to the historian in me.

Quite a bit of my spare time recently has been spent looking at the council’s performance and forming valid questions for the district auditor as this has to be completed this week because of the time window allowed to do it in.

Here are an example of some of the questions I have asked about Pleasurama that the district auditor has confirmed are valid, as they may help others in framing their questions:


- how much money did the Council spend on the Pleasurama development in 2009/10?

- how much of this money related to repairs to the cliff facade?

- how much compensation has the Council claimed re repairs to the cliff facade in 2009/10?

- how much compensation has the Council received re the cliff facade in 2009/10?

- how much compensation did it expect to receive, as at the end of 2009/10?

- what does the Council estimate its potential liability to be in respect of the Pleasurama development, in respect of not determining the development agreement?

- what does the Council estimate its potential liability to be re the risk of a tidal surge storm or cliff collapse results in injury or loss of life?


Of course if you are perfectly happy about the councils performance and accounts you won’t need to ask any questions, so this won’t apply to you.