Old pictures of Ramsgate and Margate

 Click the pictures to expand them

 hopefully some you haven's seen before.

 Moses's shipyard and the Paragon baths in this one

 Note the tramlines

Work in the bookshop here are the pictures of the books that went out today.

I have been trying on and off to get to grips with aspects of the changes to the local and I think part of this is the relocation of where the houses will be built.

The table above is from the council's website, this is the link to it   the housing tables being in appendix B. Personally with the whole business of the DCO application giving such a developer free for all regardless of whether the application is ever granted, I am getting a bit of a waft of rat.

I wonder just how much the freedom to build say a couple of thousand home at Westgate or  1600 at Birchington would be worth to developers.

Will the Manston DCO make men stupid?

For me, while I quite like the idea of a small regional airport at Manston I am not keen on an airfreight hub there because of the amount of freight aircraft movements that are needed to trigger a DCO combined with the amount of unfiltered fuel that needs to be burnt on or near the ground for each movement.

However you look at it, each movement, one landing or takeoff would burn about enough fuel here in Thanet to take a family car all the way around the equator, with the fewest number of movements being in the 10,000 a year bracket, the people up wind of this burn up, will be breathing it in. Particularly in our coastal towns to the north and east of Manston and the takeoff flight path, with the onshore breeze holding it in and added to the existing pollution, it isn’t looking good for men of a certain age.    

What is it that the BBC are trying to say here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45326598

“Researchers believe that the negative impact increases with age, and affects men with less education the worst.”

In these days of political correctness, what the BBC mean by “men with less education” is another one of those wosisnames.

Have they singled out those educated in The University of Life? Who are they?

Do you err “you know wot I mean” When bruv and geez turn up wiv a form from the government, do you say “I’ve lost my reading glasses.” “The misses does forms.” Well that type of fing?? How is your differential calculus this morning, “I’ve lost slide rule” quadratic equations, “definitely to do with four” squares init.

gov data gis mapping at http://naei.beis.gov.uk/data/gis-mapping is looking pretty bad on the old arsenic front this morning.

So is this turkeys voting for wosisname? What about women, is this a case of discriminatory pollution, will women who are wot? Intellectually challenged be like the youf. I just asked some and here is what they have to say. “you is like well old init, so you is like well fick init.”

This could of course be a conspiracy theory put out by the Chinese with an, er cell at Yale University in the US, have they been got at? Is it something to do with Trump?

With me it’s the academic papers I’ve been reading over the past few years, now as it were, coming into the public domain it seems breathing in all that arsenic may be compensating for other aspects of, what was it? Mi old alma mater and er universities where every naming could be construed as a shaming/shamming, including life.    

I am wondering whether the map has some impact on why the Scots elected to stay in the EU

Pictures thoughts

 A couple of holiday related Margate photos here, this one just says "Holidaymakers" on it.

 and this one "Holiday Sq. Off Mansion St" now the expressions of the people who have turned to look at the camera have become more significant than the fire over the years

 I like, half remember the money's done sentiment.

 the Georgians did the have more or less fun than us?

For the dedicated followers here is the link to the books that went out on Saturday

One thing that never ceases to interest me is the the peculiar and disconnected comment on the internet. Back ten years ago this blog was very different, we were all learning how to say what to say. Anyway ten years ago today councillor Ken Gregory was blogging and rung me up to say he couldn't get online, sadly he is now dead but the internet being what it is his blog remains Here is the Link 

I heard that Don Long had died that day, so I did a post about that too.

I also managed to get a picture of the Granville bomb damage, so a blog post about that too.

What of the comments though? Particularly the anonymous ones, why would anyone want to make them? It's a funny old world.

If no one knows who you are, why would they read what you wrote?

Anyway here are the posts for ten years ago today. The larger text post titles should work as links to them.

Granville Bomb Damage

A fairly unusual picture of the Granville just after it was hit by a bomb in the Second World War. Much less health and safety then the chaps clearing up the mess aren’t even wearing hard hats.

Ken Gregory’s computer has broken

Ken just rang me up to say his computer started emitting smoke and no longer works, he has orderd a new one but won’t be able to answer emails or respond to posts until at least next Monday.

Donald Long

It is with sadness that I have to report the death of Don Long. Don was the author of several history books about Ramsgate that I publish, his help and advice on matters of local history was invaluable.

Don was also churchwarden of Holy Trinity Church Ramsgate, long serving school governor and for a long time a Ramsgate town councillor.

Photos of Ramsgate from Sandwich today, some thoughts on Manston, a wet Bank Holiday Ramble

If anyone tells you that when the ageing process cuts in you will need less sleep and therefore get up earlier, all I can say is this hasn't worked for me. Snuggling back under the covers smartphone in hand, one look at the weather app was enough to send out the very clear message that today should be cancelled due to lack of interest.

I recently asked my teenage children. "Assuming I have entered my second childhood, how old do you rate me as being - mentally, at the moment" The answer. "About twelve." Wasn't very encouraging.

So, from this perspective, various grownups made me get up and to The Church of Saint Peter the unconsecrated/secularised or whatever it is in Sandwich. "It's Sandwich Festival today the tower is open and we want vertigo." Or was it to go, go came into the equation somewhere, so I went.

Up the tower, not the best conditions for zooming at Ramsgate and other stuff, a fairly bright afternoon with the sun behind me would have been favourite, here are the links to the unedited content of my camera card.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Well it wasn't the 13th, the tower collapsed on 13th Oct 1661, hand held zoom shots with the frisson of a collapse in mind, you can do your own editing.

I have been a bit obsessed recently with the business of painting looking down on things

 you don't get much looking down from buildings among the old local pictures

 I guess because the traffic wasn't significant enough to obscure the view

    lots of practice sketches in the Pav aka Spoons

On to Manston, the main snag with the airfreight hub for some people is the reduction in life expectancy that will be caused the air polution created by the large number of airfreighter movements needed to make the DCO an nationally significant infrastructure project.

Personally I have great admiration for those people living upwind of Manston and low part of the takeoff path, I guess mostly Margate and Broadstairs, who are happy to give up a few years of/off their lives for increased import/export. For the rest of the people who will want to move because of the pollution, mainly being killed by it, night flights noise air, water, I was expecting a compensation package a bit like the Heathrow Expansion compensation one. Here is the link to it    
the Manston expansion compensation seems to be a bit limited .

The DCO application is basically a jumble of massive pdf documents most of which I haven read, but the funding statement Here is the link to it   seems to be a bit inadequate.

Back to the wet Bank Holiday Sunday, well we got something out of it, however we have really run out of good and fairly local indoor leisure destinations, any ideas would be appreciated, especially any where there is a view that I can paint.

Politics, war and religion in East Kent back in the good old days

300 years ago local government in this area was administered by the church through the church wardens, much of this was to do with what we now call social services, however back in the good old days (providing you weren’t poor, that is) this was called farming the poor.

As far as I can tell, back in the early 1700s Ramsgate was the fairly prosperous place in Thanet and probably the largest, John Lewis writing at that time says Margate was very run down.

Assuming, and there really isn’t much to go on that Ramsgate was the largest place on the island, something apparently based on shipping trade with the Baltic, then you can see it wasn’t very big    

from the Ramsgate map of 1723/36

The map of Margate also from 1723/36 looks pretty thin on the ground, Margate went through a particularly bad patch in the last half of the 1600s when they had to sell their fishing boats and as far as I can see were making do with boats that were too small to go far out to sea.

I think a lot of prosperity was much more related to what people grew close to home and it the Thanet towns what they managed to get from the sea, fish and shellfish. Bringing up a family without parish relief was seen as an achievement.

I think there is a sense in which this blog post is an advertisement for Thanet local history and more precisely for Thanet's first significant local history book, we do a cheap reprint of this book, so you can come to the bookshop after this bank holiday and browse it this is the link to the inevitable buy it now button associated with this type of advertising.

Here are a couple of the pages from the book about Margate

Apart from the S's being written like F's it's fairly readable.

This is the link to the rest of the Margate or St John's bit of the book

At this time most people would have worked when work was available, apart from on Sundays when they would have gone to church.

As John Lewis was the vicar of Margate and so responsible for farming the poor there, with the help of his churchwardens, what he has to say about the Margate then has to be from experience.

But it is also important to remember he is writing a history of Thanet and a lot of what he wrote is taken from earlier sources, so be careful to keep an eye on the marginal notes. 

 Next Ramsgate August 1940

 before

 and after

Yesterday was the anniversary of a bombing raid in Ramsgate killed 29 people, August 24th 1940. Hard also to accept that these events are slipping from living memory, when I was a child “the War” was a major topic of conversation among all of the adults, now for the most part it is becoming hazy memories of the very old.

Ramsgate is peculiar in as much as it was pretty much the first town in the UK to be blitzed, it is also among the last to lose its bombsites, with several still remaining after all this time.

I publish a booklet about the 1940 raid and most of it is available on the internet, click on this link for it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/1940/id3.htm if you want to buy the booklet click on this link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/id130.htm

A bit of an odd approach to advertising, I know, either buy it or read it for nothing, but there you go.

Old folks in Margate, Ice house in Ramsgate and Stephanie Quayle in Canterbury

 I would guess these 3 pictures (click on them to expand) date from the 1920s or before so local people born before 1850

 Note the numbers to identify the photos so the photographer would be able to work out which pictures to try and sell to? I victims the right word here? Customers? Ah I think it may be punters?

This is the ice house on the dry dock

 a couple more harbour gates crosswall ones

and white clock face with bell in tower


If you are in Canterbury it's worth taking a look at the Stephanie Quayle at the Sidney Cooper gallery

Here in the bookshop in Ramsgate another busy day, lots of local history books in particular so lots of who lived in my house a hundred years ago and where did granny live, we did our best and here is the link to the pictures of the books we put out 

on the camera front here is the link to the pictures on the sd card for the last couple of days

on the painting front

only a very quick sketch over supper in Wetherspoons this evening, I guess there were over 1,000 other people in there too which says a lot.

once again very high quality and service, well above the average Spoons