Wednesday 10 February 2010

Snow in Ramsgate and a bit of a ramble

As you can see from the pictures we have had a fair amount of snow here in Ramsgate today.

At the moment the busses are running cautiously but roads and pavements are fairly slippery.
My peculiar fracas over photographing Westwood Cross made it into Your Thanet today see http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/launch.aspx?pbid=84956776-5fe0-4064-a733-83aabf1dd4b7 and http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/01/photography-banned-at-westwood-cross.html for my blog post about it.

As some of you may have read the report and wondered how to get to all the pictures that I have taken of this area, here’s how.

You will find as you scroll down some of the posts on this blog – about a third I should think – have links to pictures in them, when you get to the bottom of the page of posts if you click where it says older posts another page of posts will appear also with links to pictures.

In many cases I have used historic pictures of Thanet to illustrate posts, in most cases clicking on the picture will make it enlarge.
There are over 1,000 posts so the whole process could take a while.
I managed to find the results of the public consultation about the maritime museum on the councils website, here they are.

“Maritime Museum
Consultation summary
Just over 200 representations were made. The majority opposed disposal and wanted to see the site retained as a museum. The importance of Ramsgate’s maritime history/heritage, architecture of the building, location of the building, tourism and education were the main reasons for objection to the sale. Those who did support the proposal to sell would only agree based on appropriate future use of the site.

Response to consultation
Total representations: 207

Councillors: 10

Public: 197

200 oppose disposal
7 support disposal based on appropriate future use”
I suppose that this says a great deal about council consultations.

The council consults.

The council doesn’t like the results of the consultation.

The council agrees to the findings of the consultation.

The council then makes it impossible for the results of the consultation to actually happen.
Considering today that a senior Labour politician tried to use the British judicial system to cover up information about American armed forces torturing a British subject, I am beginning to wonder when the special relationship became the special grovel.

Coming back to my thought about Westwood Cross, not so much the photography, but the general way in which we are developing areas in shopping, leisure and commerce with its own laws, surveillance and police.

I was talking to an elderly couple in the shop just now, who had read the Your Thanet article and said that as they become older and more scatterbrained, that they are also becoming increasingly concerned, that they are going to inadvertently break some law or another and become the victims of some form of under regulated “security” with no compassion or common sense.

4 comments:

  1. 'More scatterbrained' speak for yourself !

    How old are these people you speak of, the present 50/60 year olds are more likely to bump someone on the nose.

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  2. Can anyone confirm whether the pavements around Westwood Cross have been gritted? A few weeks back it looked like half of Minnis Bay beach had been dumped there (including the little used stretch between Tescos & the main roundabout) yet all of our High Streets remained untouched - so much for "encouraging" us to use the town centres more...

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  3. 13.52 in their 80s I would say, and I was quite surprised as I thought they would feel safer in the “security” environment rather than threatened by it.

    Sorry Peter no chance of getting out to look due to being snowed in.

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  4. Just by way of a comparison, I was visiting a shopping complex in Watford recently and they had signs up everywhere saying "No photography allowed except official photography" so maybe it is a standard rule they build in when these things are built ?

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.