Tuesday 12 January 2016

Life at the End of the Runway a ramble and the Pavilion Weatherspoons Plans.

Monday went and Bowie went, if you didn’t buy his new album on his birthday then you may have missed the most memorable line of song lyric so you have already lost the thread. Of the thread? So may as well give up reading now.

Sorry about the absence of posts again, it’s worse for me, no post or painting and when I look back. What? No day.

I don’t of course know what happens with you, that is what happens when you try to work out where all the Mondays went, with me I look at my blog posts and my sketchbooks.

On the Manston front there has been some activity, the site owners – these are the people who run Discovery Park in Sandwich, so the biggest local employer – have been leafleting the Thanet with their intentions.

Here is the link their website http://www.stonehillpark.co.uk/ their plans are for a mixed use light industrial park at Manston. 4,000 jobs and 2,500 homes. This does raise the question. Will they like Daisy pull it off? The answer here is that they are pulling it off in Sandwich http://www.discovery-park.co.uk/ with 2,400 jobs so far.

Thanet District Council are obviously opposed to the largest local employer creating 4,000 jobs in Thanet and say thy are looking for a new partner to finance compulsorily purchasing the site, see https://www.thanet.gov.uk/the-thanet-magazine/news-articles/2015/november/council-to-undertake-further-soft-market-testing/

Their previous proposed partner RiverOak after being rejected by the council are trying to use the national government compulsory purchase route to turn the site into an airfreight hub using the National Infrastructure legislation, see http://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/south-east/manston-airport/

The requirements for this process would mean 12,000 cargo plane movements a year, and although I first out the door with the camera when a plane flies over, that many puts me into the NIMBY camp.


On to The Royal Victoria Pavilion planning application, here is the link https://planning.thanet.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=summary&keyVal=ZZZZMPQEBJ826 I hope. The fight with the new council planning website was interesting and I think I won in the end, up to a point.


I thought that work was due to start this month with the object being that the new Wetherspoons would be open in the summer, however it looks like the planning stage still has some distance to travel.


So wot’s it like inside, here are the links to the pictures I took of the inside




http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pav2010/id5.htm

Back to Bowie, best I could do on the bookshop blog http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/a-book-about-bowie.html

12 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    1. Please let me know why you removed my comment? which was to the best of my knowledge an belief legal, honest and truthful an therefore complied with your policy.

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    2. Julian it looked to me as though it fell into the “maybe libellous” (see comment conditions below) bracket.

      Of course if like me you have the information published online linked to you work and residence address under what is verifiably your real name like I do, then this could be a different matter.

      But basically potentially libellous comment is something I have to remove from here, of course if I had the time money and my own legal team it would be a different matter.

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    3. I am very sorry if I have caused you a potential problem, that was not my intention because I can see how much effort that you put into the site. I did not see the objecting comment, but I can assure you that my comments were my purely personal opinions, based on matters of public record, but I did quote the wrong job title for Pauline Bradly which should have been Head of Joint Ventures at the Bank of Scotland (I am quoting from the Scottish Daily Herald).

      This subject stirs up deep feelings because for too long Thanet residents have watched seemingly powerless while dodgy deals have been done in their name, the last election was a result of people from all backgrounds standing up and saying "we are not going to take this any more" If that democratic wish just ignored, local democracy will have been irreparably damaged.

      Best Regards,

      Julian Eagle
      21 Devonshire Gardens
      Cliftonville.

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    4. Richard,
      Thank you for that fascinating incite into the history of the Foreland Plant.

      I must say that I admire R.G's use of language, "exposing the paucity and venal nature of their arguments to public scrutiny" is a phrase that I intend to plagiarise in the future because I can think of a number of applications!

      It is very easy to criticise. R.G. is a working politician; accusing a working politician of duplicity is "like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy' 500 ", the truth is that all to often the are no workable options for Politicians, other than continuing to get paid; in this case the proper solution is to turn Foreness into a full recycling plant but if he went down that road, he would be removed.

      It seems to me that the Riveroak bid is a "double game" you may note that R.G comments in the Gazette this week "Riveroak will be put through the mincer and the business plan and finances will have to stack up. If it doesn't then the Secretary of State will turn it down and that is fine by me. That is the decision"

      A cynic could decode that as "I have done my bit for the surfs, my behind is covered both ways;Hey Ho.

      I will judge him on the outcome, but the Airport option is (in my opinion) the best and most viable option.

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    5. Julian sorry about this as I see things are going from bad to worse here for you. Richard leaves a considerable quantity of potentially libellous comment, which would take up most of my life if I were to check and verify. It being my day off I delete unread and out of hand these comments with my mobile.

      I should also point out that years ago Richard used to live in Thanet and have his own blog which he deleted completely, he now seems very keen to publish his ideas here.

      Frankly for me managing the blog with a mobile phone is just one long senior moment for me.

      I would say the answer for you would be to go to blogger.com and start your own blog, happy to link to it on the sidebar as I linked to Richard’s when he had one.

      It isn’t that I mind pointing out the less commendable aspects of prominent locals, it’s just that when I do I do the research and link to the appropriate documents. Eg. Chris Wells bankruptcy status linked to The Gazette, Tony Freudmann being struck off as a solicitor with the disciplinary tribunal’s findings, Roger Gale’s expenses antics liked to the parliament website and so on.

      It is just that these thing have to be fairly cast iron in my mind, my solicitor charges £195 + vat per hour and while I don’t hesitate to consult him where I think it’s appropriate, doing this for all and sundry is something I just don’t have the funds for.

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    6. Michael,
      I take your hint, it is a first class site so the last thing that I want to do is lower the tone but, you did come out for Stonehill Park (or whatever they are calling it) so I am surprised that you did not get more of this kind of thing, unless people are getting bored with the issue which would be the worst and most dangerous outcome (for which I blame the Manston lot),

      Best Regards,

      Julian Eagle

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    7. Julian its on record on this blog that Michael supports a Manston that would provide passenger services that would benefit the local population. Considering he lives and works and has children at schools under the old flight paths then Michael opinions are worth listening to rather than those that don't even live in east Kent let alone Ramsgate.

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    8. Dave, Julian. I mainly support local firms, particularly those who are major employers and contribute to the local economy. Obviously I supported the airport and continued to support its reopening after it closed.

      DP buying it was a game changer, they are the largest local employer and a great many of my customers work at DP, they have a proven track record of providing wealth and employment, something greatly needed in Thanet.

      I have never seen RiverOak as a serious contender, they are not and never have been major employers, if they were this would show up on the internet. They don’t run airports as if they did this would also show up on the internet. What they do and have previously done is operate as a relatively small hedge fund although they don’t seem to have been very active in recent years, according to their main website http://www.riveroakic.com/ their last commercial activity was in 2013.

      The plan to turn Manston into an airfreight hub doesn’t seem to stack up commercially, based on previous freight handling, geographic location, absence of a fuel pipeline, amount of investment required and so on.

      It also doesn’t appear to stack up environmentally, particularly on particulate air pollution related to the background levels, prevailing wind direction and population concentration upwind. It is also a consideration that the airport was previously running whilst working towards obtaining an EP (environmental permit), something it never managed to achieve, hence a 106 agreement rather than a proper planning consent.

      Trying to acquire the site for an airport using the cpo process, is fraught with difficulties particularly in terms of compensation, partly because the value of the site would be based on brownfield land values and partly because all of the residents and businesses could probably claim compensation as unlike planning there would be no prior use consideration at the cpo stage.

      At the moment I am supporting DP, of course if a better solution comes along, offering substantial local employment with a reasonable wealth v pollution balance from a company with the money and a proven track record of employing people in their field then I may think again.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. I note that you still can't spell Wetherspoons, Michael.

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    1. I wondered about the little red lines underneath Joe

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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.