Friday 23 November 2007

Here in Ramsgate one of our most important buildings the Royal Victoria Pavilion is coming up for grabs, unless of course the council have already sold it, they are not always to keen to publicise what they are up to but there is nothing recent about it on their website.


Designed by architect Stanley Davenport Adshead who also designed Ramsgate Library the floor is well below the flood line, so the building is not just at risk from how the council dispose of it.



Anyway the current occupant the casino is due to move off to improve the traffic congestion at Westwood Cross and I am afraid they haven’t been to kind to our pavilion.

Their greatest act of external vandalism being the demolition of Adshead’s ornate porch and bricking up all the windows, internally they have let a large part of the building that they didn’t want to use become derelict.

I wonder if they will have to do anything to return it to its former glory when they leave, I suppose being casino operators they would be able to afford to.
You may consider that Brighton makes rather more of its pavilion so there you have it a building the size of the Turner Contemporary in a prime site, I wonder what will happen.

1 comment:

  1. As always Michael, you infuriate us by showing the elegance of past times, highlighting what we're missing!

    The Pavilion is surely such an easy one to save - it's obviously destined to be a building for public use, and once taken over by a charitable trust on a sympathetic lease from a friendly local council, could be turned in to a regionally significant community centre. A large hall for performances, exhibitions, concerts, festivals, the occasional trade / craft / antique fair; catering spaces all around, along with small workshop, studio and shop spaces; a terrace serving rereshments with the sea and harbour views that it was built for - it just needs a bit of vision, a shedload of money (ah, ok, there might be a catch) and some assistance from the council (ok, I've come back to my senses now...).

    Oh well, maybe a nice pub chain could acquire it and do the same as has happened to the Customs House - bugger all, but it's an asset in the accounts and that's what counts. Sigh.

    ReplyDelete

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.