Some thoughts about Kent Terrace and other pictures

I have just returned from a pleasant day out and sat down in the living room with the rest of my family we have one guest staying, a board game is in progress, one of us is playing guitar and I have just put the camera card into my laptop to see what the pictures on it are like.

The board game is Go For Broke, the object being to lose all your money, my two youngest children are having some difficulty coming to terms with a game where the object of the game is to lose, something that is mildly amusing.

The first page of pictures to publish is at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop910a/id3.htm the first picture is of the new development at the bottom of Kent Terrace, I assumed that anything going between the Regency houses there and the Belgian Café building would be in keeping with the buildings on either side.

The building that has the Belgian Café and Pete’s Fish Factory on the ground floor is in the style of a castle, built I think in about 1820, I assume it originally housed The Castle Inn as an engraving of 1817 shows a different building there of that name.

Looking vaguely at the picture I realised that the levels of the windows of the new building don’t line up with the rest of the terrace, a look at the council’s planning website reveals what is going to be built there.
OK it isn’t particularly unpleasant looking, just total out of keeping with the style of the buildings around it, the obvious question here is, why not fill in the gap with another bow fronted Regency style building like the other ones?
This sort of thing depresses me and it frankly doesn’t make any sense, oh well there wouldn’t be time in life to examine every planning application and object to all the daft ones, perhaps one day we will have government sympathetic to the town, until then there is only a limited amount one can do.
There is some activity on the Pleasurama cliff façade, thanks to Gerald for this picture and letting me know about this one, I am not sure what is going on there as by the time I managed to get out and take some pictures the chaps with the cherry picker were having a break. Next time I got out they had gone, it is obvious that they didn’t weed it like last year, my take is that anyone looking at the condition of this thing before building work starts can only be beneficial.

Another squirrel, this time on Plains of Waterloo.

Blocked drain adjacent to the harbour, by the bus stop, after the recent flooding both in Harbour Parade and York Street, it seems incredible that this drain that has been blocked for about a year, still hasn’t been dealt with.

Once again numbers one and three slipways are occupied, there are plans to build a development on numbers two and three slipways, there is a mock up picture of what this development will look like in the town council’s offices, but nothing I can find on the TDC planning website. I have to explain here that the TDC planning website is a very strange website indeed, if you were going to design a website deliberately to conceal information it would make a pretty good starting point. So it may be there and I just haven’t been able to find it.

Anyway back to this development, what no one can tell me is how the harbour is supposed to operate with only one slipway.
On to Westgate and Birchington where a nice old Norton single was parked up, it looks to be about 1955, as around 1956 alternators started to replace dynamos I think it is an ES2, the external oil filter is a modification.

We went for lunch at Quex Barn today, I opted for the £10 two course option in the pictures.

The next page of pictures at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop910a/id4.htm were taken in the gardens at The Powell Cotton Museum in Quex Park.