Pleasurama Royal Sands Cliff, a conspiracy or a conundrum and other Sunday Rambles.

A long old ramble about Pleasurama first
The cliff behind the Pleasurama site in Ramsgate has become something of a local joke to those of us living in Ramsgate, we all saw the extensive and expensive works to repair it, about £1m of TDC money was expended on these.

After that we all saw the weeds growing out from the cracks between the new paintwork, the weedings the repairs to the repairs, the bits dropping off and at the moment we can all see the rather dodgy looking bits where parts of the bottom of the cliff has been exposed.

Having made various fusses about Pleasurama for years now extending back before this blog see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tdc/report.htm or even as far back as seven years, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/seafront/ and more on this blog see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/search/label/Pleasurama%20development

With the cliff safety issues relating to the Pleasurama site I genuinely thought that I had made my point and that the council, The HSE and the developer had taken what I have been saying seriously and had some sort of “make safe the way of the cliff” plan.

Then Simon Moores reacted rather oddly to one of my comments, with a comment on his blog.

“So please no more conspiracy theories of this kind on my weblog if you will and the same with the cliff. You are starting to sound like Rick banging on forever with allegations that the IRA had some loose connection to Thanet councillors” see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/itson-weblog-so-it-must-be-true.html

That was last Sunday and I thought I ought to check the situation i.e. to make sure that my concerns are being addressed properly. There are all sorts of concerns related to this cliff, most of which are open to doubt and my banging on about them will eventually either show me up to be a bit of a nut, or there will be a cliff collapse there and, what, I will be able to say, I told you so, or something.

One concern that I thought every one agreed with me about, is that there needs to be a weight limit for service vehicles driving along the cliff top footpath, next to the edge of the cliff.

I am not naming names here, I am not Rick and certainly not invulnerable to libel, even if what I am saying is the truth, nor do I want to put people in the awkward position of having their name googled as an exact phrase and coming up associated to something like this, maybe years later, when they are applying for a job or something.

Anyway the senior engineer at the civil engineering consultants that the council use, agrees with me and the council’s own civil engineer agrees with me, that driving heavy vehicles along the edge of the cliff is a bad idea.

If you are an engineer there isn’t much else you can do, you see although the concrete cliff wall looks impressively strong, to people who are not engineers, it doesn’t actually do anything to hold up the cliff and wasn’t designed to do so.

What you are looking at, although you can’t really see this, is an unsupported chalk cliff and I don’t suppose you would drive your car too close to the edge of one of these, were it just grass and chalk.

In fact chalk cliffs from an engineering point of view are generally much stronger than they look and a lot of Thanet roads go within about 2 metres of the edge without much in the way of worries.

It’s the last few feet next the edge that’s best avoided, for something very heavy as I am sure most people can work out for themselves.

The added problems with this particular bit of cliff relate to different things that have happened to it over the years, tunnelling, navel guns mounted there during the world wars, long periods of bad surface maintenance, that sort of thing.

Anyway after Simon’s comment I wondered just how seriously the health and safety people had taken my concerns, so I wrote to them and it seems that the council may have been a little economical with the truth when talking to the HSE about the cliff.

There are several documents that I have relating to the cliff, they were obtained via the freedom of information act, they may seem a bit dull but click on the links if you want to read them.

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/id3.htm

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/id4.htm

are the ones that the I think the council may have forgotten to send the HSE and

http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/id2.htm

the one they definitely did send the HSE.

I don’t really know what is with the council and Pleasurama, the EA sent them a letter three years ago, saying that they should insist on some basic safety modifications to the deign see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/ea/

The senior council officer, who is to be the new chief executive of the council, advised the cabinet to terminate the development agreement and they ignored her, I don’t think I should publish confidential internal council documents, but do have the documentary evidence supporting this if pushed.

Then all this business about the cliff safety, I don’t think that anyone reading the developer’s contractor’s report http://www.thanetonline.com/cliff/ about the condition of the façade could reasonably disagree with my contention that some sort of further investigation should be made.

Then the business of the recently issued 199 year lease, I haven’t enquired about this one, but do wonder in the light of the Hartsdown application and all the delays over the Maritime Museum lease, why the Pleasurama one didn’t go to consultation, or perhaps it went to a secret public consultation like the leadership one.

I know people probably think that I bang on about this consultation that I consider to have been rigged, but if you are one of them you may ponder for a moment, why it hasn’t appeared on the council’s consultations page, see http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council__democracy/consultation.aspx perhaps they are in a state of denial about this, see no evil who knows.

The trouble is that if I make a complaint about this again, they may think I am being vexatious, as it is they haven’t yet answered the feedback I made about this consultation when it was on.

Anyway back to the dodgy cliff and Pleasurama, the bit that worries me the most is the bit where the drain has blocked at the top of the cliff, this caused a puddle on the footpath, this froze and thawed causing the surface of the footpath to come away, this caused water to get behind the cliff façade, this caused bits of the façade to drop off.

The council say that some of this is wrong I think, I a not quite sure which bits they think are wrong, the last link in this chain of events was when the council put up a barrier at the bottom of the cliff and I thanked the only to get a reply from them, saying that the barrier wasn’t to protect people from being hit by the lumps of cliff that had been falling off.

Obviously there is work going on down on the Pleasurama site at the moment and having joined the church of responsible blogging, I emailed the council’s press department saying that I was going to do a post about Pleasurama, they emailed back saying that there was going to be a meeting about this at the end of last week. So I emailed them back saying I would delay the post until then. I made it very clear that a lot of people including myself would like to know what is going on after all this time.

The current development agreement says that the metal cage that forms the structure of the building should have appeared by now, so with the development agreement having been thrown out the window again, what is going on is anybody’s guess.

As yet I haven’t heard from the council, so this is a sort of partial post.

A look at some of the other Thanet blogs over the last week.

I will start with the one that I publish but don’t write http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ this is where I publish press releases that people send me and new council documents, frankly it isn’t a very popular blog, only about a third of the number of people that read this one, read it. Quite a lot of blogs don’t even have links to it, including Bignews Margate that links to the other main Thanet blogs.

Pageviews today 147 Pageviews yesterday 180 Pageviews last month 5,431 is what the stats say for this blog but two recent posts there have been getting some comment.

One has the emotive title GO-AHEAD GIVEN FOR TREE MASSACRE see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/go-ahead-given-for-tree-massacre.html I have to admit to being a bit unclear about this one and have been reading the comments with interest.

The other is http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/employees-and-contractors-from-pfizer.html?showComment=1297692530692#c3615986546683633728 about the Pfizer closure.

Starting at the top of my sidebar today Thanet Life http://birchington.blogspot.com/ the latest post http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/no-right-turn.html has video of a pilot’s eye view of the approach to the Runway at Manston over Ramsgate.

As Simon points out there really isn’t an alternative to overflying Ramsgate when landing and taking off in this direction.

Manston expansion is one of those strange Thanet mysteries that seem a bit odd given the economic climate, the latest episode being the Parkway railway station, despite government being Conservative all the way up and a promised reign of common sense it would seem that despite the desperate need for money to sort some of Thanet’s problems, the only big lump of future government money seems to be for this station.

If comment is anything to go by Simon’s post last Sunday http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/when-whistle-blows.html was very popular and is about the Margate Football Club plans at Hartsdown Park.

Next Ken Read’s blog http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/ with an informative post on the development of Ramsgate Harbour http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/2011/02/wind-in-our-sails.html

Next to one of the local news pros Isle of Thanet Gazette's Saul Leese who started his own YouTube channel yesterday, see http://www.youtube.com/user/mindbloggles this is called Mind Boggles.

I tuned in, waited for mind to boggle, and, yes, it boggled.

Publishing 6 vids to YouTube since yesterday suggests that Saul may have gone critical.

I have just returned after taking the children to Morelli's in Broadstairs for an ice cream and notice that Simon has put up a very encouraging post about the undercliff in Westgate, it really does sound like some sort of cooperation between residents and the council, see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/big-society-at-its-best.html

I also notice that Simon is getting the same problem when you try to expand some of his pictures by clicking on them if you are using Internet Explorer, you get a virus warning instead of a bigger picture.

I think someone must have reported Blogger to Microsoft as being a malicious website. A bit like those spam emails saying you have a malicious file in your computer, they give you instructions to delete it, the only problem being that the file you delete is vital to the running of your computer.

Tony Bignews Margate had a post with a lot of comment on it last week, see http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/2011/02/boring-biased-and-conservative-bbc-in.html even quick comments from Cllr Chris Wells. `What is it you want to ask, Tony? Reminded me of an oft parodied or plagiarised thing in literature that I am not sure of its origins, you know the one where the computer asks the questions.

I will endeavour to ramble on as the day progresses.

Work Starts on the Royal Sands Development Ramsgate at the Pleasurama site again.

After the work to clear the site of piles of dirt and rubbish that stopped at the beginning of October the same week as a lump of masonry fell off of the cliff façade, leaving a small mountain of dirt, work has started again.

This time it is to investigate the pipes and electrical wires on the site prior to piling, obviously this is necessary as they wouldn’t want bore a pile through the main sewer or an electrical cable.

Apparently the plan is to start pile boring in December, this isn’t official information but just comes from asking the chaps working on the site what they are up to.

Speculation about this project is a difficult one, perhaps a crystal ball would be more appropriate than asking the council.

Royal Sands Development Ramsgate Pleasurama Where Now?

I am asking for a bit of help from the people who read this blog, not a for or against just some ideas as once again I am one again going to try to get some temporary summer use for the building site next summer and some sort of resolution to the ongoing problem.

This will be a fairly long post as for the most part I am clarifying my thoughts by writing them down.

With the temporary use I have tried this every year for last few years and once we did get a leisure use for the site throughout the summer.

All of the other years the answer from the council has been that the development is to start imminently and that the developer would need all of the site so any other use would be impossible.

No work has ever started on the site and not a single part of the foundations have been laid.

I suppose the best solution to the overall problem would be if the planning application approval was withdrawn, this would give all of the parties involved a chance to come up with some scheme for the site that is viable.

The problem there is that the road layout and surface drainage pipe, both of which are outside of the site, form part of the approved planning application, because of the work on these the council’s planning department tell me that technically work has started on the development.

Normally if no work had been started then the planning consent would have expired by now but because of this technicality the approval remains valid forever.

Another road to go down would be to say that as the developer is behind schedule in terms of the development agreement between the developer and the council.

This would if it went through all of the various stages exclude the current developer, SFP, but there are problems related to this course of action.

One is that the planning approval would still remain valid. Another is that the developer could engage in litigation against the council to recover the money that they have already spent on the road, surface drain and planning, I think this is the best part of £3m, money the council hasn’t got.

Now my guess is that the current development agreement would be very difficult to apply in this economic climate, mainly because the first part of the development it stipulates that what should be built is the hotel, something that wouldn’t be likely to sell easily at the moment. Another problem is that the hotel is at the western end of the site and all of the construction vehicles would have to pass the hotel until the development is complete.

Since the plans were first approved various issues have come up that makes the development both less viable and less attractive.

The first was the height issue.

The first set of plans were for a building that was too high relative to cliff behind it, in fact height has dogged this development from the early stages.

There is only so much space between the high tide level in front of the building and the cliff behind it.

Various modifications have been made to the plans to try and fit the building into this space, with out changing the basic design so much that the changes invalidated the planning approval.

The net result of this was to remove the gull wing effect of the building depriving it of any architectural merit.

Since the plans were approved the area has been designated a high risk flood zone, this means that the plans would have to satisfy more stringent rules if they were to be approved today.

Another problem is the situation with the cliff behind the development has changed too since the plans were approved.

The council had the cliff surveyed and the survey said that the condition of the cliff wasn’t good.

Since the survey the council has spent various sums of money totalling about £1m on the cliff behind the site and it looks as though cliff maintenance there is going to ongoing, expensive for the council but more significantly will need more space between the cliff and the building, to work on the cliff, than the plans allow for.

Another problem is the road access to the site, the plans and road layout at the moment are reliant on busses being able to use the Victorian viaduct running down the face of the cliff to access the building, for the life of the building.

At best this would mean considerable expense for the council during the life of the building maintaining this structure and at worse the viaduct could become too unsafe for road traffic during the life of the building.

Another problem is the capacity of sewage system in this part of Ramsgate, this is the one that regularly causes flooding in Harbour Parade and would seem unlikely to be able to cope with a large development’s waste.

All in all the council passed plans that at best will be very costly for the council if implemented and at worse will produce a development that is partly or wholly unusable for part of its expected life.

In the long term I think the best solution would be a different development, both higher in terms of the flood risk, further from the cliff to allow better access and designed so that it would work with road access that wasn’t reliant on the viaduct.

At the moment only one of these factors seems to have affected the progress of the development and that is the condition of the cliff behind the development.

So far the council’s stance has been that there is nothing serious wrong with the cliff, as the council owns the cliff and is responsible for maintaining it, this puts the council in a position of considerable financial liability throughout the life of the development.

On the face of it the developer can play this situation to his advantage, using the condition of the cliff as an excuse for not starting the development as he is supposed to have done to conform to the development agreement.

I think this is what happened at the beginning of this year when he examined a small part of the cliff façade.

You may remember that at the end of last year I made a visual examination of the cliff façade and pointed out defects some of which the council repaired.

After this the developer’s contractor investigated some of the defects that the council hadn’t repaired, this was a bit of a strange investigation because it was only of a small part of the potential defects.

They did two things that I could see. One was to investigate some of the other panels like the one the council had to replace, from what I could see this showed that some of the panels that they investigated were faulty (either too thin or not properly constructed). My conclusion here is the it would have been easier and cheaper to replace these panels before the development was built, making access much more difficult and causing disruption to the people living in the development. Something that totally mystifies me though is that finding some defective panels they didn’t investigate the rest of them.

The other thing was to do with the foundations of the support columns. When I made my visual inspection it appeared that the foundations couldn’t have been constructed to the design on the plans of the façade that the council had supplied me with. So either the foundations were different or the simply didn’t exist. What the developer’s contractor did was to dig beside the first of these support columns to see what was underneath it, the result of this was that they found no foundations at all, just muddy earth, there can be no doubt about this I went on site and examined the hole they had dug and photographed it. This leaves me with the question why didn’t they examine the foundations of any more of the support columns?

You have to appreciate that this isn’t a case of some minor construction sitting on no foundations, but a seventy foot high concrete construction, four meters away from where the contractor intends to build an hotel.

Whatever the situation work on the development’s foundations didn’t start at the beginning of this year like it was supposed to.

What did happen this year was that a subcontractor laid the surface water drainage pipe between the site and the harbour.

Finally during September the contractor started to clear the site and I was assured that the development was going to start. This work lasted for about three weeks and involved two men and a digger. This work stopped before the site was completely cleared at about the same time as part of the render fell off of the cliff façade, I am not really certain if the two things were related.

Now having said all of this which is I know a bit negative, the main contractor, Cardy Construction, are a local firm, employing local labour, they also have a good track record.

Now if I push the council to terminate the development agreement, the plans remain valid and we could get a much worse developer.

I will definitely push for temporary use of the site for next year, although I don’t hold out much hope.

I will definitely continue to push for a survey of the cliff, this is a bit of a difficult one as the civil engineering firm that the council normally uses for this sort of work are the same firm that supervised the main cliff repair job and the same firm that assured me in writing that thick concrete foundations resting on solid chalk exist, where there is in fact just muddy soil.

I will defiantly continue to push for a proper flood risk assessment before any building work starts.

Both of these things should be sensible measures that can only save both the council and the developer future problems.

What I am asking for here though is any suggestions of any other actions I could take over this matter.

Pleasurama site cliff façade another loose bit

Below today's email to the council and the HSE, slightly modified to remove names.

“Unfortunately despite the work carried out on the cliff façade by TDC on 8th October (removing vegetation lose masonry from the portal blockwork on site and from the area either side of the site boundary at the eastern end of the site, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/10/council-weed-pleasurama-cliff-facade.html ) more of the render has come away from the façade, I think over the last couple of days.

One again this is over the site boundary, so any of it that falls to the ground will do so from about 50 feet and probably land partly on the site and partly on the public highway.

There is a ledge immediately below the part I can see that has come away which may prevent part or all of it from falling to the ground, I would think this would depend on how far up the delamination extends.

As you know my concern is that the rapid deterioration of this part of the façade is due to the blocked drainage and damaged surface above it and my main concern is that water has entered this part of the cliff making its stability uncertain.

I am also concerned that both the council and the council’s advising engineers have a considerable vested interest in the cliff façade within the site boundary being shown to be in good condition. I am further concerned that any survey of the cliff by the councils advising engineers or the councils engineers after the main contract to repair and coat the façade would be influenced by the liability were the cliff to found defective.

I am also uncertain as to the situation relating to work on the site, by this I mean that all work on the site seems to have stopped since the weekend 2nd 3rd October when the piece of render fell off.

Is it your contention that it is safe to work on the site at the moment?

Picture above with the loose part outlined in red, clcik on it to enlarge, the render seems to be about 50 mm away from the brickwork behind, because the surface of the render hasn’t cracked this suggests that the delamination extends some considerable way up.

I am asking that you take the following action.

1 Cordon off and sign the effected area until the problem is investigated.

2 Institute a weight limit topside.

3 Investigate the localised area and remove the lose render.

4 Arrange for a full and independent survey of the cliff behind the site extending beyond the site to Augusta Stairs.

5 Please register this as official customer feedback.”

Royal Sands Development, work to start on the Pleasurama site

I have been reliably informed that work on the site will start next month, the first stage will be to set up all the Portakabins site security and so on. This will be followed by the ground works, pile boring pipe laying and so on. Steel frame construction should start by 1st March 2011.

There seems to be some different opinions about what work is going to be done to the cliff façade, the nearest I can get at the moment is that the council will probably replace at least one more block panel and they may well weed it again.

There seems to be no doubt that the development will still be very close to the cliff, something that I am not at all happy about. There also doesn’t seem to have been a proper site-specific flood risk assessment.

Over the past six years during which I have had an interest in this development there have been several announcements that work on it was either going to start, or even in one case that it had already started, frankly on those occasions I was unconvinced.

This time the information has come from two sources, one from within the council and another from the contractor that actually intends to carry out the building work.


I can only say that I am fairly convinced that work is actually going to start this time.

At the moment what I shall be pressing for is some sort of drop in session, at some prominent and accessible venue in Ramsgate, so that local people get some chance to get some idea of what is going to be built, what building materials are going to be used and so on.

One very important factor that seems never to have been properly addressed is what it is going to look like from above and how the view from the bandstand area of the cliff is going to be effected.

The two main concerns with this development are the development’s safety and appearance and I think it would be fair to say that were the plans, that I understand are going to be built to, presented today, they would be rejected on both counts.

My main safety concern relates to the stability of the chalk cliff and the condition of the concrete cliff façade, however I don’t think this would count for much even were the plans to be presented today.

I won’t go into this in detail again here, pretty much everyone in Ramsgate must know the council have spent around a million pounds on having the cliff façade repaired and painted. Anyone who wants to can look at the condition of it now and make up their own mind as to whether or not they think the work is satisfactory.

The safety consideration that would have had to be addressed were the plans to be presented today is the flood risk, the environment agency have designated this as a flood risk area.

The following is what they have to say about it:

“The land is in an area that has a significant chance of flooding which means that the chance of flooding each year is greater than 1.3 percent (1 in 75). This takes into account the effect of any flood defences that may be in this area.”

Anyone who missed their assessment of the site can read it at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/ea/

The bottom line here is that if the planning application was made today a professional assessment of the flood risk would have to be carried out and its recommendations adhered to.

The council tell me that they have ticked all the right boxes that were required when the planning application was first made and there is nothing they can do to force a flood risk assessment to be carried out before the work starts.

Of course while the situation is as it is now, the development will to a lesser or greater extent be blighted as it is being built without following strong recommendations from the environment agency.

I find it particularly concerning that the developer appears to intend to proceed in this manner, after all a flood risk assessment could show there was no problem or could require relatively minor modifications to the design.

To go ahead with a twenty million project without first having this assessment done seems like driving a Ferrari around without insurance, in fact it just doesn’t make sense.


Since the plans were first submitted there have also been additional restrictions to what can be built adjacent to a conservation area and I don’t think that the plans would comply with these either.

Oddly enough when the opportunity to pull out of this development came up last year, because the developer had failed to comply with aspects of the development agreement. The decision was put to the council cabinet with a recommendation from the council’s director of finance to pull out.

Well I suppose we all know what happened and I would say that the decision to continue with the development rests firmly with our elected representatives.
It’s my day off today and I will add to this post as and when I get time.

Pleasurama, Royal Sands Development Ramsgate Development Agreement

I have finally got around to this very large document and am working through it, I did ask for it in digital format but what I got was a big pile of paper.

I have been photographing the sheets of paper in-between customers in the shop today and have put what I have done so far on the internet at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/pda/ the links there take you to different sections of the document.

I don’t really know if anyone else wants to tackle it, however I am fairly certain that if I only put up the parts I think are relevant there will be a lot of anonymous comment saying that I am editing it to prove my point of view.

Well I suppose I should state my point of view once again and I will try to do so here as I get time.

Well I suppose the links along the bottom of the post Cardy Construction Limited, Pleasurama development, Ramsgate royal sands development, SFP Venture Partners Limited, SFP Ventures UK Limited give a fair idea of my point of view, so you can always follow them.

This development that never actually starts, certainly blights Ramsgate and I suppose one of the worst aspects of it is that while the delays go one year after year, the fact that the developer doesn’t allow the empty site to be used for anything that would help Ramsgate’s economy is something the concerns me the most.

Pleasurama Thanet District Council and The Freedom of Information Act

I have just recieved the Pleasurama development agreement, as you can see from the picture there is a lot of it, probably over 1,000 pages, so it will take me a while to peruse.

This was the first time I have used the freedom of information act, so I can’t tell if my experience was representative.

The whole process of getting this document took nearly a year, god alone knows how much of my time and the council’s it took. I hate to think about what obtaining it cost the council.

What I also found pretty horrifying was that I didn’t get an electronic file but printed documents, as did the information commissioner who tells me that they will all have to be scanned onto their system.

It is obviously that all of the documents were originally produced as electronic files and then printed out.

This makes me wonder how many forests are being cut down, as one part of our government types out documents in MS Word prints them out and posts them to another part of our government, where someone then scans them back into a computer so that they can be accessed without government officers being buried under the mounds of paper.

As far as I understand the whole document is now in the public domain, although I doubt you will find it on the council’s website and you may encounter some resistance if you ask for a copy too.

I haven’t yet decided if I should put the whole thing online or not, does anyone want me to?

Sewage in Ramsgate harbour update.

The council have taken the emergency measure of capping off the sewage pipe and filling in the hole, I think there are several possible problems here, one being that the condition of the pipe suggested that the sewage would just leak out a bit further along, another is that there is a sluice just like the one that was leaking raw sewage into the harbour to the west a bit and that obviously needs investigating as well.

They were both constructed for the same purpose, flushing the western undercliff outfall pipe and were both connected together within the same system.

The problem for me is that at one time, once I knew that the council were aware of the problem, I would have just dropped the issue assuming that they would do all of the appropriate things to protect the public.

Now both with KCC and TDC as I have pointed out public safety issues to them in the past which still remain unresolved – an example being the failure to set a weight limit for vehicles using the footpath, adjacent to the cliff, top side, behind the Pleasurama development – I find I now have to pursue this sort of thing until I have some sort if written answer confirming their intent. Frankly this is embarrassing and time consuming for all involved, but I don’t see any other course of action as contact with raw sewage can kill people.

Obviously to inspect this maze of old sewers and surface drainage pipes and resolve the safety issues will be an expensive business, something that I expect will make things even more difficult given the present economic climate.

The new outfall site for the Pleasurama roof drainage pipe has mostly been excavated, so far without problems.

Raw sewage running into Ramsgate Harbour and the basements along Harbour Parade.

For as long as I can remember the corner of the inner basin where the King George IV Maritime Heritage Pontoons are situated has often smelt strongly of drains and various people I know with some understanding of the history of Ramsgate’s civil engineering have told me that all is not well with the sewers in that part of Ramsgate.

Last week the workmen excavating the area around the sluice in this part of the harbour discovered a void has formed behind this sluice – something that leaks very badly in both directions – running into this is a sewer.

This means that as the rise and fall of the tide in the inner basin fills and empties this void the sewage is flushed into the harbour, as the basements in Harbour Parade flood regularly, it would also seem reasonable to assume that the floodwater there contains a proportion of sewage to a greater or lesser degree.

I should point out here that the people doing this work are competent as is the contractor for the Pleasurama development and it is my understanding that the dangerous problems here have been reported to the proper authorities.

Incidentally the sewers here and any sewage should be and theoretically have been since Victorian times, at a much greater depth, certainly deeper than the cellars in harbour parade.

The only thing that would be at this depth is surface drainage from the road and possibly peoples roofs, so this a serious problem that either relates to the early to mid 1900s sewage system still being connected, which it shouldn’t be, or that the surface drainage has been illegally tapped into.

This whole area is too dangerous for the work on the outflow to the inner basin to continue and I understand that this has now been rerouted to a different existing opening on the eastern side of the inner basin.

There is of course the more fundamental problem here, that is that the whole infrastructure in Harbour Parade would seem unlikely to be able to cope with the new Royal Sands Development, a problem that is likely to be an expensive and disruptive one.

Some of the pictures to substantiate this are really rather unpleasant, so I haven’t published them, those I have published are at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id31.htm I am not sure if this is where the scum on the water comes from but it would seem probable.

Royal Sands Development rainwater roof drain into Ramsgate Harbour inner basin

After consultation with English Heritage the roof drainage pipe is to come into the harbour via the sluice that used to use the head of water in the inner basin to flush out the sewage outfall pipe.

Once again I should point out that the work down there is being done to a very high standard, causing the minimum disruption to the café culture there.

I wish the same could be said for the main building site and the cliff façade repairs, the eyesore continues as the build up to the summer season starts, one would have thought that at least part of the site could be used for leisure or parking.

Most engineers will tell you that one of the strongest forces in engineering is force of habit and as you can see even with heating up the sluice is resisting opening.

Click on the link for the rest of the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id25.htm