Ramsgate resident Davey Stone is a former bestselling author for Disney in America and Hodder in the UK.
He recently wrote a book about growing up in Ramsgate called Too Much Information, which nobody bought so he now uses the copies as doorstops in his house or occasionally as toilet paper.
He lives in Thanet coffee shops and has no friends.
(Davey is actually a successful fantasy author best known for his series of books The Illmoor Chronicles. He runs independent publishing house Kingsbrook with wife Chiara)
I’m going to ask you a question at the end of this column…and I’m genuinely excited about the answers.
Let’s talk about the past.
It’s the late 1980s and I’m sitting outside Woolworths on Ramsgate High Street watching a man dressed as a chicken taking on Morris, the lovable town drunk, in a fight over a Kazoo. At least, I THINK the fight is about the Kazoo: at the moment, it’s pretty difficult to tell.
Morris, dressed in his trademark grey suit, is circling the chicken guy like a boxer, moving his fists in circles and blowing the Kazoo between his lips every time he moves forward. I’m quite sure the whole event started as a joke…but nobody is laughing now and even the Salvation Army have stopped playing as the fight begins to move closer to the edge of the band. I’ve never seen Morris with a Kazoo before: he usually plays a Harmonica.
The big chicken has had enough: he’s tired, angry, sweating like a beast and is throwing the sort of punches which would definitely send Morris into orbit if any of them actually connected…but he can’t seem to land one. Morris is catastrophically paralytic but for some reason he’s staggering around in such a way that he’s actually DODGING some really good punches.
Being a kid in Ramsgate was GREAT. If you wanted to see a good fight, all you really had to do was hang around the Horse and Groom or the Red Lion until my nan showed up. You didn’t have to wait long past lunchtime. I wasn’t really a big fight fan, so I spent most of my formative years playing Dominos with Johnny Giles in the Iron Duke on Bellevue Road. People used to stagger out of the Iron Duke and roll down the Plains of Waterloo: occasionally a few of them would roll sideways into the Camden Arms.
Times change, though.
Cut forward thirty odd years and I’m in roughly the same spot where Woolworths used to be, trying to work out whether I’m going to need lactase from Holland and Barrett before I take my laptop into Cafe Nero in order to TRY to get a cappuccino before all the Chatham House kids turn the place in their Year 11 form room.
Walking the High Street today is a different experience and I really do find it hard to see the place in quite the same way as a lot of the people who think it’s gone downhill. There is SOMETHING deeply depressing about the life of the shops in the town, simply because they seem to spring up and disappear with alarming frequency…but overall I think we DO look back at the past with rose-tinted glasses.
I think it’s because a lot of us still see the old places underneath the new ones. Some of us glance at the Halifax and can still see Burton’s or can’t quite walk around Poundland without remembering how much better Woolworths seemed to be…and yet we often didn’t use the places nearly as much as we probably should have done: we just wanted them to BE there.
I remember being absolutely devastated when Our Price went. I actually sat on the bench outside Woolworths with my head in my hands until a mate pointed out that I’d never bought a record from them in my life.
One shop in Ramsgate that I genuinely DID miss for all the right reasons was the Bargain Bar on Plains of Waterloo. It was run by a lovely guy who looked a bit like a giant, beardless garden gnome. He sold things like Sega Megadrives and also bought them back from you if you ever found yourself a bit hard up. In fact, there’s a good chance that most of the Megadrives he traded were actually mine.
What shops in Thanet do YOU miss? What’s gone that you’re genuinely upset about…and what ghosts do you see when you look at all the old shop fronts?
