Negroni Talks #S18 - Quality Streets: How To Ensure That Ramsgate’s Future Is Sweet? 

Ramsgate is a place on the edge, full of potential and opportunity, but does this really show up in terms of the character of its built environment? Entrepreneurial thinking, initiatives and campaigns from both individuals and groups frequently set sail against the wind of an unstable economy and funding cuts. 

So is there a disconnect between Ramsgate’s creative communities and the quality of the spaces that its local population inhabits? Despite a town alive with the explorations and investigations of makers, thinkers and designers, planning decisions seem to reflect anything but this pioneering spirit. What is standing in the way of better-quality buildings and better-quality place-making that would help the towns heritage break free from past failures and a faded former glory? Who makes the decisions that result in things being the way that they are? Is there a bold vision for the future and a meaningful design review process that interrogates and raises the standard of what is going to be built? Like so many other places throughout Britain, questions about the role of absentee landlords and the induced melancholy of vacant high street units abound. Is the local council with its planning process working against the town it claims to serve? With retrograde moves that look towards reopening Manston Airport and cross channel ferry services from some political quarters, it seems it is time to talk of progressive politics, accountability or maybe worse still corruption?

As a Royal Port with a rich cultural history apparent in its grand Regency and Victorian architecture, as well as its association with Roman and Viking invasion, Pugin, Van Gogh and St Augustine, how can those intangible but essential values of care, craft and imagination become a central part of Ramsgate’s political and planning agenda? This is about more than aesthetics. It’s about the future of our very being by the seaside and the environment we create for ourselves along the elemental line where land meets water. Rather than seeming to be “coastal towns that they forgot to close down” how we can further reinvigorate them as newly defined places from within? 

Featuring:

Steve Sinclair & Huw Williams, Fourthspace (chair)
Councillor Jane Hetherington, Ramsgate Town Council (Newington)
Scott Grady, Haptic Architects
Louise Brooks, Ramsgate Space CIC
Duarte Lobo Antunes, A IS FOR ARCHITECTURE                                                                                                                                                       and all others who want to contribute…..