The Thanet Star

Margate Fires

Written by Matt B · first published 14/04/2008

There seems to be a renewed interest in fires that have happened recently arround Thanet. I have no doubt that this is due to the devistating fire of the scenic railway rollar coaster on land owned by Jimmy Godden (a man about whom many bad an unprintable things have been said of late).

Particularly people seem interested in Margate fires. Quite why this might be is currently "beyond me" but never one to see a need unmet I will endever to list as many sources of information as I can.

I start, as always, at thanet finder and search for "Margate Fires" (I have also used other sources). The game is a foot - let us find out all we can. Care to follow me?

The very first result sees "Thanet Strife" asking some very intelligent questions (especially for for a "parady" site) as the author asks of the dreamland fire "qui bono" (who benefits)?

"Save Dreamland" have an arial shot of the damage to the attraction. I'm not going to go into huge detail on the dreamland fire as I imagine that almost every Thanet blog and site worth it's bacon is probably going to have something to say and Thanet Star has already created a round up of reactions to the dreamland fire.

The space many are calling "Godden's Gap" was created by another seafront fire to a property owned by Mr Godden. The BBC Report that the police do not consider the fire to be deliberate. The Joyland Books Forum also makes mention of this story.

Related is the fire at Pleasurama in Ramsgate but there does not seem to be much blogged or forumed (is that a word) from back then. Leaving local Jimmy Godden behind for a moment there were fires to which he can not be readily connected.

The fire at Tivoli arcade is made mention of in "Arcade Flames" by Eastcliff Richard.

Margate Architecture has a story about the "Dalby Square Fire". Which is something "style counsel uk" also pick up on a little later.

michaelsbookshop.com has some black and white images of older fires (San Clu) in Margate along with this thing we call history.

It would be nice to find a way to collate information and blogging like this. I'm starting to think a central Thanet news site run by us locals might be handy. Especially if it was a publicly run and socially driven site... but that's a thought for another day.

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Public Comments

Richard Eastcliff wrote:

There seem to be enough people reporting the news on the island, but I've always thought a 'Thanipedia' would be very useful. Imagine being able to look up 'fire' or 'act of god' in an online encyclopedia, a repository of all Thanet knowledge and history. Surely with your webby skills you'd be the person to set that up?

Kind regards,

ECR

15/04/2008 08:23:10

Matt B wrote:

Setting it up would be the work of half an hour (tops), however, these things would cost some money to host as would a nice domain name (there are other options) - I'd want to find a way to at least break-even and that means some adverts on the site and a good chance that people would find it interesting enough to make the adverts pay for everything. But I'm more than happy to set something up.

In theory the Live in Thanet http://thanet.ning.com site now has something called "notes" which is effectively a wiki with a nice interface to hide the code away. That would not cost anything as it already exists.

15/04/2008 21:04:14

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