Coming back to London after half term, I don’t worry about losing touch with the place we’ve left. The Isle of Thanet is the blogging capital of the UK. Think of Kent as a chicken, and Thanet is the parson’s nose, a protuberance, of no great size, sticking out towards France. The number of blogs is remarkable (30, by one estimate), the quality astonishing.
In Ramsgate, Eastcliff Richard punning on the town’s division into East and West Cliffs takes the palm, its witty creator concealed behind the persona of a media moghul who might, to judge from accompanying sketch, have been played by Terry Thomas.
A blog called Margate Architecture records the heritage of that handsome, if down-at-heel Victorian watering place alas, all too often a post-humous record, due to demolition and fire. I can even read the musings of Thanet’s councillors if I’m so minded (as we’ve had something of a brouhaha over the proposed expansion of Kent International Airport (Manston), outside Ramsgate, there has been reason to do so).
Whereas before I might have stared vacantly out of my Pimlico window, now I catch up on rainbows over Pegwell Bay. Distance has been annihilated. I am in two places at the same time. Isn’t the 21st century wonderful?
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21 of the greatest craftspeople working in Britain today, as chosen by the nation's best designers and architectsWe've persuaded some of the most celebrated names from our Country Life Top 100 to name the craftspeople they have in their own personal little black books.
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The garden created by a forgotten genius of the 1920s, rescued from 'a sorry state of neglect to a level of quality it has not known for over 50 years'George Dillistone’s original Arts-and-Crafts design at Knowle House, East Sussex, has been lovingly restored and updated with contemporary planting. George Plumptre tells more; photography by Clive Nichols.
