I’d only been to Ramsgate twice before, one afternoon in 2012 while touring Kent and in 1980 to get the hovercraft to the continent so it was essentially a new place for me.
There was a particular place that I wanted to visit, only open at the weekend and it’s too far to go for a day trip, or would make for an unpleasantly long day, so I made a long weekend of it. I travelled by train and scored a rather nice seafront “suite” in a historic terraced house overlooking the harbour. The trains behaved (on the way there at least) and the accommodation was very comfortable with a fine view.
This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete
I’d been itching to go and visit This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete for some time having watched a lot of the Youtube videos on old electronic music and other noise-making stuff and of particular interest to me, old electromechanical telephone exchanges. The museum is billed as "AN INTERACTIVE MUSEUM CELEBRATING OBSOLETE AND EXPERIMENTAL TECHNOLOGY” and the emphasis is on the interactive, there’s lots of stuff to play with. Some of it truly weird!
If you’re a musician type (and I’m definitely not) there are a lot of synthesisers here to play. Or if you’re not musical, to play about with and make a noise 😀
The place is packed with old electronic games, equipment, and computers. There are display cases of all kinds of obscure stuff some of which has been wired up to do stuff at the push of a button. Then there’s the telephone stuff. A working Strowger UAX rural exchange connected to telephones (and some other things) around the museum so that you can make calls and watch the switches connecting the call.
You might find yourself having to explain to younger visitors (i.e. those under 40) how to use a rotary dial telephone though. That will remind you that you are old but you knew that already because you used to work on this stuff and now it’s only found in a museum 😀 There’s also an older UAX12 exchange wired into the mix, a GEC Private Automatic eXchange connected to a dial, and dotted about quite a lot of test equipment that was familiar from my working life. If you’ve any interest in this sort of thing I highly recommend getting yourself down there, it’s only £6 to get in. Be aware though that time is distorted within the building and you’ll find two hours have gone by while you weren’t paying attention. I seem to have been to busy enjoying it to take many photos. And yes it’s tech geek/nerd heaven.
Ramsgate Tunnels
Having decided not to travel on Sunday because Rail Replacement Buses are not something I’m keen on I had another day in town so booked a tour of the Ramsgate Tunnels.
These are partly a disused railway tunnel that took the London Chatham & Dover Railway down to the seafront Ramsgate Harbour station. This station and the line through the tunnel closed in 1926 when the lines through Ramsgate were reconfigured and linked via the new station on the landward side of town. In the 1930s part of the tunnel was used for a miniature railway serving the amusement park and zoo on the site of the old harbour station. In the late 1930s the local council and the Mayor could see what was coming and that Ramsgate would be a bit too close for comfort to the action - it had been bombed by the Germans during the previous bout of unpleasantness - so they pushed hard to get a network of air raid shelter tunnels built leading in an arc under the town and connected to the former railway tunnel. It’s these, or part of them anyway which form the location of the tours.
And very good they are too. Following a brief introductory film and a safety briefing (accept their advice to use a hard hat) you’re issued a torch and a couple of knowledgeable guides take you down into the tunnel shelter system, explaining how it all worked and pointing out various things of interest. This includes quite a bit of graffiti from the time before the tunnels re-opened for tours in 2014 and local urbex "enthusiasts" used to get in. Visitors who left their mark allegedly include Charles Darwin and inevitably Norma Stitz. They’ve decided to preserve the existing graffiti but request that no more is added. And yes at the limit of exploration they turn all the lights and torches off for a minute. It’s dark in there.
Back at the railway tunnel there’s a recreation of the “tunnel town” that developed to house residents displaced by the bombing with wood and canvas rooms for families who had lost their homes, and ablutions and medical facilities.
It’s all very well done. Not overdone or Disneyfied, well able to hold it’s place against the large shelters you can visit such as Clapham South in London or Stockport, Greater Manchester. It has the advantage over Clapham in that being entered from the railway tunnel access is level-ish so no long climb down and back up 180 steps! 🙂
It has to be a “must do” when visiting Ramsgate.
The rest of Ramsgate is worth a wander around too with a lot of interesting nooks and crannies in the backstreets, a busy harbour although it now lacks any cross-channel ferries, and some nice pubs. Although a warning to the easily offended, maybe it was just the fine weekend weather, maybe it was the proximity to Wetherspoons but the harbour front and town centre do seem to attract a noticeable number of shouty, sweary people.
I enjoyed my third visit to Ramsgate, there are more photos here on Flickr.
Oh and the train journey home? Yeah, that was severely disrupted by someone getting themselves under a train at Maidenhead. Terminally 🙁
