Scarborough’s Grand Hotel

Above is a detail from a painting of 1867 in the Scarborough Museum and Art Gallery - it shows the seaward side of the just completed Grand Hotel on a day of unusually perfect weather.  The artist is John Wilson Carmichael (1799-1868) whose speciality was maritime subjects and coastal views who retired to Scarborough after a working life based in Newcastle.

In 1852 Cuthbert Brodrick (1821-1905) won a national competition to design a Town Hall for the City of Leeds. When his ambitious design was finally complete in 1858 the opening ceremony was performed by Queen Victoria.  Brodrick was 37 years old and his building had been hailed as a triumph - he stood on the threshold of a brilliant career but it never quite happened.  It has been argued that while his contemporaries mostly worked under the influence of Classical tradition, Brodrick with his preference for the French Second Empire style (“opulent and coarse” in the words of Jonathan Meades) was increasingly out of step with public taste. For the Leeds design Brodrick had made use of Classical elements and restrained his Frenchified tendencies but in his design for the Leeds Corn Exchange he surrendered to his passion for the Halle aux Blés in Paris (later rebuilt as the Bourse de Commerce). For more about the Corn Exchange follow this link to my blogpost of 2008.

Scarborough’s Grand Hotel was Brodrick's last major commission and he seized the opportunity to design a massive and imposing exercise in Second Empire style that wouldn’t look out of place on Haussmann’s Parisian grands boulevards. Built on a V-shaped plan between 1863 and 1867, it was one of Europe's largest luxury hotels adorned with corner domed towers, rounded windows, ornamental balconies and terracotta decoration. On the landward side there are 4 floors plus 2 attic levels, facing the sea an additional 3 basement levels are visible. It is claimed that the 4 domes represent the 4 seasons, while there are 52 chimneys for the weeks in a year and 365 rooms for the days in a year. After remodelling today's hotel has only 250 rooms. It retains a formidable sense of presence on Scarborough’s South Bay but is no longer a destination for the wealthy visitor drawn by the restorative powers of the local Spa waters, operating as a budget hotel as part of the Britannia Hotels group. Britannia Hotels consistently occupy last place in the annual Which survey of customer satisfaction and make less than perfect custodians of Brodrick’s great landmark.  YouTube has many hostile amateur videos of the horrors to be encountered there - one of the less hysterical examples is embedded below and it makes depressing viewing.  There’s no avoiding the evidence of internal dilapidation and the mistreatment of key architectural features and elaborations that seem increasingly obscured by clumsy partitioning and lowered ceilings. This would be Brodrick's last major commission - in 1870 he retired to France where he and his wife lived quietly for decades in the well-heeled western Paris suburb of le Vesinet.