Cluedo is a hotel board with a dog ear on it. The art deco ballroom, with its carpeted sprung dance floor, opens into a library used for community events, leading to a huge dining room, and the other wing has a billiards room.
Everything in this Folkestone landmark is a little higgledy-piggledy: spare tables and chairs shopped to one side, skew curtains, a grand piano here and there. A 1920s style mural completes the Agatha Christie feel. There is even a stray three-belly candle.
The man with the black cover is Pierre Condou, a restaurateur with pedigree in London’s members’ clubs and part of a community group that plans to restore the Grand to its former grandeur, back when King Edward VII was at court by the sea here with his. mistress, Alice Keppel, at the beginning of the 20th century. “It was like getting keys to the sweet shop,” says Condou, pacing around the room. “There is so much potential.”
He wants to transform the entrance, an airy atrium with checkerboard tiles called the Palm Court, into a modern brasserie, and create event space in the public rooms, for weddings or corporate events.
“Folkstone, the whole of the Kent coast and seaside resorts in general in Great Britain, I think, are on the verge of a renaissance,” he says.
Condou is betting on the Grand’s future success due to the influx of DFLs – Down From London – who moved here when the Covid Pandemic showed that working from home was viable, along with an investment in Folkestone by Sir Roger De Haan, whose father founded the Saga. holiday group.
“All these factors are beginning to revive the vacation destination market of coastal communities.”
Others agree and many are building new hotels rather than renovating old ones. In Southport, entrepreneurs plan to create the Cove Resort, a £75m surf park complex on the Lancashire coast, with hotel and thermal spa, to build a £73m events space on a foreshore being built by the local authority.
On the other side of the Ribble estuary in Blackpool, people are opening Insta-ready hotels in kitsch seaside houses, such as Big Blue and the refurbished South Beach Number One.
And on the south coast, in Poole, another community has ambitious plans to rebuild the Haven hotel, once used by the inventor and physicist Guglielmo Marconi in his work developing radio.
“It’s an iconic site coming into the harbor and it’s got heritage,” said Norman Allenby Smith, chairman of the Sandbanks Community Group. The residents spent seven years fighting plans to demolish the hotel in favor of 119 luxury apartments and, after winning one planning battle, decided to come up with their own vision, paying architect Philip Gumuchdjian to create plans for him.
“There would be a new hotel on the site and an aerial radio tower on top of the building to commemorate Marconi’s legacy,” said Allenby Smith. “Life has changed in the last seven years. Good hotels in iconic locations are still very popular. People want to come and stay three or five days, not necessarily the two-week bucket and spade type. Some of the hotel groups would be very keen to occupy that building if we get permission for it.”
Peter Hampson, chief executive of Destination Britain, said that while seaside resorts were still far more popular than often portrayed, Britain’s beach hotels now faced much more competition than in the past. .
“The radical change in the holiday market is that people now go on holiday to cities,” he said. “There used to be mass tourism with people getting out of the cities and into the fresh air. But the main threat to hotels is the explosion in Airbnb accommodation.”
Visitors stayed 29m nights in a house or apartment for rent last year, 5m more than in 2019, according to the International Passenger Survey, compared to almost 91m nights in hotels, around 4m less than in 2019.
“In terms of the UK, Airbnb has always said to the government, oh we’re just adding hotels,” Hampson said. “But now they’ve shifted their international marketing. Their ads say Airbnb is better than a hotel.
“And that’s interesting because there’s a moral economic dilemma – should you encourage people to convert houses into accommodation to compete directly with the traditional hotel? Because what happens to hotels if they go bust? They will be converted into residential properties.”
That describes what happened to the Grand. When it opened in 1903, The Grand’s founder, Gustave Gelardi, marketed its accommodations as 30 suites of “gentleman’s lodgings” where fashionable men could rent their quarters for the holiday season. There was accommodation for driver and maids, kitchens and gardens and all arranged, as a newspaper review of the time put it, so that “one can enjoy one’s own home, as it were, and still have all the benefits and facilities. your big hotel”.
According to Emre Araci’s book Revisiting the GreatEdward VII would spend the weekend at the Grand with Keppel, the hostess and society lady who was Queen Camilla’s great-grandmother.
“When the royal fans took their seats in the Palm Court, the locals were looking through the windows, so much [it] it was called the monkey house.”
The collision of upper and lower classes is behind much of the beach’s history. Spending time at sea was the preserve of the wealthy, who found accommodation for several weeks. The hotels were a way for the wealthy to escape the ordinary people who flocked to the seaside on Britain’s expanding railway network.
“Hotels were a bit on the edge where all the bedlam was going on, almost like gated communities,” said Dr Allan Brodie, a historian at Bournemouth University and part of the Seaside Heritage Network team. The first large hotels such as the Grand in Brighton and the Grand in Scarborough came in the 1860s, and the building spree continued until the 1930s, when holiday camps arrived.
By the 1970s, after hosting the likes of Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain and writer Evelyn Waugh, the Grand closed as Folkestone fell out of fashion.
Related: Punch and Judy, penny slots and Pontins: why Britain’s great beach continues to capture our imagination
The rooms were converted into flats and bought by Michael Stainer, who established tea rooms and a pub in the building. He was jailed in 2022 for tax fraud after failing to pay £470,000 of his employees’ taxes.
To pay for the building’s upkeep, the Grand’s residents plan to convert parts of the lower ground floor into 24 new holiday lets, with 13 on sale this week. Money from the holiday rentals will be used to fit out a new restaurant and commercial space.
“The Grand can be revived,” says Condou. “It is deteriorating and needs to be modernized.”