The Grand Hotel in SARBOROUGH

Scarborough is located on the eastern coast of Yorkshire which also happens to be the only oceanic coastline the county has.

I chose to describe its location this way because to many Yorkshire people their allegiance to their home county takes precedence over their allegiance to England. That sentiment of superiority was consolidated in the phrase used to describe the county as ‘God’s own country’. This may sound like it has been around for years, decades, centuries and millennia. It hasn’t. It was first mentioned as a headline for a special edition of Country Life published in 1995. The author was Nigel Farndale, a son of Yorkshire.

The town’s name is the result of the conflation of two words. The ‘Scar’ part is a shortened version of the Anglo Saxon word ‘Scear’ meaning a ‘rock’. The ‘borough part is also rooted in the Anglo Saxon language and means a place that is fortified. Scarborough certainly has a big rock at the northern end of the South Bay overlooking the harbour. At the summit of this rock are the visible remains of an old castle whose ancient stones lie on top of fortifications dating back to 2000 BCE.

From the South Beach it is possible to see some of the remains of the fort that was built in the 12th century. It would be intact today if it hadn’t been used as target practice by the Royal Navy during World War I. In my own opinion the naval artillery should have been aiming about a mile to the south.

There is evidence of human settlement in the area dating back to 8,000 BCE. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of a Mesolithic dwelling predating The Grand Hotel by ten thousand years.

For several centuries Scarborough bumbled along as a fishing port, a trading harbour and a smuggling area. Then in 1626 a Mrs Farrar discovered a stream of acidic water containing iron that drained into the South Bay. ‘Taking the water’ is something I have never tried but Mrs Farrar saw a business opportunity and tapped into the demand for spa facilities that nearby Knaresborough had already developed.

The giant of travel writers, Daniel Defoe, was on one hand very polite about Scarborough in his travels in the early eighteenth century. He described it as ‘…well built, populous, pleasant and we found a great deal of good company.’ On the other hand, he was a bit of a back stabber about the town when he visited Knaresborough fifty miles into the hinterland of the county.

‘We were surprised to find a great deal of good company here drinking the water, and indeed more than we found afterwards at Scarborough.’

Oh well, even three hundred years ago it was difficult to trust the reliability of travellers’ reviews.

Scarborough holds the world record, set in 1988, for the largest recreation of a page of a comic. The record is based on the front page of the ‘Beano’ and was grafted into the sands just below The Grand Hotel. Sadly it, the comic not the hotel, was washed away by the incoming tide. The same sands where a picture of a very young Michael Parkinson, with cricket bat in hand, began to learn how to deal with leg breaks, googlies and full tosses bowled by his Dad in the 1940’s. In 1933 at the harbour a British record, still standing, was set for the largest tunny fish weighing in at eight hundred and fifty one pounds.

The person from Scarborough who is most deserving of a much wider fame than he already has is George Cayley (1773 – 1857). He is regarded by those within aeronautical circles as the founder of their science without which none of us would be able to jet off to anywhere in the world. He designed a fixed wing aircraft and recognised that for it to fly it had to come to terms with four forces; weight, lift, drag and thrust. He even identified the need for airplanes to have a cambered wing. In his work for aeronautic design and the need for lightness he invented the wire wheel made from steel and not copper which may or may not have been invented in Yorkshire.

Yorkshire people have a stereotypical reputation for tightness with money. They have been described as ‘Scotsmen who have wandered south and on the journey have had all the generosity squeezed out of them’. That is the problem with stereotyping. It applies a broad brush stroke of generalisation to an entire group of people regardless of the reason for that group having a distinct identity. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that people from Yorkshire are tight’ with their money. It is more an issue of being prudent.

When Heather’s director heard we were staying at The Grand Hotel in Scarborough his praise for the hotel was unrestrained. We trusted his opinion. Afterall, he had been on the board of an international hotel group and knew the sector from the vegetable and fresh produce stores in the kitchen to the penthouse suite.

As we walked along the main street of the town we began to see the west facing façade of the hotel. It’s pastel pink brickwork and white ramparts glowed in the rays of the afternoon sun looking like some Maharajah’s home rising above the dusty streets of a town in the Punjab.

Each step took us closer and revealed more of the intricate details of the building and lived up to its name.

The hotel was designed in the late Victorian era. It is the shape of a ‘V’ to honour the then Queen. There were three hundred and sixty five bedrooms in the original design; one for each day of the year. There is no record of there being a room three sixty six in leap years. These rooms and the reception area are spread over twelve floors; yes, you guessed it, one for each month of the year. And the two parts of the ‘V’ are surmounted by four towers representing the four seasons of the year.

It was a grand design built to enhance the holiday making trade coming to the town that was started by Mrs Farrar in 1626 nearly four hundred years prior to its grand opening.

Fair play, the reception area and the rest of the ground floor we could see while we were waiting to check in looked grand if not a tad tired. We were soon to discover these areas had more front than Selfridges or Harrods. It was after we had checked in and had been allocated a room on the third floor that alarm bells started to ring. The only lift to the third floor was tucked away behind the reception desk. The carpet tiles near the lift shaft were held in place by black and yellow hazard tape. Police tape declaring a scene of a crime would have been more appropriate. The metal lift shook and even had a hesitating emergency stop between the second and third floors. Neither of us were in the mood to make light of the unfolding disaster that we were destined to play the leading roles in.

‘You wait until I speak to that director again’ Heather muttered through clenched teeth.

It was then that the lift rattled and clattered into life to continue its upwards journey which we both honestly thought was going to be our last on this earth.

Our room was at the end of a corridor. The door looked like it had had a good kicking during a raid by the police, Border Force or Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. To open it I had to shoulder it like a rugby player going into tackle an opponent while Heather watched.

The room had a double and single bed as well as a sofa bed all made up to welcome the weary traveller. The thing is, it wasn’t laid out like a hotel room. It looked like something to be seen in a community centre, a school sports hall or refugee centre to provide temporary accommodation for surviving victims of natural or man-made disasters. No doubt the bed bugs woken by us gaining entry were chattering away to themselves at the prospect of soft skinned southerners sleeping in their kingdom. ‘Oh look, a smorgasbord of fresh skin delivered direct to our beds, yummies.’ We decided to disappoint them. And returned to reception wanting to be allocated another room.

‘No, we are not staying here tonight’ Heather said, ‘You wait until that director hears about this.’

I am sure I overheard the word ‘murder’ in her mutterings.

We refused the second room. There was a water feature. Not one to induce a Zen like aura of calm and tranquillity. But one that would at any moment cause the fuses for the room to blow, if not the entire wing of the hotel, as water dripped into the central light fitting from the room above. The light fitting was full and so it dripped water on to the only bed in the room.

In any tense, stressful or anxiety inducing moment in life there comes a point at which all the negative feelings about the situation begin to be erased. First there are hard to conceal movements at the corner of the mouth, smirks. Then the giggles start and are allowed full rein as the fine dividing line between tragedy and comedy is crossed cathartically.

The third room was in the attic space on the twelfth floor. It was as the reception team advised us a ‘twin’ room’. It hadn’t been used for a while as it was quite stuffy so we opened the window to allow some of Scarborough’s rarefied sea air to waft in. We were greeted by the screeching of seagulls on the balustrade outside our window. We also found out that the white that we saw from street level that crested the building was not paint. If the guano islands in the Caribbean ever run out then the mining companies may wat to think about the roof of the Grand Hotel in Scarborough as a source.

Suitably refreshed after our journey we ventured back downstairs for dinner.

All the meals were ‘deconstructed’. Not in the fine dining sense of little bits of this and that distributed on a fine China plate which the diner then reassembles to their own taste. The Grand’s concept of de-construction is a servery counter packed with aluminium trays about the size of two A3 sheets of paper under melanoma inducing and dehydrating lamps. Everything looked the same and only the textures separated the animal from the vegetable.

Dessert was ice cream, fortunately not from under the heat lamps, but from one of those deep freezer units seen in shops where tubs of the stuff are displayed for retail. There was no service so punters, sorry ‘diners’, had to forage into the depths of the freezer to procure their ice cream. We watched one poor man who could not have been more than five feet tall getting his just desserts. The ice cream tubs, what there was of them, were so far down in the cabinet the only way he could reach them was by taking his feet off of the floor and reach headfirst into the Arctic depths. We waited and we waited while he mined for his vanilla to see if he would end up heads down in the freezer and two feet scrambling in the air. He didn’t.

On the floor of the Lloyds Insurance market in the City of London is the ‘Lutine Bell’. By tradition this bell is rung every time there has been a shipping disaster. If there was such a bell for hospitality, its clapper would have been worn out if it knew about our stay at The Grand Hotel in Scarborough.

Please note: We made this visit over ten years ago. Friends of ours stayed there in 2023 and reported pretty much the same conditions as we encountered. In fairness and in the hope things have been improved at the hotel I went to a travel site and read the following:

3rd Feb 25 - STAY AWAY!!! Absolutely disgusting hotel.

Jan 25 DUMP First room mould on the ceiling...

Jan 25 Terrible hotel - lovely location, Lovely building but unfortunately the rooms were terrible.

Conversely there were positive reviews as well and the range from negative to positive was balanced.

All I know and can confirm is what is recorded above as being my recollection of our stay for one night only.