The Grand is a dog-eared Cluedo hotel. The Art Deco ballroom, with its sprung dance floor covered in carpet, opens into a library used for community events, which in turn leads into a vast dining room, while the other wing has a billiard room.
Everything in this Folkestone landmark is a bit messy: empty tables and chairs pushed aside, curtains askew, a grand piano here and there. A 1920s-style mural completes the Agatha Christie feel. There’s even a stray three-pronged candlestick.
The man with the black envelope is Pierre Condou, a restaurateur with a reputation in London’s members’ clubs and part of a community group that plans to restore the Grand to its former grandeur, when King Edward VII held court here on the seafront with his mistress Alice Keppel in the early 20th century. “It was like being given the keys to a sweet shop,” says Condou, pacing the room. “There’s so much potential.”
He wants to transform the entrance, an airy atrium with chessboard tiles, better known as the Palm Court, into a modern brasserie and create an event space in the public areas for weddings or corporate events.
“Folkestone, the whole Kent coast and seaside resorts in Britain in general, I think are on the verge of a renaissance,” he says.
Condou is banking on the Grand’s future success on the influx of DFLs (Down From London) who moved here when the Covid pandemic showed that working from home was feasible, combined with the investment in Folkestone by Sir Roger De Haan, whose father founded the Saga holiday group.
“All of these factors are beginning to revitalize the coastal community vacation destination market.”
Others agree, and many are building new hotels rather than restoring old ones. In Southport, entrepreneurs are planning to create the Cove Resort, a £75 million surf park complex on the Lancashire coast, with a hotel and thermal spa, along with a £73 million events space on the seafront being built by the local authority.
Across the Ribble Estuary in Blackpool, folks have been busy opening luxury, Insta-worthy hotels in the birthplace of seaside kitsch, such as Big Blue and the restored Number One South Beach.
And on the south coast, in Poole, another community has ambitious plans to rebuild the Haven Hotel, once used by inventor and physicist Guglielmo Marconi for his work on developing radio.
“It’s an iconic place coming into Poole Harbour, and it has a heritage,” said Norman Allenby Smith, chairman of the Sandbanks Community Group. Residents fought plans to demolish the hotel for 119 luxury apartments for seven years and, after winning a planning battle, decided to come up with their own vision and paid architect Philip Gumuchdjian to draw up plans.
“There would be a new hotel on the site with an aerial radio tower on top of the building to mark Marconi’s heritage,” Allenby Smith said. “Life has changed in the last seven years. Good hotels in iconic locations are still very popular. People want to come and stay for three or five days, not necessarily two weeks with a bucket and spade. A number of hotel groups would like to move into that building if we can get permission.”
Peter Hampson, CEO of British Destinations, said seaside resorts are still much more popular than is often thought, but that Britain’s beach hotels now face much more competition than in the past.
“The radical change in the vacation market is that people are now going to cities,” he said. “Mass tourism used to be about people getting away from cities and getting some fresh air. But the biggest threat to hotels is the explosion of Airbnb accommodations.”
According to the International Passenger Survey, visitors spent 29 million nights in a rented home or apartment last year, up 5 million from 2019, compared with nearly 91 million nights in hotels, down about 4 million from 2019.
“Airbnb, in British terms, has always said to the government, oh, we’re just expanding hotels,” Hampson said. “But now they’ve changed their international marketing. Their advertising says Airbnb is better than a hotel.
“And that’s interesting because there’s a moral economic dilemma – should you encourage people to convert residential properties into accommodations to compete directly with the traditional hotel? Because what happens to hotels when they go out of business? They get converted into residential properties.”
That describes what happened to the Grand. When it opened in 1903, the Grand’s founder, Gustave Gelardi, marketed his property as 30 suites of “gentlemen’s rooms” where fashionable men could rent their lodgings for the holidays. There were accommodations for chauffeurs and maids, kitchens and gardens, and everything was arranged so that, as a newspaper review of the time put it, “one can enjoy the seclusion of one’s own home, as it were, and yet have all the advantages and conveniences of a grand hotel.”
According to the book of Emre Araci The Great RevisionEdward VII spent his weekends at the Grand Hotel with Keppel, a hostess and aristocrat who was the great-grandmother of Queen Camilla.
“As the royal entourage took their places in the Palm Court, local residents looked out of the windows, so much so that [it] was called the monkey house.”
The clash between upper and lower classes underlies much of the history of the seaside. Spending time at the seaside was the preserve of the wealthy, who would stay there for weeks at a time. Hotels were a way for the wealthy to escape from the common people who flocked to the seaside on Britain’s growing railway network.
“Hotels were sort of on the edge of where all the chaos was happening, almost like gated communities,” says Dr Allan Brodie, a historian at the University of Bournemouth and part of the Seaside Heritage Network team. The first big hotels, such as the Grand in Brighton and the Grand in Scarborough, came in the 1860s and the building boom continued until the 1930s, when the holiday camps arrived.
In the 1970s, after hosting celebrities such as 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 coastline continues to capture our imagination
The rooms were converted into flats and bought by Michael Stainer, who set up tea rooms and a pub in the building. He was jailed in 2022 for tax fraud after failing to pay £470,000 in taxes owed to his employees.
To help pay for the building’s upkeep, Grand residents plan to convert portions of the ground floor into 24 new vacation homes, 13 of which are listed for sale this week. The money from the vacation homes will go toward a new restaurant and commercial space.
“The Grand can be revived,” says Condou. “It’s just falling into disrepair and needs to be modernized.”