BUILDING THE GRAND
The Grand Hotel opened its doors a century and a half ago, becoming an iconic town landmark
V-shaped architectural grandeur on a monumental scale, The Grand Hotel bestrides Scarborough’s South Bay, its imposing presence a continuing reminder for the past 150 years of the town’s status as an exclusive Victorian spa town and seaside resort.
In his 46 volume series of county guides ‘The Buildings of England’ (1951-74), Sir Nikolaus Pevsner the historian wrote:
“The wondrous Grand Hotel is a High Victorian gesture of assertion and confidence, of denial of frivolity and insistence on substance than which none more telling can be found in the land”.
Constructed on a cliff-top site that had at one time contained a lodging house where the Bronte sisters had stayed during their visits, poignantly denoted today by one of the three blue plaques commemorating Anne Bronte who died there in May 1849.
Designed by the renowned Hull architect Cuthbert Broderick (1821-1905), the Grand’s distinctive mass and domed corner towers combined with Henry II’s 12th century castle spanning the headland, are the key elements of a unique skyline that is essentially the town’s visual trademark.
Broderick had already established himself as an eminent architect with his designs for Leeds Town Hall, The Mechanic’s Institute and The Corn Exchange, his buildings prominently defining the look of the city centre.
Born as a result of the rapid development of Scarbor- ough with the expansion of the railways and the accompanying Victorian creation of seaside vacations, this most exuberant of hotel designs was conceived around the basis of the calendar.
Envisaged by Broderick as the seasons being represented by the four towers, the months by 12 floors, weeks by 52 chimneys and days by the 365 rooms.
Opened on July 24 1867, The Grand Hotel, a colossus of an edifice, was both Europe’s largest brick construction having absorbed in excess of six million bricks and the most advanced building of its kind anywhere on the Continent. Built in in a style influenced heavily from the French Second Empire mode, the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock in his ‘Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ (1977) states that it “remains internationally the most notable example of the type”.
Typical of Broderick’s approach to design, is the fine architectural detailing evident for example in the spiral iron down-pipes that can still be seen today on the exterior of the building. Unexpectedly sustaining a degree of damage during the bombardment of December 16 1914, receiving 36 shells alone, undoubtedly due to the hotel’s prominent size and location as viewed from the position of the German fleet.
Opulent, ornate, grandiose and overwhelmingly ambitious in both its conception and realisation, Scarborough’s Grand, once Europe’s premier hotel, subsequently then became the inspirational prototype for every other Grand Hotel to be built in the country.
A Grade II* listed building, of enormous historical significance, it is one of the greatest architectural assets from the town’s expansive Victorian era.
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