Take a tour of the Hotel ‘Cesspit’
MARTINVANBEYNENvisits the unlovely hotel in Papanui once called Hotel All Seasons butnowabandoned while its owner CP Group waits for an insurance settlement.
Welcome to Hotel Festering Cesspit. Let me show you to your room.
The abandoned hotel in Christchurch’s Papanui Rd is now famous as a ‘‘bombsite and festering cesspit for squatters’’, thanks to Christchurch City councillor Jamie Gough’s colourful description.
Opposite private girls’ school St Margaret’s College, the hotel reception area welcomes the visitor with a musty smell. The carpet is strewn with glass and tourist pamphlets. The mirror behind the reception desk is intact. Chandeliers still hang from the ceiling.
In the restaurant, the name of which used to start with ‘‘Scot’’, the light shades are smashed, tables are up-ended and the doors to the kitchen have taken many kicks.
The carpeted floor is awash with books – Soul Purpose by Heidi von Beltz catches the toe – rocks and broken glass. The word ‘‘Teeth’’, with an illustration of a tooth, has been sprayed in blue on the wall.
Up the stairs, where the balustrade has been snapped off, is the former Brookfield Conference Room.
Drapes are on the floor which is covered in Batts, ceiling panels and other debris. One wall has been impaled by chairs and adorned with the words Mongrel Mob in red spray paint.
Up more stairs to the rooms calculator rolls litter the hallway. Despite the chaos, this is still very much a hotel. Gideon bibles, baskets which once held coffee and tea sachets, hair dryers and pale prints of bucolic scenes are dotted around in various states of repair.
In Room 335, a thick mirror has been shattered with shards over the floor. Bad luck. A fire extinguisher, the likely culprit, and an ironing board lie flat on the carpet.
Room 334 looks out to the west and a fresh breeze is coming through a large hole in the wall which used to have a window. In Room 336, you can stand on the balcony and look at the west wall of the hotel, now a row of smashed windows and other damage.
The top floor has accommodated the more house proud. One room has no broken windows and on the table is a little candle next to an empty cigarette packet. The bed is tidy and someone has left a pair of bed socks and a toothbrush.
Next door has more signs of habitation. Beer bottles, a cigarette packet, a room key (670), a plastic Super Liquor bag, a paper Burger King bag, a Gideon bible and an empty KGB vodka bottle.
Past a door smashed flat and sprayed with the word ‘‘Rambo’’ is Room 454, where three mattresses have been moved together and someone has put some Christmas tinsel over the wall lamps.
A sign hangs from one room door. ‘‘Please make up my room’’.
The building remains solid and what strikes the visitor is not the mess, which could be cleaned up, but the waste.
A perfectly functional accommodation building which could have housed any number of workers, people caught out by the shortage of rental accommodation or the homeless has been shamefully left to rot.
An opportunity gone begging.