Morecambe and modernity: Union north and Avanti Architects help revive Morecambe's Midland Hotel for developer/hotelier, Urban Splash.

On 26 January 1932, Oliver Hill wrote a letter to his cliend Arthur Towle, Controller of the London Midland and Scottish (LMS) railway company's Hotel Services, in which he boasted that he had 'made it my business to keep in touch with the best Continental work ... in France, Germany, Austria and Scandinavia etc and I feel that you have here a unique opportunity of building the first really modern hotel in this country'. (1) Clearly no tyro at buttering up clients, Hill added that 'my enthusiasm was greatly stimulated by the situation itself'.

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It would be difficult not to be moved by the site. It looks west and north towards the misty fells of Cumbria over Morecambe Bay, the vast mysterious glistening expanse of mud and sand covered twice a day by frightening tides reputed to move faster than a running horse. Morecambe may have fallen on sad days since, but in the early '30s it was looking up. The ship-breaking yard that had dominated the sea front for decades was closed and about to be replaced by public gardens and a luxury open air swimming complex. In 1928, the town had adopted a new motto 'Beauty surrounds: Health abounds'. With its two piers, Winter Gardens and new promenade, it claimed to be 'Britain's most modern and progressive resort'. (2) Clearly it had to have an up-to-date swish hotel.

The railway company was keen to make the place rather more upmarket than Blackpool further down the coast. Oliver Hill, who had a flourishing practice of grand houses in several styles: Palladian, Tudor and, increasingly Moderne, was appointed architect of the Midland Hotel, partly because of his familiarity with the sort of clientele the LMS hoped to attract. Hill curved his plan to follow the new sea wall and to maximise views of the bay from the convex side. Three storeys high, the slab was roughly symmetrical about a central drum containing the entrance and the grand stair, on which guests could parade in holiday finery.

To the north, the slab terminated in a one-storey circular element, the rotunda, containing a cafe and public bar intended to serve the municipal gardens and the projected swimming complex. The kitchen was placed between hotel dining room and the rotunda, so local cafe and bar customers were almost as greatly discouraged as the staff from mixing on equal terms with hotel guests: in outline, the plan was a clear diagram of '30s class structure.

The main public rooms were laid out on the convex side of the plan with, next to the kitchen, the main dining room opening from the entrance hall. On the other side of the hall was a chain of rooms that changed their function as the hotel was designed (and continued to do so in use). These terminated to the south in an open loggia overlooking the sea --'30s holidaymakers seem to have been much more robust than we are. Photographs from the period are now enlarged on the landings of the stair and reveal that it was common to sit on the sands wearing a cloth cap and heavy overcoat.

The concave side of the ground floor plan was taken up with the entrance and the service rooms. Upper floors were devoted to sleeping, with the best bedrooms and suites on the convex side, usually with balconies. Less grand bedrooms (often single bedded) on the concave side overlooking the town did not have individual bathrooms-unthinkable in a hotel with such pretensions now, but then commonplace. Guests could use a solarium on the roof. At the north end of both upper floors, staff had living quarters, carefully placed over the kitchen to avoid disturbing guests with cooking smells. In all there were only about 40 guest rooms and suites served by some 15 resident staff, with more outsiders coming in daily.

Structure was usual for the era, with a concrete encased steel frame and reinforced concrete floor slabs incorporating hollow pot infill. Very rapid construction (start on site was on 29 August 1932 with the hotel opening on 12 July in the next year), strange foundations on a sand-dune and lack of movement joints caused structural cracking even before the building opened to guests - apparently the two wings had started to sag away from the staircase drum. But defects were patched up, and in July 1934 Hill boldly announced that the building was 'highly satisfactory structurally' in his report to the LMS. (3)

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Externally, the brick walls were covered in a polished white render incorporating carborundum and crushed glass to give sparkle. Bluegreen glass (supposedly reminiscent of the colours of the bay) was used in the precast architraves to the principal windows. Though the hotel is commonly referred to as one of the first Modern buildings in Britain, it is a Classical design transforming itself into Art Deco (Hill had been an assiduous student of the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs). With its architraved windows and string courses that almost, but not quite, echo internal floor levels, it was heavily unlike the stripped-down mainstream of continental Modernism. The Architectural Review unintentionally pointed up differences by publishing Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium in the issue in which its reviewer Lord Clonmore (the magazine had a different class of writer in those days) hailed the hotel as rising 'from the sea like a great white ship', and as 'comfortable as if it were on the Continent'. (4)

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Inside, references to the sea continued. For instance, the entrance hall, which stretched right across the whole width of the plan to the great windows of the west wall that overlooked the bay, had a buff terrazzo floor, reminiscent of sand, inlaid with strips of silver mosaic to evoke waves. Hill chose all the furniture and designed much of it himself. To achieve a Gesamtkunstwerk, he worked with other artists, the most well known of whom was Eric Gill, who designed and carved the great medallion of Neptune and Triton entwined with mermaids on the drum ceiling (it was coloured by Denis Tegetmeire). Gill's classical mood continued in the south wall of the entrance hall where he carved the relief of Odysseus Welcomed from the Sea by Nausicaa: a metaphor of the hotelier receiving guests.

Gill's work also appeared on the exterior where two stylised stone seahorses heraldically crown the entrance side of the drum. The seahorse motif was invented by Marion Dorn, who designed carpets for special rooms, and the little creature was quickly adopted by the LMS as a motif for the whole hotel. The carpets have gone, but a Dorn mosaic seahorse remains in the middle of the entrance hall. Lost, like the carpets, was the mural of Night and Day by Eric and Tirzah Ravilious that decorated the inner walls of the cafe in the rotunda. Here was '30s fantasy at its most lighthearted, yet the yachts, flags and fireworks quickly disappeared - a victim of the hotel's hurried construction: the plaster was too wet, and the wax painting began to peel.

Efforts to repair the work were fruitless, but the hotel was an immediate success when it opened and attracted exactly the clientele the owners had hoped for: the Lancastrian and Yorkshire business community with famous theatre and music hall stars who performed at the Winter Gardens. Country Life called the Midland an 'exquisite building', (5) and people like Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Churchill, Noel Coward and Gloria Vanderbilt were supposed to have stayed, but their visits can no longer be authenticated for all records disappeared in subsequent chaotic events. (6) These began in September 1939, when the hotel was requisitioned as a hospital for the air force. It opened again after the war and I was taken to stay there then, but one of my few recollections is of sliding backwards down the wide, smooth silvery polished aluminium banister rail to the great consternation of the staff. Infinitely more worrying for their future was the sale of the place by the newly nationalised railways in 1952. Though the new owners were experienced hoteliers, they continued the erosion of Hill's masterpiece begun by the military. It was under them for instance that all the cutlery and crockery stamped with the seahorse motif disappeared and crude alterations started to be made in the public rooms.

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Deterioration continued under a string of (generally) increasingly disastrous owners. (7) The building was a metaphor for the whole town, which progressively lost trade as cheap plonk and air fares made Mediterranean sunshine more attractive than the bracing air of northern England. Morecambe's piers were destroyed by fire and storm; the Winter Gardens closed; clumsy attempts to create new attractions failed. By the late '90s the hotel's windows were smashed or boarded up, huge rust stains appeared on the white render, and the interior was left to fall to pieces; all the original furniture was lost. In 1992, Gill's Nausicaa relief was removed and sent to London for an exhibition after which it disappeared. The building remained as a hulk, protected by its Grade II* listed status, but its future seemed hopeless.

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Suddenly in January 2003, everything changed. Urban Splash, the adventurous developers who had already shown themselves brilliantly capable of sensitively rescuing fine but decayed buildings and making a profit from them, bought the Midland. Tom Bloxham, the company's chairman said that it was a 'fantastic building [which] I hope we will be able to restore ... as a hotel and restaurant but it will be very difficult, expensive and will no doubt take several years.' (8) He was right--and now the result (with a few small aberrations) is a triumph.

Once again the hotel sparkles on the sea front. Original fenestration and colour scheme have been retained, and on the east side the only obvious major alteration is a new, but very discreet, top storey of posh bedrooms built on the old flat roof. The drum still dominates the facade and Gill's seahorses have been repaired and cleansed of '40s paint. Hill's grand green copper outer doors have disappeared, and so has his revolving inner door, (9) now replaced by two pairs of automatic sliding ones. Changes are more obvious on the sea front, where a long thin sun lounge with a west wall glazed with butt-jointed panes has been addedon the ground floor, effectively extending the public rooms toward the sea. The extension replaces a cruder one added in the 1950s, one of the few alterations to Hill's original design that made sense. The scale and smoothness of the addition is clearly Modern, High-Tech even, slicker than Hill's work, from which it is separated by a continuous flat rooflight that at night allows light to shoot up the '30s facade from below.

Inside, the basic layout of the public rooms has been preserved, and the rediscovered Nausicaa relief has been replaced in its original position, now with the reception desk in front. Hill's glass screen between entrance hall and dining room has gone, as have fixed partitions between the string of rooms to the south of the entrance; these are now intended for functions which, from its opening, provided the hotel with a vital source of income. Upstairs, all partitions were swept away and a new layout installed, allowing every room to be double and have an en-suite bathroom, created as a wooden island within each space. Each guest room has different furniture designed this century and chosen by Urban Splash.

Resident staff are no longer required, so the space taken up by their old quarters has been given over to guest rooms which, with the new ones on the roof, are hoped to provide enough revenue to make the hotel viable. (10) Urban Splash will be the first to discover if they do not, for the developer has set up a separate company to own and run the Midland and its other hotels. Materials and workmanship have been carefully chosen to respect Hill. In the public rooms, the principles of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings have largely been obeyed: new work is seen to be new and old fabric (even if battered) is often left--occasionally disturbingly, for instance the sandy terrazzo floor of the rotunda bears the stigmata of decades of misuse, and can simply look dirty. Yet generally, when you go to the hotel, you cheer up and 'insensibly relax and feel peaceful' (11) as Country Life's readers were expected to do in 1933. All members of Urban Splash's team have clearly approached the rebirth of the Midland with passion. Will their energy be enough to ignite the renaissance of Morecambe itself? The hotel did so once.

(1.) Letter in RIBA Manusripts Collection, quoted in Conservation Analysis: Proposed Scope of Works Appraisal, Avanti Architects, November 2003, p. 71. This report was the foundation for most of the work on the building by the architects for the works, Union North. Avanti already had experience of reclaiming Oliver Hill's work in a house in Hampstead.

(2.) Advertising poster shown in Guise, Barry and Pam Brook, The Midland Hotel: Aorecambe's White Hope, Palatine Books, 2008, p.95.

(3.) Avanti report, op it, p22.

(4.) Clonmore, The Lord, London, Morecambe & elSewhere, AR, vol LXXIV, September 1933, pp 93-99.

(5.) The LMS as Maccenas, Country Life, vol LXXIV, 18 November 1933, pp 539-544.

(6.) Guise and Brook, op cit, p 101.

(7.) Details of the sad story are given in Guise and Brook, ibid, pp 151-178.

(8.) Ibid, p 179.

(9.) It was removed by the RAF to allow stretchers to be taken in.

(10.) Further space was realised by relocating many services accommodated on the east side on Hill's ground floor plan to the basement. This level had been ill-considered by Hill, and was found to be half full of fetid sea-water. It had to be drained and thoroughly water-proofed.

(11.) Country Life, op cit.

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