While restaurants come and go in Brighton and Hove, hotels tend to last a long time. Most of the main hotels in the resort a century ago are still on the seafront today.

A few have gone to the wall, changed their names or been renovated but someone from 1914 would still recognise the Grand Metropole, Old Ship and Royal Albion.

The Old Ship lives up to its name by being far and away the most ancient. It was already thriving when Nicholas Tettersell, who helped save King Charles II by shipping him out to France, bought it during the Restoration.

But the hotel has always been well liked by visitors and a room is named after the great violinist Paganini who once played there.

The Royal Albion dates from the 1820s but its heyday was a century later when it and the neighbouring Royal York were owned by Sir Harry Preston.

Diminutive and daring, Preston had an eye for publicity. He brought the greatest writers and sportsmen of the era down to Brighton and made sure the world knew about it.

The Grand lived up to its name from the time it was built in the 1860s. Yet a hundred years later there were plans to demolish it which luckily were thwarted.

It gained its greatest fame in 1984 when the IRA bombed it during the Tory Party conference, killing five people and narrowly missing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The handsome Bedford Hotel was destroyed during a suspicious fire in 1964 which also caused loss of life.

Its replacement, a hideous concrete combination of hotel rooms and apartments, kept the same name for a few years but is now run by Holiday Inn.

The biggest hotel is the Metropole and when built in the 1890s it was the largest outside London.

It was extended in the Sixties by Harold Poster who had the vision to see that Brighton could do well with conferences and exhibitions.

What a pity it was that the extensions were so ugly and that the scheme included building Sussex Heights, still the highest building in the county.

Meanwhile the flamboyant Feld family bought the lacklustre Norfolk hotel and made it a fun place to be.

It took a long time for a new hotel to be built after the Second World War but more than 30 years on, the Ramada (now the Thistle) was built near the town hall.

The hotel’s huge atrium was unkindly compared with the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham but it fulfilled a need.

Several hotels have been built recently, mostly inland for budget travellers, and more are planned which will be good for Brighton.