Adam Trimingham column

They approved the building of a new hotel nine storeys high and containing 221 beds just off the seafront.

It will take away the conference and exhibition halls at the Hotel Metropole. Why is this important? Let me take you back about 60 years when most resorts still catered mainly for families spending a fortnight by the sea. Suddenly continental countries such as Spain offered holidays with almost guaranteed sunshine at prices including full board and air fares still cheaper than those at home.

Some resorts could see it was the end of the bucket and spade era. But many such as Bexhill and Bognor did not. In showing a lack of enterprise and ambition, they condemned their towns to decades of deterioration and decline.

The worst affected town in Sussex was Hastings which was in Britain’s top five resorts in 1952. Despite its proud possession of the most famous battle name in Britain’s history, it has become a squalid dump full of penury and deprivation.

The one Sussex resort that clearly saw the way ahead was Brighton. Its councillors knew they had to try something new.

Luckily the most enterprising hotelier who agreed with them was already well established.

Not everyone liked Harold Poster whose wealth stemmed from a north London furniture firm. He was full of bluster but he had some good ideas and the will to make many of them happen. Poster believed a university should be founded in Brighton. He wanted a Brighton festival and a big yachting marina. All three started in the Sixties and were successful.

But most of all, he felt it should throw itself into the burgeoning conference and exhibition trade.

Poster owned the historic Bedford Hotel which he wanted demolished and replaced by a modern hotel with apartments and meeting rooms. A fire did a lot of the work for him.

He bought the West Pier opposite for a knockdown price and proposed additions such as a casino. But best of all he had the Hotel Metropole.

Built in 1890, the Metropole was the largest hotel in Brighton and the first to have electric light. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse who also built the Natural History Museum in London and Hove Town Hall. Poster ruined much of the architecture by installing a penthouse restaurant at the top. He knocked down several historic buildings including a church behind the Metropole and replaced them with modem exhibition halls and conference rooms. The halls had little natural light and were hideously ugly. But few other towns could offer anything like the same space and Brighton was in business – the conference business.

Brighton was always a more attractive destination for visitors than its main rival, Blackpool, and the gap has widened to a chasm.

It had nearly all hotels, restaurants and conference venues in a short stretch of the seafront. Although it had only 7,000 beds compared with an amazing 250,000 in Blackpool, they were generally far better.

But the exhibition trade took a knock when Birmingham built a new centre far bigger than anything Brighton could offer. And in a further blow, Rank, owners of the Kingswest building which was to have a new conference centre, suddenly filled the space with cinemas. Undaunted, councillors approved the first purpose-built conference centre in Britain and stuck with it even though the cost rose from £4 million to £10 million.

They offered free use of council venues to organisers and in return they filled nearly all the off peak times. The quietest month at the Metropole became August.

But in recent years there has been a decline. Poster is long dead and his exhibition halls have not been used for years. I can’t see much of a future for conferences now video meetings have become so popular during the pandemic. The Brighton Centre is out of date with not nearly enough break-out space. Other towns like Bournemouth have shared in the spoils while major cities are also offering halls. There have been plans to build a new conference centre at Black Rock and to extend the Churchill Square shopping centre towards the sea. But who will want to pay for new shops when the high street has become the die street?

Conferences will not go in one blow but I fancy that in cities like Brighton their numbers will fade fast. A latter-day Poster would not seek one solution to current problems but rather concentrate on making the resort compelling and dynamic. I’ve already put forward a slogan: Brighton – Dares to be different. Here’s another to be used with pictures of a stormy sea: Brighton – Like nowhere else on Earth. The new hotel will provide beds. Brighton’s task is to fill them.