MORE than 1,000 people are expected to have signed our petitions calling for the French Convalescent Home to be saved from demolition after this weekend.

Members of the public angry over plans to pull down the chateau-style building on Brighton seafront have been queueing to put their name to the plea for it to be preserved.

Trustees of the home, who say it is in financial difficulty, are selling it for a rumoured £1.5 million to developers Bovis Retirement Homes, which plans to bulldoze the

101-year-old home and build 67

sheltered flats.

But managers, who only learned of the sale after reading a planning notice pinned up outside the home, say it is healthy, with only one spare bed and four calls a week from social services, looking for somewhere to place

hospital patients in need of care.

At an appeal table set up in St James's Street on Thursday, dozens waited patiently to sign the petition and to urge Brighton and Hove Council's planning committee to throw out the plans.

Meeting

And petition leaflets have been distributed throughout the town and neighbouring villages.

Meanwhile, home manager Catherine Gennaro, who was not told of the flats plan, is meeting with trustees on Monday.

She said: "The whole thing is scandalous. They say we are in financial difficulties. But if that is the case, why do we have 97 per cent occupancy rate?

"We have one spare bed and every week I have three or four calls from social services to ask if they can place patients with us.

"The only people not meeting standards in all this are the trustees. They never come down, they never contact us. I am the manager but I have not been told a thing."

The Tory opposition leader on Brighton and Hove Council has challenged the French ambassador to meet the 38 elderly residents who will have to find new homes.

Coun Geoffrey Theobald visited the home yesterday to meet residents and some of the 50 staff facing redundancy.

He pledged to write to ambassador Daniel Bernard, whose predecessor Bernard Dourin appointed the trustees and said in a speech at the home in 1992 that it should never be closed.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.