Top hotel spends £500,000 to improve leisure time

WORK has begun on a £500,000

project to improve the leisure club at the most famous hotel in Sussex.

The Grand, on Brighton seafront, is undergoing the renovation as part of a multi-million pound facelift to bring it into line with other five-star hotels.

New facilities will include the town's first saunarium, a cross between a sauna and a steam room, which allows individual users to alter the temperature setting for their own needs.

The swimming pool, lounge area, showers and gyms are also to undergo a series of improvements.

Leisure club manager Debbie Reed said: "Customers are becoming more demanding these days and we have to move with the times to create a superior quality of stay."

The leisure club was closed on Monday and builders began work yesterday. It is due to reopen next month.

Miss Reed said: "We are ambitious to compete with the other top hotels in the country and the company is rebranding its whole leisure operation."

The Grand's owner, De Vere, which runs 14 hotels in Britain, is also replacing the 135-year-old domed glass canopy above the main stairwell at a cost of £210,000.

Forty of the hotel's 200 rooms will undergo a £700,000 facelift.

Elsewhere in the building, an £80,000 carpet is to be laid in the Empress Suite and curtains costing £9,000 will be hung in the Albert conference room.

The Grand became Brighton's first five-star hotel in 1988 and has since been joined by the nearby Thistle.

Since it was completed at a cost of £100,000 in 1864, it has hosted visiting statesmen such as American Presidents Kennedy and Reagan and the French Emperor Napoleon III.

But the hotel's most famous moment came in 1984 when an IRA bomb, intended to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, went off late at night.

It caused widespread damage and killed five Conservative Party conference delegates.

This was not, however, the first time the Grand's future was in doubt. In 1961, Brighton Council bought the eight-storey building and applied to demolish it and replace it with an amusement arcade.

But Government intervention ensured it received listed status and remained a distinctive part of the town's skyline.

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