Two years ago, after completing thirty years in teaching, I decided to try something new; writing a book. I wanted to write a book on some aspect of social history and thought seaside history would be fun. I picked six seaside "Grand" hotels to research and write about and naively began.
The general research was the easy bit; looking up census records and visiting archives, but I wanted to add another dimension to the histories and look into the people who made the hotels what they are now. This involved sifting through newspaper archives, an invaluable resource if you want to really find out about people and the stories that lie behind the facts and figures. Once I found out that Brighton had an architect before John Whichchord, who was sacked from the job and that a secret time capsule is hidden in the foundations, I was hooked. The idea of discovering information lost in the mists of time was compelling. Each time I took on a new hotel, I wondered if this would be the "boring one"; the one that would have no new stories to tell. Happily that never happened and by the end of the six hotels my addiction was so entrenched that I added a chapter on some of the Grand hotels that have been lost. Even that wasn't enough and I added another hotel to my original six, making seven in total. The book has been "finished " for a year and yet I still keep adding new information as it comes to light. I am about to embark on a new hotel; Poole and I'm already excited about what I will discover and looking forward to my trip to the National Archives.
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