FUMING locals are hitting back over plans to bulldoze a historic hotel, branding it a “disgusting act of vandalism”.
Residents in Poole Harbour, Bourmemouth, are outraged with the owners of The Haven Hotel, who plan on levelling the site to make way for developers.
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Located in well-to-do Sandbanks, where the average home sells for £1.5million on average, the hotel – built in 1880 – is coming to the end of its life, owners claim.
A planning agent, acting on behalf of FJB Hotels, say they intend to build a cheaper hotel of a similar size in its place – but locals aren’t having it.
Resident Keith Ulyatt wrote in his objection letter: “Granting permission for demolition without any proposal of what is to replace it is totally unacceptable.
“It raises the prospect of a flattened empty building plot being in place for years, in the most iconic of local locations…so that any subsequent proposed building would be acceptable compared to the wasteland created.”
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Many of the locals fear the site may remain empty for a long period of time, so that more profitable deals for luxury flats can be pushed through.
Andrew Reed, said: “This application is nothing short of vandalism, a ploy to avoid the rigorous assessment of a future development application by reducing a usable and valuable asset to a piece of waste ground in the most prominent of locations.”
Overlooking the Channel, the 84-bedroom hotel was the birthplace of the radio, after Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi set up camp in the lounge there to experiment with wireless telegraphy.
Resident Carl Emms said: “I’m disgusted that a property of such historic significance has been left to deteriorate.
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“It seems to have been a deliberate lowering of maintenance and worth so to convince decision makers that the hotel’s future is not sustainable.”
Marconi moved to the hotel in 1898, where he assembled a make-shift laboratory and built a 120-foot wooden transmitter mast in the hotel grounds.
When the Titanic sank in April 1912, the operators onboard used the Marconi radio network to transmit their desperate SOS signals back to terra firma.
Despite its wealth of history, Richard Carr of Property Planning Strategy, who is working for FJB Hotels, said the hotel cannot be saved.
“The site has to be used as a hotel and we plan to submit a new application very soon for an 85-bedroom hotel,” he said.
“We are planning to demolish the Haven which isn’t listed or in a Conservation Area. The building has come to the end of its life.
“The majority of it is a steel-form building which faces the sea and has been exposed to salt water and south-westerly winds for over 100 years. Parts of it are severely corroded.
“If you run a bath, you get yellow water from where the pipes were made of galvanised steel that has perished over the years.”
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He added that the running costs were “eye-watering” and “ridiculous” and insisted that the new hotel would cost far less to run and would be built from modern materials.
Sandbanks, which is made up of about 800 households, has several famous residents including former football managers Harry Redknapp and Graeme Souness, and the computer magnate Sir Peter Ogden.