The Hotel Avocado

On this day a year ago, the comedian Bob Mortimer published his second novel The Hotel Avocado. The book is rooted firmly in Brighton, with much of the action revolving around a fictional seafront hotel in Hove distinguished by a giant avocado sculpture outside its doors. Mortimer’s Brighton is a place of seaside hotels, bus stops, eccentric neighbours and surreal detail, a backdrop that frames his off-beat comic sensibility.

Robert Renwick Mortimer, born in 1959, is best known as one half of the comedy duo Vic and Bob. Raised in Middlesbrough, he studied law before turning to performance, eventually creating Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Shooting Stars and Gone Fishing. Though he lives in Kent, Mortimer has long used Brighton as a location in his fiction, and in The Hotel Avocado it becomes the centre of his comic universe.

The novel - published by Gallery Books and a sequel to his debut The Satsuma Complex - follows Gary Thorn, a diffident solicitor from Peckham. His girlfriend Emily has inherited and is attempting to renovate a Brighton hotel. Gary is caught between his safe but dull life in London - sharing pies and walks with his elderly neighbour Grace and her dog Lassoo - and the pull of Emily’s Brighton Beach project. Matters become more fraught when he crosses paths with the threatening Mr (or Clive) Sequence, who is intent on silencing Gary in a corruption trial. Meanwhile, Emily wrestles with planners over the proposed avocado statue, Gary’s friends embark on ever stranger schemes, and Mortimer shifts the narration through multiple unlikely voices, from Emily to a pigeon.

From the opening chapter of The Hotel Avocado; picture above is by ChatGPT.

‘If you’ve never heard of the Hotel Avocado, then you are way behind me. Miles back, in fact. If you have heard of it, then well done you, but don’t go getting all pumped up about it because I’ve actually seen it. I see it most days. Sometimes from the pavement as I walk past, sometimes from the bus stop opposite when I’m having my lunch. To be honest, I’ll take any vantage point I can. I’m not fussy like some people. There is a chance that you’re someone that has seen it for yourself, in which case we are #equals. Better still, of course, you might be someone who has been inside or even stayed at the hotel. If that’s the case, then I have to concede that you are an Avocado scholar compared to me. Yes, I’ve glanced through the front door and some of its windows (so I’d want credit for that), but I’ve never set a foot over its threshold. That would be the dream. Maybe one day.

For those who are coming to it all ignorant and innocent, let me add some paint to the picture. The hotel is second from the end of a long terrace of hotels and apartment buildings directly facing the sea on the promenade of my town called Brighton on the south coast of England.

It’s a big five-storey Victorian stuccoed building painted a yellowy magnolia and nestled between two identically designed buildings: the Royal Hotel to the left and the Hove View Apartments on the end plot to the right . . . You can forget those two places as far as I’m concerned; it’s the Avocado that steals the show. For one, its windows are always clean, but listen to this (and apologies if you are one of the people who has seen the place): on the front of the hotel is a huge (five metres tall), sliced in half, avocado sculpture.’

Brighton’s grand dame

One hundred and thirty-five years ago this summer, on 26 July 1890, the grand Hotel Metropole swung open its doors. It was the largest and most prestigious hotel outside London, with over 700 bedrooms and a 500-seat dining hall. The opening was so spectacular that a luxury train carried 1,500 visitors from Victoria and Brighton’s King’s Road was carpeted with red Hassocks sand. In the run-up, rumour had run riot - some said the Metropole would boast 4,000 bedrooms, others that its electric lighting could illuminate the entire town.

The Metropole was the vision of hotel magnate Frederick Gordon, known as the ‘Napoleon of the Hotel World’, who wanted a showpiece to crown his chain. He turned to Alfred Waterhouse, the celebrated architect of the Natural History Museum, whose use of red brick and terracotta gave Brighton’s seafront a startling contrast to the familiar white stucco. Together they created a building that was both vast and imposing, a statement of modern luxury that set out to eclipse anything the resort had seen before.

In its early years, the Metropole was a glittering hub for stage-struck society: Julia James and the Dare sisters, Zena and Phyllis; Vesta Tilley, the famed male impersonator (see The St Aubyns performers); Lillie Langtry, the Jersey Lily; Countess Poulett in her sumptuous finery - all taking tea under chandeliers and whispering success, scandal, and style. And in August 1917, Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s artistic daughter, stayed for ten days, blending royal grace with genuine empathy as she comforted wounded soldiers.

During the Second World War, the hotel pivoted from luxury to service. It housed RAF aircrew and Australian and New Zealand forces, becoming a wartime hub with hospitality leagues, chaplains, dentists, thousands of grateful servicemen, and fresh New Zealand tinned oysters. In July 1945, it even became a Red Cross centre to repatriate POWs, offering warm baths, clean uniforms, de-briefings and tender reunions.

Post-war, the Metropole staged a glamorous revival: in 1947 Winston Churchill and Clementine dined there after he received the Freedom of Brighton, and that signed menu remains in the hotel’s library. The 1950s and 60s saw it flourish as a VIP hotspot - Shirley Bassey, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret, Margot Fonteyn, Ian Fleming - graced its casino which once hosted 800 guests a night.

From today’s vantage - 135 years down the line - the Metropole still stands as Brighton’s grand dame. Its original façade remains unmistakable; the building’s integrity continues despite 1960s extensions. The south-facing bedrooms still look out over the beach, offering views that have changed little since 1890, apart from the line of wind turbines on the horizon and the melancholy remains of the West Pier slowly crumbling into the sea. It remains the largest residential conference hotel in the South of England, with 340 bedrooms, now operating under the DoubleTree by Hilton brand since 2023.

More on the hotel can be found at Wikipedia, or at Judy Middleton’s excellent Hove in the past website.

Through Dammo’s eyes

Following on from the Brighton Mod Weekender, two exhibitions are giving Brighton a chance to look at Mod culture in fresh detail. On the beach front, beside the i360 and the Upside Down House, the photographer David Clarke - known to the Mod community as Dammo - is showing Through My Eyes, a free outdoor display of his work. 

The exhibition sits between the shingle and the traffic, where the promenade railings overlook the sea, so that anyone strolling past or pausing for an ice cream finds themselves drawn into the images. Running until the end of August, it charts twenty years of the Brighton Mod Weekender, from scooter ride-outs to sharply dressed gatherings, and captures how a once-fringe revival has matured into a fixture of the city’s summer. Clarke’s images are not posed studio portraits but candid records of Mods in their element, whether standing by the railings in the wind or reflected in the chrome of a Vespa.

Inside Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, a parallel exhibition takes a deeper dive into the roots of the movement. The In Crowd: Mod Fashion & Style 1958-66 brings together garments, photographs, ephemera and music that defined the original scene. From Italian-cut suits to miniskirts, from Motown singles to Lambretta brochures, the show aims to immerse visitors in the years when the Mod aesthetic was first forged. The curators emphasise that Mod was as much about attitude as appearance, with a spirit of youthful confidence shaping fashion choices and nightlife.

Although both exhibitions centre on Mod identity, their approaches differ. Clarke’s photography celebrates the Brighton revival, with an eye on the community that has kept scooters on Madeira Drive most Augusts since 2005. The museum’s survey looks back to an earlier moment, before Quadrophenia and before the myth-making, when Mod was still a modernist youth movement in the making. Together, they offer a conversation across sixty years: how a style born in late-1950s London became heritage on the south coast, and how today’s enthusiasts carry the look forward.

The contrast between the two is deliberate. Clarke’s work meets passers-by in the open air, integrated into the ebb and flow of promenade life, while the museum requires a step indoors into a curated, reflective space. One is part of the spectacle, the other a retrospective. For the Mod faithful, the seafront show is also a chance to find themselves in the pictures: Clarke has been a regular on the front line of ride-outs and has built up an archive unmatched in its scope. Meanwhile, the museum exhibition situates Mod within broader shifts in British design and music, drawing links with jazz clubs, Carnaby Street boutiques and the global rise of youth culture.

A boy, a yacht and a cat

On this day in 1951 the Daily Mirror published the tale of a boy, a yacht and a cat. ‘Shivering and soaked to the skin,’ it began, twelve-year-old Roger Maitland stood on the deck of his father’s topsail schooner Rustler as heavy seas drove her toward the shingle. When the anchor cable parted and a tow proved hopeless, Roger tucked the kitten inside his jacket and swam for the shore while holidaymakers cheered. ‘I was not afraid,’ he said afterwards; ‘The kitten got frightened and clawed my face.’ The Daily Mirror set out the scene in tight detail: the beach some sixty yards away; his father, Kenneth Maitland, and family friend Fred Austin also abandoning the vessel; and the Shoreham lifeboat with a hawser aboard but unable to pull her clear.

The Telegraph, the same day, added the practical coda: after failed attempts to refloat her that tide, Rustler was hauled higher up the beach by a lorry to await the next rise. A photograph in The Journal of the Royal National Life-boat Institution - captioned ‘Shoreham life-boat and the yacht Rustler - shows the schooner grinding in the surf with the lifeboat standing by.

A year later, the wreck was still a Brighton landmark. Ernie Charman’s diary places him on the promenade on Sunday 24 August 1952, photographing Rustler beached between the piers as crowds filed past. His note fixes the date; the memories it prompted show how fast the vessel became part of seafront life.

Local recollections found at My Brighton and Hove fill in what happened next. ‘The Rustler could not be refloated,’ one reader remembers; ‘dozens of volunteers shovelling stones away from the ship,’ recalls another. Several contributors say children were allowed aboard: ‘we climbed on board, I was eight years old,’ wrote Terry Hyde; ‘the man let us on board to play . . . it was fabulous,’ remembered Rosemary Brazill. As the fabric failed, accounts say the remains were eventually burned and beachcombers picked through the cooling timbers for copper and bronze.

The Mod Weekender

Thousands of scooters and sharply dressed Mods descended on Brighton this Bank Holiday weekend, with Madeira Drive once again the focal point of the annual Mod Weekender. Lines of Vespas and Lambrettas, many lavishly customised with chrome, lights and Union Jacks, stretched along the promenade, while the beach and seafront filled with spectators and photographers. For many, the weekend has become a living tribute to the subculture that defined the 1960s and found one of its most enduring homes in Brighton.

The Brighton Mod Weekender was established in 2005 by The New Untouchables, a London-based collective of DJs, promoters and enthusiasts committed to keeping Mod culture alive. The group had long been organising club nights and events centred on Northern Soul, ska, rhythm and blues, and 1960s beat music. Bringing their efforts to Brighton in the mid-2000s was both symbolic and practical: the city was immortalised in the 1979 film Quadrophenia and already had a global reputation as the spiritual home of the Mods. (See also Mods and Rockers clash in the 60s.)

The inaugural event in 2005 drew hundreds of scooters and enthusiasts, with daytime meet-ups on the seafront and late-night parties at venues such as the Komedia. Over the years it has grown into one of the largest gatherings of its kind, attracting visitors from across Britain and Europe. Scooter ride-outs to Beachy Head and beyond became part of the ritual, as did competitions for the best customised bikes, while the weekend marketplace offered records, clothing and memorabilia. The event also helped shift Brighton’s civic stance: once a city that banned Mods from its pier in the 1960s, it has since embraced them as part of its heritage and tourist identity.

The Weekender has not been without its defining moments. In 2014, thousands of Mods marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous 1964 seaside clashes with Rockers, filling Brighton’s streets with scooters in what local media described as the largest gathering since those heady days. In 2019, the seaside saw record crowds again, just before the pandemic forced a pause in 2020. When the event returned, the emphasis on heritage was clearer than ever, with exhibitions, photographic retrospectives and fashion shows anchoring the programme alongside the music and scooters.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Brighton Mod Weekender, and the celebrations have been extensive. Yesterday and today Madeira Drive was packed with scooters, while crowds lined the seafront to watch the ride-outs and browse the stalls.

Intrepidly into the sea

This month marks 170 years since the final monthly number of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes appeared in August 1855, an anniversary that recalls the novelist’s life and his enduring ties with Brighton - above all the pages that put Brighton’s beach, pier and sea-air squarely into Victorian fiction. In Vanity Fair he sketches the resort as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’, while in The Newcomes he steps onto the Chain Pier and, in a few gleeful lines, all but lets the surf spray the page.

Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811, sent to England as a child, and educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge (he left without taking a degree). After a short flirtation with art and a loss of much of his inheritance, he turned to journalism and illustration, writing for Fraser’s Magazine and later Punch, where The Book of Snobs made his name. He married Isabella Shawe in 1836; the marriage was shadowed by her severe mental illness, and he raised their daughters - Anne (later the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie) and Harriet Marian - largely on his own. His major novels followed in quick succession: Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853-55) and The Virginians (1857-59). In 1860 he became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine. He died in London on 24 December 1863 and was buried at Kensal Green. (See Wikipedia for more on Thackeray’s life and this sketched self-portrait.)

Brighton sits in the middle of both the life and the work. Thackeray knew the resort first-hand - letters mention him ‘sitting on the chain pier in a bath chair’, dosing himself with sea-breezes - and he was fond of calling the place ‘Doctor Brighton’, a quackish but kindly physician for overworked Londoners. In July 1859 Thackeray stayed at the Royal Crescent Hotel and produced a small watercolour titled Brighton from The Royal Crescent Hotel, July 17th 1859. Though best known as a novelist and satirist, he had trained as an artist and continued to sketch throughout his life, leaving behind drawings and painted vignettes of the places he visited.

When looking at his fiction, Brighton is less a backdrop than a mood: brisk, gaudy, restorative, faintly satirical. Vanity Fair uses Brighton as a stage where masks slip. Newly married George Osborne and Amelia Sedley take the air on the front; Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley work their separate hustles in lodgings, billiard rooms and on the cliff; and as the Waterloo campaign gathers, ‘all the principal personages’ decamp. Thackeray’s aside - Brighton as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’ - is both postcard and pin-prick.

The Newcomes (available to borrow digitally at Internet Archive) brings its readers to the seafront with a panoramic relish, the narrator Arthur Pendennis surveying the parade of bath-chairs, schoolgirls and telescope-wielding day-trippers. The scene catches the democratic sprawl of the beach long before cameras made it commonplace.

‘In Steyne Gardens, Brighton, the lodging-houses are among the most frequented in that city of lodging-houses. These mansions have bow-windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences, and ornamented with neat verandahs, from which you can behold the tide of human-kind as it flows up and down the Steyne, and that blue ocean over which Britannia is said to rule, stretching brightly away eastward and westward. The chain-pier, as everybody knows, runs intrepidly into the sea, which sometimes, in fine weather, bathes its feet with laughing wavelets, and anon, on stormy days, dashes over its sides with roaring foam. Here, for the sum of twopence, you can go out to sea and pace this vast deck without need of a steward with a basin. You can watch the sun setting in splendour over Worthing, or illuminating with its rising glories the ups and downs of Rottingdean. You see the citizen with his family inveigled into the shallops of the mercenary native mariner, and fancy that the motion cannot be pleasant; and how the hirer of the boat, otium et oppidi laudi et rura sui, haply sighs for ease, and prefers Richmond or Hampstead. You behold a hundred bathing-machines put to sea; and your naughty fancy depicts the beauteous splashing under their white awnings. Beneath the rippled sands (stay, are they rippled sands or shingly beach?) the prawn-boy seeks the delicious material of your breakfast. Breakfast - meal in London almost unknown, greedily devoured in Brighton! In ten vessels now near the shore the sleepless mariner has ventured forth to seize the delicate whiting, the greedy and foolish mackerel, and the homely sole. Hark to the twanging horn! it is the early coach going out to London.’

Little ol’ me

Hmm… these green buses aren’t very tasty. All showy paint, no chips inside. Crunchy, yes, but not the good kind. Not like a battered sausage. Or even one of those flapjack cubes from the café with the seafront awning. I miss those. Oh crumbs, literal crumbs - I miss crumbs. These days, crumbs wouldn’t keep me alive for five minutes, not since I’ve grown to the size of an SUV.

People screaming. I don’t want to hurt them. I thought maybe this time one of them would drop something hot and greasy and perfect. I don’t want phones; they taste almost as bad as beach pebbles.

Why did I peck the bus? Why do I keep pecking buses?

Oh no . . . someone’s filming again. Look at them, tiny hands raised like they’re trying to tame me. I’m not a monster. I’m just big. And starving.

That mixer thing, ahead of the green buses. It smells odd. Kind of like eggs? Hot pavement? A building site in summer? Maybe it’s got gravy inside. Maybe it’s a giant sausage roll for machines. Maybe - just one peck. One nibble. Ugh.

I didn’t ask to grow this big. One minute I’m arguing over a churro with Kevin, the next I’ve outgrown the bandstand and I’m scaring toddlers, and their parents are calling 999. I don’t even fit under the pier anymore. I used to roost there. It was cosy. It was safe. Now all I want is food.

There’s another bus. I’m getting a sense that I need to do more, work a bit harder to feed myself . . . The people inside, they’re looking very tasty. Oh look, some of them are getting off at the bus stop. I’ve grown too hungry to control myself, now I see the answer perfectly: this may be a bus stop for people, but it’s a food stop for little ol’ me.