The Royal Victoria
As I mentioned in the previous post, our visit to Hastings and Battle included a stay at The Royal Victoria Hotel, and we chose it for it's location and historic interest. The hotel was built in 1828 and gets its name from Queen Victoria. And now we can count ourselves among the 500 distinguished guests who have stayed in the hotel, including King George V, Prince Albert, Edward VII, Gladstone, Palmerston and Tennyson. So not only were scenes from Foyle's War filmed here, but one of my favorites, Tennyson, slept here too!
The hotel is situated right on the coast and most rooms have views of the English Channel and Beachy Head. It is difficult to photograph the hotel because it is right on a busy coastal road, and directly across the street is the beach, with a promenade above the sand level. To get a view of the hotel you have to stay up on the promenade, but the hotel is huge so photographing from the promenade is too close!
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| The view from the same side of the street - The Royal Victoria is BIG and quite beautiful, even on the grayest of days. |
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| From across the street on the promenade - trying to show the full length of the hotel |
The hotel does have free parking, but the small lot 6 cars is the extent of their on-site parking. The rest is street parking. We found street parking behind the hotel once and on the street in front of and up the street just a bit, and this is obviously not high season! I can't imagine trying to park in August!
The entrance to the hotel is a beautiful wood revolving door. But as you can see, it isn't large, so getting through it with luggage was a bit of a challenge. Despite my best efforts, I sort of spilled into the lobby.
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| The revolving door! |
When we checked in, I was excited to learn that our room was on the 5th floor (great views!), but that excitement was quickly extinguished when we were told the elevator was broken and we would have to take the stairs. We had two suitcases (one with clothes and one full camera suitcase) and two laptop bags. Normally, stairs aren't a problem, but our stuff was heavy! So while the view from the 5th floor was breathtaking, so was the chug up the stairs.
Having been built in 1828, the hotel has a lot of beautiful architectural components as well as some quirks. The ground floor lobby is nice, but it was dark and led to a grand staircase as well as some meeting rooms. The Grand Staircase is beautiful, with marble columns and balustrade. At the first landing, the staircase divides to the right and left and continues to the 1st floor. There is mirror on the back wall of the landing, the photo below is looking up to the first landing with the staircase continuing up to the first floor reflected in the mirror.
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| The Grand Staircase, 1st landing - you can see the lobby at the landing level and the staircase rising to the first floor reflected in the mirror. The flowers are in front of the mirror on the landing. | | |
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| The Grand Staircase from above |
Both sides of the staircase open up to a lounge area that is flanked by hallways leading to rooms on one side and a bar and restaurant on the other.
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| At the top of the Grand Staircase |
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| The Lounge Area |
The bar and restaurant are at the front of the hotel to take advantage of the ocean views. We had breakfast in the restaurant and each morning we were greeted by the maître d'; a very outgoing gentleman from Barcelona with a sense of humor! You can see him in the photo below.
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| View into the restaurant from the bar area |
From the lounge area, we continued up another staircase, and this one had a beautiful stained glass window.
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| Stained glass window in the first floor stair case |
From this staircase we had to walk from the center of the hotel down the length of one side to get to the side staircase leading to the 5th floor. Our room was quite big and it was nice. The opulence of the staircase and lounge area didn't extend to our standard room, but I would guess that some very nice suites are available here. Still, we had a 2 room suite with a bath and it was nicely decorated.
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| The main room -view from the door |
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| Opposite view - you can see the doorway to the sitting room |
The sitting room had a dressing table, two very large closets with cabinets above them and a sitting area.
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| The sitting room |
Both rooms have ocean views:
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| The English Channel and the Promenade |
The bath was pretty standard except for one thing:
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| Separate hot and cold taps?! Eight inches apart?! Not sure how "warm" is supposed to work in that configuration! |
Oh...and another thing. There was plenty of hot water. A little too much, probably. Getting the water temp just right in the shower was a challenge because for some reason, once it was hot it was very difficult to keep a mix of cold water so that it wasn't scalding. And when the hot water was running in the shower, warm water came out the cold water tap on the sink. Voila! Problem solved! Ron thinks that the hot water pressure was much greater than the cold water pressure, causing it to back flow. I call it roundabout engineering.
I'm also going to guess that the floors are original. Not the carpeting and linoleum, of course, but the ones underneath. They creak and moan and wobble to and fro! Walking across the floors was akin to walking on a small boat. I would have liked to have seen the floors underneath - I wonder if they are fabulously old parquet? I really think the quirks are part of the charm of staying in a hotel with such history. Except for the out-of-service elevator, we loved this hotel.
Coast Drive
We had a leisurely breakfast and morning in the hotel, and then set off for our drive up the coast to the Portsmouth area and Titchfield. Although we weren't expecting summer-like weather in February, a little sunshine would have been nice, but again the day was gray, misty and cold. The drive along the coast is pretty and we made our first stop in Eastbourne, an elegant seaside resort at the foot of the South Downs in Sussex and about 17 miles from Hastings. At the west end is Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain, rising 530 feet above the sea. The 5-mile long promenade along the coast leads you past gardens, a 1930's bandstand, the beaches and a Victorian pier.
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| The promenade with Beachy Head in the distance |
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| The sandy beach with the pier in the distance - the wood structures are called groynes and they are installed to reduce/prevent longshore drift by trapping sediment |
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| Garden along the promenade |
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| Carpet Garden near the pier |
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| The Victorian pier - originally built in the 1870's |
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| Pier entrance |
We walked out onto the pier, but many of the attractions were closed. There were, however, many interesting signs:
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| Do's and Do Not's |
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| Slip Slap Slop |
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| Jellied eels do not appeal and whelks are snails; I would have loved a Mr. Whippy if the shop were open and much warmer outside, and as for the doughnuts, I think I'll order them one-at-a-time, thankyouverymuch! |
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| From the pier looking back at the many hotels |
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| I love all the lamps and lights and wish I could see it on a warm summer night! |
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| An interesting sculpture along the promenade |
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| The Eastbourne Bandstand - built in 1931 |
Our tour of Eastbourne was too short, but Ron wanted to get to Titchfield before dark, so we headed west again. Our route took us inland and around Beachy Head for a short distance and we were treated to lovely vistas of sheep farms.
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| No, the sheep have not been injured - their red dots are their branding |
We drove along the coast and into Brighton. We had considered staying in Brighton, but I'm glad we chose to drive through rather than stay here; it's a lot bigger and more crowded so arriving here on Friday night would have been much scarier than arriving in the much smaller St. Leonards-On-Sea! We didn't stop in Brighton, but I managed a few snaps from the passenger seat:
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| The remains of West Pier - it closed in 1975 and then was severely damaged by fires and storms - fortunately the Palace Pier (sorry no photo!) is alive and well! |
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| Brighton Traffic- I think we were merging to the left, but it sure looks like we're headed into the island; perhaps the young lady thought so too! |
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| There were a lot of cars driving along the waterfront, at least one of them was très cher! |
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| The streetlights are elegant - and the lights strung between them must be beautiful at night |
From Brighton, we headed inland again, away from the coastal route and onto a bigger highway. We were heading west-ish along A27 when we approached a roundabout in Arundel. As we approached I saw a beautiful castle in the sky so I directed Ron to ignore the GPS and take the 3rd exit from the roundabout instead. We drove in to town, all the while having an amazing view of this castle:
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| Arundel Castle from Queen Street/The Causeway |
We turned right at the intersection and discovered this was a very popular place! We had to drive down the lane about 1/3 mile before we found a place to park. It worked out just fine since the walk back to the corner was along a canal along a lovely path.
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| Dashing and handsome, yeah?! |
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| Canal along the path |
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| Arundel Castle |
When we got back to the corner, we found the entrance to the castle only to discover that it is closed for the season and won't open until 1 April. We missed it by 6 weeks! We hadn't heard of the castle and couldn't get any information about it on our short walk through town, so I had to google it later. Arundel Castle is the seat of The Dukes of Norfolk and it is on 40 acres of grounds and gardens. The Castle has been open to visitors seasonally for nearly 200 years and is considered one of the great treasure houses of England. Inside the Castle you can see paintings and furniture, tapestries and stained glass, china and clocks, sculpture and carving, heraldry and armour, all displayed in room settings. I also discovered that no photographs are allowed inside the Castle, so although I didn't know it at the time, but I pretty much was able to photograph as much of it as is allowed anyway.
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| The town of Arundel, looking up High Street toward the Castle |
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| Winter root vegetables outside a shop (shoppe?) |
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| Abbey ruins outside the castle walls |
Once again, our time was too short and we headed west again towards Titchfield. We stayed on the bigger highways, following our GPS and driving in the UK like we've been doing it forever. We arrived at our hotel, checked in and then searched for a nearby restaurant. We wanted something typically British and found The Titchfield Mill nearby.
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| The Titchfield Mill Restaurant |
It was rather confusing as we entered the restaurant and there wasn't a host to take our names or seat us. We stood around a bit, watching everyone else and it appeared as though you just help yourself. We confirmed this with someone at the bar, then wandered around until we found a nice table for two.
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| The Menu |
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| Ron - at a nice table for two! |
We had a very friendly waitress who took our order, but there was another woman delivering the meals. She kept calling out to people asking them what their table numbers were and if what she was carrying was their order, and she kept muttering something about spoons. We were perplexed to say the least and we thought she must be new and that someone should give her a map of the tables. Later our waitress explained that in the few hours between lunch and dinner, they use a spoon with a number on it for some of the guests; so delivering meals to spoon numbers is NOT the same as delivering meals to table numbers. I still don't get it, but it was comical.
Our stay in Titchfield was short and wet - I stayed in the hotel on Monday and Tuesday morning while Ron worked, then Tuesday afternoon we had an exceedingly uneventful drive back into London. We dropped off the car, rode the shuttle to Heathrow and were headed back to Paris.
One odd thing though; we have only been in Paris for a few short weeks, yet it feels like home already. After our ridiculously trying driving experience and a long weekend in England, we were happy to be going home!
