The Grand Alan Hotel

The Grand Alan Hotel is a full-star hotel on the coast of the Tyne. It is renowned for its stunning architecture, its first-class hospitality and fine cuisine, all of which justify its status as the only &quot;full-star&quot; hotel in existence.

History
'Note: the information in this section is taken from the 1987 publication Tyneside: Its People, History and Other Stuff''. We have paraphrased certain details when translating the original texts from Geordie to avoid plagiarism but feel that we have preserved the information's authenticity.'''

Plans for a Grand Hotel in Tyneside were first drawn up in 1862 by Archduke MacAlan IV and Viscount Seymour of Teesport and proposed to the wealthy percentage of Tyneside Council. Initially envisioned as a forty-three storey construction, they were advised by Messrs Alanson and Geccesse (Earl OBE) - the project's most vocal advocates - to tone down the ambition of the project and reduce dramatically the funds they would ultimately be borrowing from the Royal Bank of Sunderland. Ultimately, the generous donations of those supporting the Hotel would allow MacAlan and Viscount Seymour to restore the project to its original, full scale.

Construction began in 1864 when Alanson brought in Thornton Contractors to oversee development. Their widely-recognised ability to adhere to a schedule and never let a project run behind made them the ideal contractors, and construction was finished three weeks later. MacAlan and Viscount Seymour's delight was soon quashed, however, when they arrived to inspect the finished Hotel and realised Thornton Contractors had instead built a forty-three storey cardboard cutout resembling a Hotel and subsequently fucked off with their share.

For the next twenty five years MacAlan and Seymour, assisted by Geccesse and Alanson, oversaw the construction personally and would in 1889 be at last in a position to reveal the Grand Alan Hotel to the public. Given the scale of the building, however, everyone in Tyneside had known about the Hotel for years, and so the opening ceremony was stripped back to a simple ribbon-cutting at the car park gate. In its first week, it saw seven thousand guests rent its many luxury suites.

Viscount Seymour, now 108 years of age, was fortunate to live to see the Hotel get its first guests, but sadly passed away at the Geordie Babes' Family Resort from Alcancer ten days later. The worth and responsibility of running the Grand Alan Hotel, plus a permanent seat on the Grand Alan Hotel Committee, was bequeathed to Marquess Seymour after the Viscount's death, and Marquess Seymour promptly used this responsibility to sell off the top ten floors of the Hotel and allow them to be used as advertising for top-paying companies despite the opposing opinion of the Committee. In 1889 very few 'top-paying companies' existed in Tyneside, so for many years the front fascia displayed a forty-foot advertisement for popular comic book series Jerry Cartwright the Sparkly Wizard Guy. The shock of this deeply ill-spirited action proved too much for Archduke MacAlan, and he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1891.

Marquess Seymour continued to run the Hotel solely for his own gains despite being one of the lowest-ranking seats on the Committee, outranking only the tea lady and the tramp who was paying the Marquess an Alan Dollar a weak to use the empty chair as accommodation. The politics of the Hotel were of little importance to those guests enjoying its luxury until one day in 1896 when the entire staff of the Hotel staged a walkout. The Marquess was unwise to this for several days, as were the guests who bizarrely all decided that week to skip lunch, until disaster struck. The walkout had occurred while the catering staff were still preparing breakfast, and consequently a souffle had been left unattended ever since. The kitchen held back the rapidly-expanding souffle for three days, allowing enough time for the guests to evacuate. Eventually the kitchen gave out and the souffle exploded, destroying all but the bottom five storeys of the Hotel. Luckily, no one was hurt.

The twelve years it took to clear the wreckage allowed a distraught Marquess sufficient time to plan for the Hotel's future. He gave up his seat on the Committee to allow Alanson and Geccesse to step back into an official governing role, and they managed the restoration of the Hotel for its second 'grand opening' in 1916. It has been run without issue ever since.

The Marquess, a reformed man, returned to the Hotel in 1959 after a lengthy hiatus exploring the secluded jungles of West Yorkshire, albeit with a much more lowly position as room service manager. He remains in this role to this day (as of 1996) and shows no signs of giving up, as his part in the Hotel's initial downfall remains vivid in his memory and he is fearful of doing the same again if he were ever to consider anything against the Hotel's best interests.

In 2013, archaeolologists discovered remnants of the Jerry Cartwright the Sparkly Wizard Guy advertisement buried under a shopping centre in Cardiff. The remains were shipped by train back to Tyneside, where they have been displayed in a large glass dome within the Hotel's lobby. One other fragment of the original 1889 advertisement - specifically Jerry's winking right eye - was uncovered during a potato harvest in Hackenbeck and sold in auction for £8.81 (commission and VAT included).

Features
Forty of the Hotel's forty-three floors lend their space to a number of expansive and luxurious suites. No one has ever successfully counted how many suites, but the largest number anyone has counted before passing out was 1,995, as tallied by Brambo Chistlechin in 1953. Each suite has its own bathroom, eatery and living space large enough to happily accommodate a family of eighteen, but it wasn't until 1891 that beds were added to each suite. Each suite is decorated and painted in its own unique shade of red, with the official Alantone name for the shade used to identify each suite.

The bottom floor is of course dominated by the Hotel's lobby, where its staff of thirty six concierges welcome and attend to the guests. The topmost floor meanwhile is where the Hotel's kitchen can be found, staffed throughout the Hotel's life by a lineup of four of the North's finest chefs. Currently working the kitchen are Kram Bruley (est. 1972), Bill Jan Voffle (est. 2012), Gareth &quot;Gaz&quot; Spatcho (est. 1980) and Jenny Eclair (est. ablished). The top and bottom floors are connected by a pair of lift shafts, and are oddly the only connection to the kitchen from any other point in the Hotel. This means that not only do the four chefs endure a forty-three floor ascension each morning, but any food prepared by the kitchen must make its way by elevator down to the lobby and then back up to the guest via the stairs. Fortunately, in 1918 the head chef Phil Englishbreakfast (1916-1935) perfected a means of cooking meals to such a high temperature that they would reach the ideal 'pret a manger' temperature by the time they had reached the end of their lengthy delivery.

The last of the floors not dedicated to guest accommodation was for much of the Hotel's existence empty, and later during the Marquess Seymour's marketing efforts (spanning 1889 to 1896) retained for the products of those renting out the ten-storey advertisement space. The most recent movement by the Committee decided in 2016 to utilise this space more effectively, with the intentions of constructing a gymnasium, swimming pool, sauna, casino and video game arcade. When the party ventured into the storage space for the first time in half a century, they discovered an enormous stash of vintage Jerry Cartwright the Sparkly Wizard Guy comic books that had somehow survived the souffle disaster of 1896. It is speculated that, due to the storage space's proximity to the souffle explosion, the floor survived intact and was easily reused in the Hotel's restoration, while the storeys further down would suffer from the weight of the higher levels crushing them, because that's how physics work. The efforts to move the comic books and clear the floor were only recently completed, with the profits from the sales of the comic books going towards the construction of the wooden benches in the sauna. The full conversion is expected to be completed in 2025, on Tuesday.