My trip to Brighton necessitated an overnight stay, which turned out to be more of an issue than I had expected. I have to book hotels via work’s online travel agent, and usually that’s no problem. However, it was Conference Season in Brighton, and all the main hotels had either no online availability, or were asking outrageous prices, well above the nightly limit that the Company allows. I finally managed to book a room in a small hotel in a very good position on the sea front, just a few minutes from the town centre. Unfortunately, when I looked it up on TripAdvisor, the reviews were mixed to say the least, so I was rather concerned about what I’d landed myself with.
As it turned out, it wasn’t as bad as some of the reviews had suggested. It was two adjoining Georgian town houses knocked together to form a small hotel that was really more of a B&B, within very easy reach of lots of restaurants for dinner. The decor was very dated, and the whole place needed a good lick of paint and better maintenance, but it was clean and the owners were very pleasant and friendly. I had a large airy room on the top (third) floor, with a big bay window and a sea view.
The bed was very comfortable, and I was fast asleep when I was rudely awoken at 05:30 by a very loud siren. It was the hotel fire alarm. Drat! I’ve been in a hotel fire before and it was very unpleasant and not something to be taken lightly. So I threw some clothes on over my nightshirt, grabbed my boots, room key and phone, and went to the evacuation point outside the front of the hotel. Despite the fact that I was on the top floor, I was one of the first guests to get out. In fact, although the hotel had a “no vacancies” sign up, and I knew there were 24 rooms, only about a dozen people turned up at the evacuation point, which I thought was shocking. Yes, it was probably a false alarm (it often is I find), but I really don’t think it’s worth the gamble. Unfortunately, the other people who were also conspicuous by their absence were the hotel staff! It transpired that none of the staff actually “lived in” or stayed overnight, and the so-called night-porter was a mobile phone number that when we called it just went through to an answerphone.
In the absence of any hotel management, there was a great deal of dithering going on about what to do, and I really can’t be doing with dithering. So I took it upon myself to call 999 and summon the fire brigade. We couldn’t tell if it was a real fire or a false alarm, and with half of the hotel guests apparently remaining in their rooms, it could have got rather messy. Much better to call the professionals in, and get them to make an assessment. While we were waiting for the fire engine (and it was very quick – under five minutes) I saw another of the guests, in her dressing gown, standing on the banisters and trying to unscrew the smoke alarm to take out the battery! It appeared that the reason she hadn’t evacuated the hotel was because she’d been going round all the public areas trying to disable the alarms one by one!
When the fire brigade arrived, they fairly quickly established that there wasn’t an actual fire. But the actions of that stupid woman meant that they couldn’t reset the alarm and let us all go back in, because the control panel had detected the tampering and wouldn’t reset. The fire brigade summoned the owner, and a senior “fire incident manager” from the brigade who was an expert in the control panel systems. It transpired that the alarm had first gone off in the room of the stupid woman (I strongly suspect, but can’t prove, that she had been smoking in bed) and she had then “disabled” the alarm in her room so throughly that she had smashed it completely. She’d then removed the batteries in so many of the other alarms that it was going to take an hour or more to get everything reset. The firemen were really unimpressed, and gave her a bit of a lecture, but she was so stupid that I’m not sure it sank in. Fortunately the fire brigade agreed that, as long as the owners were there and in charge, it was safe for us to go back into the hotel even though there wasn’t a functioning fire alarm system.
I was thoroughly unimpressed. The actions of that woman were really stupid and potentially highly dangerous; many of the other guests were courting danger by remaining in their rooms (and the alarm was so loud I really don’t think they could have slept through it); and the hotel management really ought to have a better fire action plan than relying on one of the guests to call the fire brigade! But at least no one was hurt and it all ended well.
