Historic British seaside hotels are glorious white elephants, but perhaps they can have new lives | Rowan Moore

At their peak, in the second half of the 19th century, British seaside hotels were Vegas-like in their brash pursuit of profit. They were big stacks of accommodation, packing as much bedroom space as they could behind their cliff-like facades, none-too-sensitive to their prominent locations. They offered as many attractions to their clientele as they could manage – ballrooms, covered connections to railway stations, up-to-date plumbing, separate taps for freshwater and seawater baths. Their grand lobbies and staircases were designed to flatter paying guests with a sense of exclusivity and daunt intruders.

They strove to attract attention with an accelerating turnover of architectural styles. They rapidly evolved from 18th-century coaching inns and converted private houses to purpose-built hotels that at first looked like extra-large Georgian townhouses, then Regency stately homes, then French chateaux, Scottish castles and almost anything their architects and owners could think of.

Style wars were driven by fierce competition. The owners of the Metropole in Brighton upstaged the city’s older Grand by commissioning Alfred Waterhouse, architect of the Natural History Museum and Manchester Town Hall, to design a building in what was then a more fashionable style, with polychrome masonry and Italian gardens.

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Grand seaside hotels became eclectic structures with Dutch gables, bay windows, renaissance pillars, baroque pediments, gothic arches or arts-and-crafts half-timbering, pile-ups of bay windows, balconies, turrets and mansard roofs. As Karen Averby, author of Seaside Hotels puts it, there was “no single grand hotel style” but “they exemplified a new form of seaside architecture by virtue of their sheer visual dominance and scale”.

The genre, fuelled by the coming of railways and boosted by the patronage of royalty and celebrities from Britain and continental Europe, reached its peak with the Grand in Scarborough, a 10-storey domed and arched pile in French Second Empire style. It is the work of Cuthbert Brodrick, the architect best known for Leeds’ monumental town hall. Here he wrestled, not completely successfully, with the perennial challenge of designing hotels, which is to create coherent and imposing compositions out of very many domestically scaled windows.

In the 20th century, seaside hotels took another stylistic turn, with art deco celebrations of sunshine and fresh air, all white paint and horizontal bands of balconies, such as the Midland in Morecambe and the Grand Ocean Hotel in Saltdean. But these turned out to be last hurrahs: the seaside grand hotel declined about as rapidly as it rose, battered by two world wars and then the rise of air travel to warmer climates.

Some became barracks and sanatoriums, some were demolished, while those that remained would enter a twilight of endless repair and, eventually, scathing Tripadvisor reviews. It is inconceivable now, even if their titles still existed, that figures like Emperor Napoleon III of France and Empress Eugénie would stay (as they did) in a place like the St George’s hotel in Llandudno.

Rapidly built, some in less than 12 months, with little thought for the future and with unsustainable lavishness, they have become some of the country’s most problematic heritage assets. But the best of them remain magnificent creations, and the attraction of the seaside never goes away. Perhaps there can be new life in them yet.

• Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer