Holbeck Hall loses seven-year fight for compensation in the last round

The owners of the Holbeck Hall hotel, which slipped into the sea seven years ago, have lost their £2m fight for compensation.

Three Appeal Court judges unanimously overturned the decision of the High Court judge John Hicks QC in October 1997 that Scarborough Borough Council was to blame for the erosion that wrecked the hotel.

For more than 100 years the four-star mock Tudor hotel stood 150 feet above the sea on Scarborough's South Cliff in North Yorkshire.

Once owned by the family of actor Charles Laughton, who often stayed there, the hotel crumbled and slid into the sea after a series of landslides in June 1993.

Lord Justice Stuart-Smith said that the council "could not reasonably have foreseen the catastrophic danger that materialised."

Hotel owners Barry and Joan Turner, who run the English Rose Hotels Group, were ordered to pay the estimated £200,000 legal costs of the court fight.