Hotel owners lose £2m compensation fight
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 over 100 years since 1880 the four-star mock Tudor hotel stood 150 feet above the sea on Scarborough's South Cliff in North Yorkshire.
But 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."
He added: "It is in my view clear that Scarborough did not foresee a danger of anything like the magnitude that eventuated."
Scarborough is on a 40 mile stretch of Europe's fastest eroding coastline which would cost millions of pounds to control.
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.