Goodmans Hotel

Andrew led me into a pitch dark room on the ground floor and flicked the light switch without result. 'Damn! There is electricity, the two attic rooms are still occupied.' He found his way to the window and struggled with the shutter fastenings until one of them creaked open, the sound echoing around the room. Bright daylight revealed faded flock wallpaper and a deep bay window. He stepped into the middle and looked around approvingly. 'Imagine sitting down to have your dinner in a room like this!' He shook his head at damage caused to the ornate plaster mouldings of the ceiling where a couple of central heating pipes had been hammered through, and could not resist looking inside a big fitted cupboard in one corner, which was of course empty.

'You really would have liked to buy this place, wouldn't you?'

'I am looking for something, another little business expansion. Actually the size and layout of the rooms here is awkward for splitting the house up into flats, as you can see from the way the existing partitions have created inconvenient cramped little corners. One of the ideas I had was to strip them out and refurbish the building as a hotel. Gay hotels in London seem to do well generally speaking. There's no reason why one in this area shouldn't succeed.'

'Do you have experience of hotels?'

'Only from staying in them. But we're not talking about a large scale place like the Savoy or the Dorchester, perhaps I should have said guest house or bed and breakfast rather than hotel. There are plenty of places to eat locally, you wouldn't need to provide a restaurant. Anyway, I wasn't thinking of managing it myself, I'd have to have someone to run it for me. That was one of the reasons for involving myself in the Hotel and Catering Exhibition, you remember I was going to send you some tickets? If someone with a bit of money to put in wanted to share the investment with me the project could still go ahead. As things stand a developer has been buying up houses in the area, restoring the facades and pulling down what lies behind to build modern flats. That's probably what will happen here.'

If he was hoping to interest me in putting up money for the project he was about to be disappointed. 'You might find a backer. I don't think anyone from my firm would be likely to help finance a gay hotel, though more than likely someone will have had experience of auditing hotel accounts; I could ask around, they wouldn't have to know it was for a gay hotel.'