I went to an iconic seaside town’s ‘worst’ hotel which many have rated one-star (Image: David Nelson)
The crisps were trodden into the carpet when I arrived, and they were still there when I left 18 hours later.
Finding the “worst hotel in Blackpool” is no mean feat, there are a lot out there. In the end I decided not to stay at the hotel with technically the absolute lowest ratings on Google, which would equate to some small micro-business that can’t stand up for itself, but rather a hotel that meets the balance of bad reviews while also being big enough to see large numbers of guests pass through its doors each week.
My pick had both of these in spades – and my local guide said it was an ‘absolute s********’.
Norbreck Castle is a northern outpost of budget chain Britannia Hotels. Of its 8,697 reviews on TripAdvisor (at the time of writing), 4,082 give it the bottom one-star score of ‘terrible’ giving it an average of 2.2 out of five. I contacted Britannia Hotels for comment for this piece. They didn’t.
The Norbreck is a towering local landmark a little over four miles north of the centre of Blackpool, rising well clear of its residential surroundings.
The Norbreck has an interesting design (Image: Lancs Live)
Its awkward turret, painted in a dreary black and grey, sticks into the sky, embarrassing yet unashamed, its mock battlements offering imaginary archers protection from the invaders below. But in the end, this place’s biggest enemy was time.
I was checked in by a woman who never did anything fast but returned a smile and worked with a methodical inevitability that reminded me of a freight train trundling across open country.
In my time there I only once saw another person behind the reception desk with her and even then he had to call her out from the back to help him, making her walk out with a mouthful of lunch. I suspect the reason the place is still going is in no small part thanks to her.
The room is basic but there are no major complaints from me (Image: Harry Thompson)
It maybe hasn’t had as much love as you’d want, but the room was clear of any horrors (Image: Harry Thompson)
Last year the hotel made the headlines after TikTok content creator Zac Jones visited, calling it the ‘worst hotel in Blackpool,’ pointing out all manner of grimy details while caveating that for £35 a night there was still value to be had.
By the time I went a year later a double room had gone up to £39, with the added luxury of a view overlooking a dilapidated yard with a security light that flashed through much of the night. Could the good times be over?
The Norbreck Castle hasn’t always been the whipping boy of content creators and tabloid journalists. Built in 1869, it was once the holiday home of wealthy aristocrats, the Shurrocks, who had such great success throwing lavish parties for their well-heeled associates they soon started renting rooms to paying members of the upper class.
When the Second World War broke out it became a northern haven for evacuated civil servants, and when it was given back to its owners 11 years later in 1951 it had its own golf course, five tennis courts, a restaurant that could seat 600 people and a bowling green, as well as a ballroom, cocktail bars and a range of conference suits. Pictures from the 1930s show it as a bustling hub of leisure enjoying its glory days.
By the time I arrived 74 years later, traces of its aristocratic exuberance were hard to find. Out of order grabber games lined the corridor and a woman with a push chair sat in the lobby vaping. Cheap furniture was scattered sparsely around and strange smells of stagnation greeted me at various points. The carpets were dirty and in my room there was an eternal dripping noise, the exact origin of which I never found out.
My room had crisps trodden into the carpet when I arrived (Image: Harry Thompson)
The room was sparse and the furniture basic, while the bed felt more like a sheet of springs, rather than a mattress. But it had a roof and would get me through the night.
In the late 70s and early 80s, the hotel cashed in on the exploding music scene of the time, hosting early gigs of up and comers like the Pretenders, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Ozzy Osbourne.
There was politics too. It was the scene of the conference where the Social Democrat Party and the Liberal Party merged to form the Liberal Democrats of today. These days are long gone.
On the night of my stay, I’d finished a prior appointment in the centre of town at around 7:30pm, but the thought of getting the tram back for a long night in the Norbreck made me feel cold and far from home, and so I opted to make the 4.4-mile journey on foot to kill some time.
As I came up from the windy coastal path, Blackpool now far behind me to the south, the towers rose grotesquely once more, comically high above the houses around. It reminded me of the carcass of a whale on a beach: horribly wrong but impossible to look away from.
A couple of bits could have been cleaner (Image: Harry Thompson)
A security guard stood at the door as I crossed the windswept car park at around 9pm and it made me think about the Shurrocks and their lavish parties and ballrooms and cocktail bars. I thought of the the war, of Blackpool’s Victorian boom, of tennis courts and joy.
Maybe this is the plight of the people who have inherited the Earth in 2025, the witnesses to failure’s slow creep, wringing out every last piece of history and profitability to keep things going as long as they can in the name of every last penny.
That night, I lay in bed and listened through the paper-thin walls to every single word the father and child in the room next door said. I think they were having a good time, adventuring together. Maybe the Norbreck Castle has a few more of those in it before it’s too far gone.