Floating hotel to open in Hartlepool

Wealthy tourists in Dubai may be able to stay on the QE2, recently decked out as a seven-star hotel, but plucky Hartlepool is soon to have the next best thing - a floating Premier Inn.

The budget hotel developers have announced plans for the UK’s first floating hotel, a four-storey 54-bed development to be built in Hartlepool’s docklands.

Premier Inn said that their hotel will use the same principle as the floating pontoon houses made famous in Holland after WWII, but with 21st century techniques and materials.

The building will be a lightweight steel panel frame structure built on a reinforced concrete transfer slab on four rectangular pontoons made from a concrete and polyglass composite. Horizontal movement will be restricted by sleeved piles driven into the marina bed, so guests will not be disturbed by the rocking of the waves.

NGM Sustainable Developments will be designing and building the hotel for Premier Inn. Kerry Martin, chief executive of NGM Sustainable Developments, said: “Our technique offers a cost-effective and innovative solution to waterfront development which is a design first for the UK.”

If planning permission is granted, the development will start on site in the spring and complete by 2010.