Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

I wouldn’t suggest you eat here, but I doubt there’s a better place to drop acid: Camelot Castle reviewed

The Camelot Castle Hotel is a pebble-dashed late-Victorian excrescence on a cliff. It overlooks the ruins of Tintagel Castle. A baby-blue Rolls-Royce Wraith and a floral Aston Martin are parked outside. They are the owners’ cars. Everyone else is in a banger. This hotel played the lunatic asylum in the 1979 Dracula starring Frank Langella, and this is more apt than you can know.

Inside there is faded Victorian grandeur mashed with Arthurian legend mashed with Kazakh oil baron chic mashed with three-star hotel in fading south coast resort. There is sinister tiling, dark wood, fraying carpets, staff dressed for serving tea at some ghostly parallel Claridge’s and, from every window, the sea. It is so disorientating — I am used to smooth, grey, efficient hotels — the result is thrilling. It is so weird, like tumbling into cinema. What might happen at the Overlook — I mean the Camelot Castle — Hotel?

The owners are the artist Ted Stourton and John Mappin of the Queen’s jewellers, who is, among other things, a fanatical Donald Trump fan. Mappin was interviewed by Cornwall Live, and he said that the helipad at the Camelot Castle Hotel was always waiting for Donald Trump, which seems like a terrible fate for any helipad. Stourton’s ‘abstract Realist’ art, meanwhile, is everywhere: splattered on walls, reproduced in books bound with gaffer tape and detailed in leaflets calling him ‘more prolific than Picasso’. There is a lot of bitching about Stourton’s art on the Camelot Castle Hotel TripAdvisor page, which is a work of art in itself. Some guests clearly consider themselves hostages; others are dazzled. The lobby, meanwhile, is decorated with photographs of Mappin attending film premieres and stalking famous ‘friends of Camelot’. Al Pacino stares out, sun-burnt and confused.

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