The Hotel de Paris is a hotel overlooking Cromer Pier in North Norfolk. Strike spends a night there after interviewing the Heatons at their home in nearby Garden Street.

“Turning reluctantly away from the sea, he retraced his steps, registering the presence of an enormous and fairly ugly redbrick hotel facing the pier as he turned back into Garden Street… The rear entrance to the redbrick Hotel de Paris (why Paris?) lay directly opposite the beer garden, beckoning invitingly” (Ch 63). 

Pierre le Françoise, the son of French aristocrats who fled France in 1799, bought the land now occupied by The Hotel de Paris and built a two storey boarding house in 1830 to accommodate the increasing numbers of visitors to Cromer. The hotel was given its grand name in 1845 and after le Françoise died it was extended by two more floors by a local businessman, then demolished and rebuilt in its current Victorian magnificence in 1896.

The hotel is Grade Two listed by Historic England, which describes its brick and terracotta structure, octagonal dome roofed turrets, Gothic bays and Victorian public house bar windows.

The current owners accommodate coach parties of guests which may have influenced the atmosphere experienced by Strike during his stay.

“He could have predicted the interior from the exterior: there was grandeur in the high archways, crystal chandeliers and sweeping staircase of the lobby, but a whiff of the youth hostel about the cork noticeboard on which a laminated history of the hotel had been printed…” (Ch 63)

… he noted that the room was clean and the bed seemed comfortable, but now that he was shut inside it, surrounded by the same soft yellow and red colour scheme as the lobby, he felt claustrophobic, which he knew to be entirely irrational” (Ch 63).

You can find the Hotel de Paris here: