AT the end of Britannia Terrace in Saltburn was the Alexandra Hotel (was being the operative word: it closed in 1973 and was converted into apartments).

I reckon it must have had the best views in town: over the sea, over the pier, over Huntcliff, over the valley.

The Zetland is Saltburn's famous hotel. I wrote about it a few years ago as the architect, William Peachey, ended in disgrace as he disappeared from railway company employ accused of taking backhanders. That frisson of naughtiness gives the Zetland an even greater grandeur, I think.

The Alexandra ain't bad, either. It was reputedly designed by John Ross, the Darlington architect who did the rest of Britannia Terrace.

It opened in 1867, owned by John Anderson, to whom Saltburn owes a great deal.

He had knowledge of east Cleveland from as early as 1848 when he invested in an ironstone mine at Skinningrove, but he was a railway engineer by trade, working first on the Stockton and Darlington Railway and then on the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway - the extraordinary line that between 1857 and 1861 clambered over Stainmore on the top of the Pennines to connect Darlington and Barnard Castle with Tebay. It can surely be no coincidence that Henry Pease, the founder of Saltburn, was also the driving force behind the line that Mr Anderson found a fair wind behind him in Saltburn.

He bought the Alexandra's plot of land in late 1861, plus the bit of land beside it, ready for an extension which he never got round to building so there is still just a gap there.

I'd guess from the hotel's name (yet to check this bit) that Anderson started work in 1863, building out of Pease's buff bricks made at Peases West, near Crook. Its 100 bedrooms opened in 1867. It had stables out the rear in Amber Street in which Jersey cows lived to provide guests with fresh milk (they might not have needed it, though, as the Alexandra and the Zetland were the only hotels in Saltburn that the Quaker-dominated Saltburn Improvement Company entrusted with a licence to serve alcohol).

The hotel was just the start of Mr Anderson's connection to the town. In January 1867 he became the Improvement Company's resident engineer and his first project was to design the pier. When the construction of it proved difficult, he became the contractor as well as the designer as well as the overseeing engineer.

It would be great to discover more details about Mr Anderson: I can't even find when he died.