I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels. Some good, some bad. Some luxury escapes, some fleapits. But none could compete for all-round awfulness with The Walton Hotel in Nottingham. I now learn that, since my unforgettable overnight stay there, it has been sold. Thankfully its new incarnation is not as a hotel. The memories would linger…

Where to start? With the receptionist who couldn’t be bothered to give us our keys because he was too busy having an argument with a guest that went on for a good five minutes without any acknowledgement at all that another guest had arrived and might require attention?

Or perhaps the location? “Ten minutes from the centre of Nottingham” according to the website. Only if the centre of Nottingham is a vast roundabout where several main roads converge; otherwise it’s a noisy 20-minute walk along one unattractive main road to pretty much anywhere you might actually choose to visit in Nottingham.

Or the rooms? They have apparently been “recently refurbished,” but whoever designed the refurb must be round the bend, or on drugs. I had a double room with a lovely big bay window letting in light…

Except that the bed was placed in the centre of the room, facing away from the window, with the headboard blocking pretty much all of the light. Behind it, a desk, again facing away from the window (into the back of the headboard, ensuring glare on any computer screen).

So far, so weird – including the fact that the “garden” view from this Grade II listed building was in fact a terrace filled with drinkers, so that if you removed any clothing in your room you were immediately visible to everyone below.

Or perhaps the decor? The hotel boasts on its website that the rooms are “carefully decorated and furnished in keeping with the atmosphere and ambience of a 19th century hunting lodge” which does sound attractive.

But it’s hard to see quite where the garish chrome mirrored bedside table fits in to that, or the giant painting of a multicoloured snowflake on the wall. I’m not entirely sure that chrome had been invented when this former hunting lodge was built in the early 1800s.

Another chrome mirrored chest of drawers with sharp edges was just wedged into a gap between a wardrobe and the bathroom door, sticking out by about six inches, so that any night-time trip to the bathroom was fraught with danger (a danger which, once there, might be exacerbated by the frighteningly sharp edges to the loo paper holder… also chrome).

Then there’s the service: breakfast was served in the bar area by a man who looked like a nightclub bouncer, complete with a large set of keys jangling from his waistband, who brought a ‘continental breakfast’ of two lightly burned croissants after a lengthy wait. But the highlight was yet to come.

During the long wait for some breakfast to arrive, he stood behind the bar moving things around and wiping surfaces. At one point dropped a pint glass, which shattered with a deafening crash a few feet away from our table, sending shards of broken glass all over the floor.

Incredibly, he carried on with what he was doing for at least five more minutes as if he hadn’t even heard or seen what had happened.

Pausing only to serve a young couple two pints of lager – this was at 9.15am – he finally ambled off to fetch a long-handled brush, which he then used to move a few (but by no means all) of the shattered glass fragments into a dustpan before returning to his task of moving things around.

The final indignity came when we asked if we could check out 15 minutes after the allotted time, since we were waiting for a lift, and were informed – after consultation with the manager – that we could… but we would be charged an additional £10 for “every additional hour or portion of an hour after 11am.”

Did this happen to previous guests, including (so they claimed) Roger Moore, Bob Hoskins and er, Christopher Biggins? I very much doubt it. Sir Roger would have raised an eyebrow and gone full Bond; and Bob would have gone full Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday. As for Biggins… the mind boggles.