From the roof you can look down on what remains of the West Pier and from the car park you can look up at the dizzyingly precise walkways that curve up and up...
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Embassy Court should have crumbled as the pier did; it should have died. Cara, our tour guide talks about the mistakes made in its construction. Each time she mentions one of these mistakes she gives an appealing smile, as if she's still arguing for a stay of execution. Embassy Court was a wreck when I was a little boy and it was hard to discern that this was a building of international significance. Now, post-clean-up, post-window replacement, post God-knows how much money, one can see how beautiful it is, how strange. Le Corbusier preached that we should build machines for living but Wells-Coates, who designed almost every inch of the place, built what was originally a machine for leisure; possessing a restaurant, chauffeur service and a rumoured tequila bar. In the 1930s a flat in Embassy Court cost as much to rent for a month as a flat in Chelsea cost to buy. A war stopped all that - my father-in-law tells me that the 50s were brown and there was no place for this gleaming white-and-biscuit edifice in that drab decade and after, no room for the stupidly-rich to come down from London and waste time on cocktails and swank. Now it is home. Now its residents are part of its history, part of its story, and part of this town (city) and its changes. | 
