THE owners of a former loss-making Minehead hotel who faced a barrage of opposition from critics with a scheme to convert it to holiday flats have withdrawn their plans at the 11th hour.

Justin and Caron Taylor's hopes of turning the Promenade Hotel on The Esplanade into a family home and two holiday units with accommodation for up to six adults and two children were due to go before West Somerset Council's planning committee next Thursday (February 27).

But last Friday the couple's architect, Carhampton-based Chris Veale, was told to pull the scheme.

Mr Veale said the application for change of use would have been recommended for refusal by planning officers on the grounds of loss of tourism - despite the holiday use of the flats.

He said Mr and Mrs Taylor now intended to run the building as a hotel but did not want to comment publicly on their decision.

In a letter to the Free Press in January they responded to critics of their plans, who included the Minehead Conservation Society, which said the Promenade, which specialised in holidays for disabled people, had provided a vitally important service.

Society chairman Sally Bainbridge said Minehead desperately needed a mix of accommodation if it was to survive as a tourist destination.

And she said, with an ageing population, hotels like the Promenade were seeing a renaissance.

But Mr and Mrs Taylor made it clear it had not been their decision to close the hotel but the former owners Livability.

They said the business had lost more than £100,000 a year in recent years and was not trading when they picked up the keys to the property last September.

Livability had announced its intention to close the hotel in January 2013, giving nine months notice that it would cease trading and make the staff redundant.

"This was because Livability considered their own hotel a financial liability beyond economic use," said the Taylors in their letter.

The couple, previously from Burnham-on-Sea but with family connections in Minehead, said they had not bought a hotel that was a going concern and the property itself had been built in 1905 as a private residence.

No-one had shown any interest in buying the Promenade for use as a specialist hotel in the two months it was advertised for sale.

"The Promenade is now in part a home for our young family and we applied to the council to use part of it for holiday apartments to earn a living.

"The property was in very poor condition when we bought it but none of the work we have done required planning permission.

"We do not understand why carrying out this essential work to our own property makes us 'arrogant'."

Mr and Mrs Taylor said they had no other agenda, no intention of extending the property or changing its appearance.

"We do not want to concrete over the garden or build on the garden - we have just added some gates and fencing to keep our young children safe from the road."

The couple went on to suggest that, while people were fully entitled to express their opinions, some might need to question whether they were becoming "an undignified nuisance locally and an embarrassment to Minehead nationally.

"Their predictably venomous, aggressive knee-jerk opposition to absolutely everything will cause other investors to take their money elsewhere while Minehead decays."