Kennel Cam

The cameras are dark

Four Sony pan-tilt-zoom cameras ran in the kennel from 2004. Clients drove them themselves, from anywhere in the world.

One client boarded his two black Labradors and then chose a Caribbean cruise because the ship had a business centre he could watch them from; when the ship's internet failed he made the cruise line fly an engineer out from Miami. At full zoom a camera would fill the screen with a dog's eye.

They were switched off with everything else when the hotel closed in 2010, and the addresses they used to answer on have belonged to somebody else for a long time. Clicking a camera today reaches nothing at all.

This is the nearest thing that survives. Channel 5's national evening news came out to Lucies Farm, and the reporter checked his own dog in for the night.

Channel 5 national evening news, filmed at Lucies Farm. The kennel, the suites and the guests, while it was open.

The four cameras

Where the rest of it went

The story. How a dog hotel in Worcestershire came to be investigated for four years by two councils — and what was found when the files were finally opened. Read what happened →
The dogs. The hotel is gone; its guests are not. Thousands of photographs of them survive. See them at CritterSnaps →
The food. Every meal served here was worked out from the nutritional principles Marjorie went on to write down, so it can be cooked at home. Cooking for Dogs →
The Ritz Canine. The archive of the dog spa next door — hydrotherapy, massage and acupuncture. Visit it →

Prices, telephone numbers, addresses and e-mail addresses on these pages are those of the time and are no longer in use.
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