IT MAY resemble a giant illuminated Slinky toy.

But a Bournemouth MP reckons that the company who built it could bring a little of their architectural pizazz to the town to help put it on the map. He'd also like to see a statue of Frankenstein placed in the town, too.

Tobias Ellwood posted an image of the Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring Resort in China on his Twitter feed, declaring: 'How about one of these on our skyline?' and urging Bournemouth to 'think outside the box'.

"It wasn't so much the large, curved hotel but what I did think was that we have an opportunity to replace some hotels on the seafront, not least on the East Cliff, but we’re replacing them with like for like which can be rather dull," he said.

His plea fell on deaf - and occasionally furious - ears. Twitter users berated him for not considering the environment, with calls for 'more bins on the beach' and one respondent raised the spectre of the Boscombe surf reef. Another complained of the 'non-sustainable environmentally-disastrous box'.

But Mr Ellwood was unabashed.

"When I did the government tourism brief I used to think that if the Post Office turned up to somewhere and wanted to create some stamps of an area they would probably use the area's iconic buildings," he said. "There's nothing iconic that really says 'You're in Bournemouth'," he claimed.

He said he wanted the town to have an iconic building 'the same way that Portsmouth has the Spinnaker Tower'.

He praised the new Bournemouth University building for its modern design but criticised the decision to place the stone slab statues at the front of Boscombe Pier. "I wanted it to have a statue of Frankenstein instead," he said, explaining that it would reference the writer Mary Shelley, who is buried in the town.

  •  Is Mr Ellwood right? Do we need doughnut-shaped hotels or a Spinnaker Tower? Or is it an insult to an architectural heritage which includes the Russell-Cotes Museum, and Daily Echo building?