An online petition has been launched in a bid to preserve a spruced up grot-spot.

Owners of Medina House were ordered by Brighton and Hove City Council to spruce up the scruffy structure.

The order gave the owners six months to clean and repaint the southern and western elevations, remove breeze blocks from windows and replace the blocks with glazing, repair all broken doors and windows and repaint external window frames, door frames and soffits as well as re-rendering the eastern side of the property.

Medina House was built as a Turkish bathhouse in 1893 and a campaign group has now filed a petition in a bid to protect the building because of its internal Royal Doulton tilework.

A spokeswoman for saveHOVE said: “Instead of waiting for yet another inappropriate planning application and more wrangling on that front, we are asking with the petition for a planning brief to be urgently created for the Medina House site.

“We hope to retain and have the building restored for re-use, with residents biased in favour of commercial use. A planning brief could establish a height restriction to control any planning application.”

To view the petition visit Brighton and Hove City Council petitions page