Hotel hopes you will join the Alice band with crockery gifts for hospice

Managers at the Best Western Monkbar Hotel in York have launched an appeal for the city's residents to donate old china cups and saucers to help raise funds for Martin House Hospice in Boston Spa, near Wetherby.

The award-winning hotel, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is staging a Mad Hatter's Birthday Tea Party and will use a myriad of cups and saucers to mirror the scenes from the famous book.

Afterwards the crockery will be sold in the Martin House shops in Skipton, Selby, Boston Spa and Headingley, to raise funds for the children's hospice.

Hotel director, June Nelsey, said: "We have been supporting Martin House for a number of years now, and felt we would combine our 20th birthday event with an event for them too."

The Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who used the pseudonym Lewis Carroll to write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, lived in Ripon while his father was a canon of the city's cathedral.

Anyone with cups and saucers to donate can leave them at the Monkbar Hotel's reception on St Maurice's Road before the event on Friday, September 24.