Blackpool’s £2bn bid to revive the spirit of the British seaside
The glitz that once attracted the likes of Frank Sinatra has faded but now the town has a shot at restoring it's fortunes
On the train approaching Blackpool North station, two women sitting near me were deep into office politics: “I said, Jane, you shouldn’t be writing that paper, because it’s not your job . . .” Then one nudged the other, indicating the carriage window. Her companion nodded, smiling, and they shared a beatific moment before resuming their fraught conversation. They had glimpsed the top of Blackpool Tower. Until recently, you could see more of it from approaching trains, but a new Holiday Inn beyond the station has slightly got in the way.You could say Blackpool Tower has signified good times in the offing since it opened in 1894. Blackpool was — and is — Britain’s leading coastal resort. It is said that, but for its pleasure palaces, there would have been a revolution in England. The industrial towns from which people flocked to it were all too real, whereas Blackpool was unreal, a realm of fantasy, transcending its topographical location on a flat, blustery stretch of the north-west coast. It is, metaphorically, halfway to America in its wildness and can-do energy. It has been compared to Coney Island; when Walt Disney was pondering Disneyland, he sent a research team to Blackpool.
Then again, you could say that, ever since cheap flights instigated the holiday revolution of the 1960s, Blackpool resembles Coney Island only in its tawdriness; that it is no longer a place to escape to, but a place to escape from, a fate against which it lashed out by voting 67 per cent in favour of Brexit. Of England’s 10 most deprived local authority wards, eight are in Blackpool. As a council officer told me, “We’re at the wrong end of a lot of tables.”
I exited the station, to be confronted with a smart facade of the new hotel. More momentous were the words surmounting the hotel underpass: “North Station Tram Stop”. Unlike so many other English towns, Blackpool kept its trams, which run along the Promenade like something between a public utility and a fairground ride. They haven’t come inland for 60 years, but when the Blackpool North stop opens in a few weeks’ time, they will do so again.The new tram line and the Holiday Inn are elements of the biggest investment in Blackpool for over a century: a £2bn scheme of private and public money, underpinned by Towns Fund and levelling up grants, both emanating from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, with which Blackpool’s Labour council had formed a marriage of convenience. Both know that Blackpool, being famous, is a test case for levelling up.
The sinuous new tram lines gleamed in the sun, as though slaloming joyfully towards the sea. Over the road, the terracotta stone of the equally new Civil Service Hub (which will bring 3,000 government workers into the middle of town) seemed like a classy refinement of the red Accrington brick of old Blackpool.It was the sort of day when Blackpool seems merely a little unrestrained compared with other towns — a little more exuberant. On the steps leading from the station up to Talbot Road, a woman appeared to be struggling with a suitcase. I asked if I could lend a hand. “Thanks, love, but I’m fine,” she said and, as I walked on, she called after me, “Your mother would be proud of you, love!” (Let’s get this straight: Blackpool is a friendly town.)
I passed Ma Kellys pub, which recommended I “Beat the clock” and “Get in early” for pints at £2.20 between 11am and 1pm. On the Promenade, Shenanigans Irish bar challenged: “Party like the Irish, if you dare.” A nearby fast-food stall offered “Foot-long hot dog”. I kept wanting to ask the writers of these signs, “Are you sure you’re not being a little irresponsible?”But the sea was behaving itself, tracking quietly south, rather than hurling itself at the Prom, which it often does, with onlookers appalled and fascinated. On those days, the stats of deprivation come readily to mind.Alongside the Tower, I came to Showtown, a museum of entertainment that opens on Friday. The chief executive, Liz Moss, told me, “We’ve got so much for-real entertainment in Blackpool that our focus will be on behind-the-scenes.” So an interactive display demystifies magic tricks. The workings of the Illuminations, by which Blackpool has cannily prolonged its season since 1879, are gone into.Visitors can play a ukulele (sort of) in time with George Formby, whose innuendo-laden ditties included “With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock”. Actors will impersonate Blackpool landladies, whose catchphrases (according to mythology) included “All rooms to be vacated by 10am” and “No hot water till four o’clock”. Showtown will generate social outreach projects, and the world will be reminded of Blackpool’s showbiz importance. (When Frank Sinatra came to Britain in 1950, the one gig he played outside London was in Blackpool.)Exiting Showtown, I looked up at the Tower. Yes, it’s less than half the height of the Eiffel, on which it’s modelled, but it’s more surreal, because it arises from such humble red-brick streets, like some Victorian rocket perpetually lifting off. The complex at its base houses a circus and an opulent ballroom, which is reminiscent of a sort of gymnasium with fairy cakes and sequins, such is the rigour and skill of the dancers.
The poignant thing is that Blackpool wouldn’t have needed a tower if only it had had coves, caves or cliffs of any size. Lacking natural sparkle, Blackpool made its own. In Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, Travis Elborough notes that “each of its three piers was already bathed in electric light by the 1880s”, hence the thunderbolt on the town crest.The British seaside holiday was pioneered in Blackpool in the 1870s. The textile towns in its hinterland needed to close their mills for maintenance for a week every year, so “Wakes Week” holidays evolved, whereby entire populaces decamped to Blackpool, leaving behind only a few social misfits and the engineers checking over the mill machinery.Ideally, arrival would be at Blackpool Central station, rather than Blackpool North, because Central was practically on the Prom, where you were plugged straight into the Blackpool magic: the arcades, freak shows, wax tableaux, over-the-top swings (we’re in the 1930s here); or perhaps walk south to the Pleasure Beach funfair, to ride the Reel, the Whip, the Big Dipper.But in 1964, Blackpool’s council decided to close Central station. Rising car use meant either it or Blackpool North had to go, and the council wanted Central’s prime site for development, which turned out to mean a vast car park, so there was a void in the middle of town. This is being taken in hand. A £300mn private investment will fund entertainment centres, a hotel, restaurants, a heritage quarter. The first stage, the construction of a trim-looking multistorey car park (because all those cars had to go somewhere), was recently completed.
Radiating from the Central site are streets comprising mainly tall guest houses, just as though the station were still there. Other properties have a more ambiguous status, with five or six doorbells, and the multiple doorbells persist further inland when the houses become smaller and more dilapidated. I recalled a line from Jez Butterworth’s play, The Hills of California, currently running in the West End and set in Blackpool in 1976: “Up in town, it’s all ‘kiss-me-quick and mine’s a choc-ice’ — out here in the backstreets, it’s carnage.”An hour later, I was in the top-floor office of council leader Lynn Williams, which commands views of the whole town. “Tourism aside,” she said, “it’s about housing, housing, housing. Everything from domestic violence to substance abuse comes back to that.” The Blackpool landladies were the social anchor. As they died or left town because of the decline of tourist overnighting, their properties were acquired and subdivided by buy-to-let speculators. Rents are cheap, conditions poor.
Thousands of “transients” have been drawn to Blackpool, living a kind of glum parody of a holiday, frequently on benefits. The council, working with the levelling up department, has intervened in the housing market and is building new social housing.With the sun setting over the boundless sea, Williams indicated the site where the new “Multiversity” campus will arise, intended to keep young people in the town. Earlier on, I’d asked a 22-year-old barman on the Prom about Blackpool. “The tourists love it,” he said, “and when I see them having a good time, I get a nice feeling.” So did he intend to stay? “For now,” he said, guardedly.
As for the tourism, it’s alive but changed. Most of the 7mn people who visited Blackpool in 1937 stayed a week. Of the 20mn who visited in 2022 (reflecting the greater mobility of modern times) most were day-trippers, so the strategy is to extend stays: a ticket for more attractions than can be seen in one day; a multi-day Christmas By The Sea fair. Already, more families are visiting, but the aim remains for Blackpool to be “a resort for fun and entertainment” and when I mentioned the word “gentrification” to Williams, she winced quite violently.As I left, I asked her what she made of Showtown. “It’s bright,” she said, “it’s fun and it’s . . . well, it’s just us.” I knew what she meant, and I liked what she meant.
@AmericanTangerine may be interested in some of the first part of the article above.
www.lner.co.uk
thread shows, there's tons of improvements happening or about to happen.
