Blackpool illuminated: resetting the jewel in Britain’s seaside crown
28.07.2023 - 15:35
/ theguardian.com
Heading for the seafront from Blackpool North station, I passed gleaming new tramlines. Blackpool’s famous trams – confined to the promenade since the early 1960s – will soon be running inland again, and nearby hoardings boasted: “The renaissance of Blackpool is gathering pace.”
Good news about Blackpool is welcome, and rare. You can read all the indices of deprivation in Madelaine Bunting’s recent The Seaside, an excellent book, but the chapter on Blackpool is enough to make me feel guilty at always having had such a good time there.
Of course, you do have to brace yourself for sensory overload, and that was my mode as, overnight bag still in hand, I marched along the prom towards the tower. Entering the building at the base, I climbed the wide stairs, passing beautiful turquoise ceramics depicting underwater scenes. Occasionally, I glimpsed the riveted girders by which the tower is rooted to the prom, which are somehow unnerving, like scaly dinosaur legs amid the Victorian gentility.
Entering the vast, gilded ballroom, I was confronted by the Fellini-esque vision disclosed there every afternoon. A white Wurlitzer organ was being played from the stage by a dapper man whose blazered upper half was very composed but whose feet were flying about as he touched the pedals. On the floor, couples of all gender combinations were performing a medieval-looking, courtly dance – a gavotte, I think. Spangly dresses sparkled in the softly golden illumination, as did every man’s shoes. My meal arrived: crustless sandwiches and carefully variegated small cakes. The organist was now playing a quickstep, and the vibration of the sprung floor sloshed my tea in its cup. The sweat on the dancers’ faces coexisted oddly with the great decorum of their moves.
Half an hour later, I was in the glass lift ascending the tower, which is rusty in parts, as though it had once been under the sea, and which culminates in a series of what look like large ornate birdcages, collectively known these days as the Tower Eye. From these, you survey the basic Blackpool offer: no harbour or cute coves but just a massive expanse of beach, giving way to an inscrutable sea. I looked directly down, at the bunker-like Coral Island amusement arcade that stands on the site of the old Central Station, which, until 1964, disgorged excursionists (sometimes 30 trainloads a day) directly on to the prom. Where the tracks entered the station, there is a very grey car park, but this is doomed, because the footprint of the old station is to be redeveloped – another aspect of the renaissance.
After leaving the tower, I sought directions to my hotel – the Imperial – from a woman serving at an open-fronted shop selling ice-cream, doughnuts and rock (and this