Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: why I love Blackpool

‘Jesus is the light of the world,’ reads the sign outside Blackpool’s Central Methodist Church, but all along the promenade the lights are going out. I’d returned to my favourite seaside resort to catch the end of the Illuminations, an annual attraction that brings several million visitors here every year. Since 1879, this vast canopy of fairy lights has stretched Blackpool’s summer season into autumn, flooding the seafront with ‘artificial sunshine’. But even Blackpool, with all its razzamatazz, can’t turn winter into summertime. From the Central Pier to the South Pier, the Illuminations are now all dormant. Only a modest cluster remains, between the Tower and the North Pier. It feels like a fitting metaphor for the shifting fortunes of Britain’s biggest seaside town. Ever since the railway arrived, in 1846, tourists have been pouring into Blackpool. But now the tide of history is flowing the other way.

In the history of British entertainment, Blackpool is unique. For a hundred years it was Lancashire’s Las Vegas, a place where millions of people went year after year to let their hair down for a week (or a fortnight if they were lucky). Britain’s other seaside towns tried to imitate it, but Blackpool was always bigger and brasher than all the rest. It had three piers and 11 theatres. The lifeboat station was the only one in Britain to have its own brass band. There were 60 ice-cream stalls and 40 oyster stands along the front. A troupe of 40 midgets lived in the roof gardens in Blackpool Tower. They manned the miniature railway at the Pleasure Beach. The midgets are long gone but the Pleasure Beach is still Britain’s most popular tourist attraction. Cheap package holidays to the Costa del Sol did away with Blackpool’s raison d’être, but half a century since those first charter flights, somehow it’s still here.