Blackpool, a town on the Lancashire coast in North West England is the largest seaside resort in the United Kingdom. In 2016, the last year for which full data are available, the overall number of tourist visits to the resort reached 18 millionâan increase of around one million compared to the previous year. That survey valued Blackpoolâs visitor economy at a ÂŁ1.5bn, supporting more than 25,000 jobs (âMarketing Lancashire STEAM figures 2017â). Blackpoolâs Pleasure Beach (an amusement park complex) remains the most popular of all English holiday attractions.
Despite these successes there is a widespread perception that Blackpool is in decline and what it has on offer is not particularly appealingâentertainment rather than art and lowbrow for that. The purpose of this book is to interrogate these perceptions and the realities which are behind them, by looking at two facets of Blackpool: film and music, with an emphasis on more recent representations. I chose these aspects of Blackpool because the bulk of research concerns Blackpoolâs history, neglecting its present day and focusing more on the infrastructure for entertainment than art created in and about Blackpool. Moreover, by considering Blackpool film and music we can find out how Blackpool presents itself to different types of observers.
In order to better understand what Blackpool stands for, it is worth positioning it at the crossing of two discourses. One of them is the discourse on the North of England, because Blackpool is, of course, located in this part of the country. The second discourse is of seaside resorts. Onto them is woven a discourse of England as a country in decline, looking backward to its lost imperial glory. However, these discourses do not explain everything that has been said about Blackpool and this is not only because there is always a certain surplus of meaning which theories cannot capture, but also because Blackpool is in many ways exceptional: it is thus not like any other northern town or seaside resort. Even the post-imperial decline is played there uniquely. In the next parts of the introduction I will sketch these discourses, but first present a very short history of Blackpool.
1 Blackpoolâs History: Facts and Figures
Nobody wrote as much and as vividly about Blackpool as my former colleague from the University of Central Lancashire, John Walton. His publications about Blackpool, especially the books The Blackpool Landlady, published in 1978 and Blackpool, published in 1998 and a number of articles and book chapters, provide the most comprehensive accounts of Blackpoolâs history to this point, so it is worth revisiting its main findings, before presenting the last twenty years or so of Blackpoolâs history, which Walton did not cover. As a seaside resort, in Waltonâs words, Blackpool was âa late developerâ, but it caught up very rapidly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, capitalising on the growing spending power of the working class which was released through falling prices in the extended period of deflation after 1873 (Walton 1998: 2). From the 1870s Blackpool opened its doors to the working-class holidaymakers en masse, first from the Lancashire cotton towns, then from further afield. Annual totals roughly trebled to about 85,000 between 1865 and 1873, then more than doubled again to nearly 2 million over the next twenty years, and continued this process to reach nearly 4 million on the eve of the First World War (ibid.: 3). It was during this period that Blackpool added an important attraction to its portfolio of pleasures: the Illuminations, an annual festival of light, founded in 1879 and inaugurated on the 18 September that year, and held each autumn for about two months, from late August until early November. It consists of traditional festoons and tableaux, and illuminated tram tours, covering 5.2 miles, stretching along the Promenade from Starr Gate at the south end of the town to Bispham in the north.
Going against the dictum that political upheavals thwart the tourist industry, Blackpool did very well during the First World War. The town benefitted from billeting troops and refugees and the redistribution of resources which produced enhanced spending power while rationing access to consumer goods. Meanwhile, transport restrictions gave Blackpool a captive market from the nearby industrial centres (ibid.: 4). The resort continued to grow during the interwar years, relying to a large extent on the working-class market but sustaining a broad appeal to more affluent groups (ibid.: 4). During this period it not only attracted visitors from the North of England, but also from London, the south coast, industrial South Wales and Glasgow (ibid.: 4â5). The period of the Second World War was, again, prosperous for Blackpool. This was in part because many of its competitors on the east and south coasts were incapacitated by the threats of invasion and aerial bombardment. Although the holiday season was shortened due to the lack of the Illuminations, the landladies were able to recoup their income through accommodating Royal Air Force personnel in training; over three-quarters of a million RAF recruits passed through the town during the war. The townâs population increased from 128,200 in 1939 to 143,650 in 1945, despite the departure of local men for the war effort (ibid.: 137). A property boom developed as boarding houses came to be regarded as goldmines and some trebled in value during the war years (ibid.: 138). During the war Blackpool also changed its employment structure thanks to the state-run aircraft factory at Squireâs Gate, which opened in 1940 to produce Wellington bombers and employed more than 10,000 workers at its peak (ibid.: 138).
The first two decades after the end of the Second World War were also prosperous for Blackpool. The town was ready for the explosion of post-war holidaymaking, facilitated by the Holidays with Pay Act from 1938 which gave most workers the right to one weekâs paid holiday per year, in ways its competitors on the south and east coast, damaged by war deprivations, could not match. It also benefitted from convenient railway connections, as well as an increased number of visitors arriving in coaches and private cars. At the peak of the season Blackpool railway stations brought in over 100,000 passengers per day and 12,000 coaches per week. In 1949 the Illuminations returned to Blackpool, bringing 3 million excursionists and symbolically ending the period of war and post-war austerity (ibid.: 139). Good seasons continued into the 1960s, as the change in emphasis from the summer to the Illuminations season continued. This reduced the impact of emergent competition from continental holidays, as many people took their second holiday in Blackpool in the autumn (ibid.: 141). The number of visitors were also boosted by the conferences of political parties, which brought Blackpool extra publicity. However, there was a shift towards shorter holidays, which inevitably brought less revenue to the town. Moreover, during this decade one can observe a change in the demographics of the visitors, with older holidaymakers dominating over the young, a trend suggesting an (approaching) decline.
In 1972 Blackpool Corporation and the English Tourist Board commissioned a survey of the townâs visitors, which was carried out by the British Market Research Bureau. It concluded that Blackpool attracted 3.24 million staying visitors and 12.8 million day trippers during the season, although many of these were repeat visits drawn from a pool of nearly 6 million regular customers. The survey also showed that Blackpoolâs visitors were overwhelmingly working class and relatively elderly. However, contrary to the expectation of a downward spiral, a second survey in 1987 found that the number of staying visitors increased from 3.24 to 3.46 million, with the average length of stay being three to four nights. Up until the mid-1980s Blackpool attracted 17 million visitors a year. This and further increases in visits were prompted by the continuing development of the Illuminations. This was a remarkable achievement, given that Blackpoolâs competitors, such as Morecambe, were declining rapidly (Hassan 2003: 254â55; Jarratt 2015: 355). The worst decade for Blackpool was the 1990s, when the number of visitors fell to 10 million, to recover to about 17â18 million in the second half of the 2010s.
The changes in the number of visitors are reflected in the population trends. Between the 1881 and 1911 censuses, Blackpool more than trebled its census population (Walton 1997: 21â22). In the early 1960s, Blackpoolâs population reached its peak at about 153,000 people. In 1981, the total fell below 150,000 inhabitants and the 1991 counted about 145,000 people. Moreover, the proportion of the older population was increasing, with nearly one in four Blackpool inhabitants having reached pensionable age by 1991 (Walton 1998: 148). These trends have continued to the present day. In 2018, the population of Blackpool was 139,300 and of those 20.4% were of the age 65 or more against 18.2% in England as a whole (âJSNA Blackpoolâ).
In the last twenty years or so the attempts to sustain Blackpoolâs position as Britainâs biggest resort and entertainment centre were marked by setbacks. One of them included getting a super-casino, one of 16 such casinos around England mooted in 2007, under the Labour government of Tony Blair. However, the first licence to open a super-casino was granted to Manchester, rather than Blackpool, which hoped to use it to create an extra 3000 jobs, leaving its authorities and inhabitants very disappointed (âWhy Blackpool Lost Casino Bidâ 2007; âBlackpoolâs Dismay at Casino Snubâ 2007). The reasons were complex, but in a nutshell, the rejection showed that London did not see Blackpool as a major player in the tourism industry, able to sustain such a large project. The super-casino project was reheated in 2019, but attracted little enthusiasm, in part due to the conviction that supporting gambling is not the best vehicle of regeneration and in part because in the meantime the gambling industry moved from the physical spaces of casinos to the internet (âMinister AimsâŠâ 2019). Blackpoolâs efforts to diversify its economy and strengthen the cultural capital of its inhabitants were also frustrated. A poignant example is its failure to secure the establishment of a university in Blackpool. Such ambitions were met with sympathy during (New) Labour rule (Lipsett 2008), but were thwarted by the successive Conservative governments, in part aware that higher education in England might have reached a saturation point, given that even the existing universities struggle to fill their places.
Even if Blackpool still holds on to its reputation as Britainâs Las Vegas, various socio-economic indicators cast the town in an unenviable light. In recent years a number of league tables which, among other indicators, identified Blackpool as having the lowest male life expectancy in England, being over 5 years below that of England (âJSNA Blackpoolâ), the largest per capita number of prescriptions issued for antidepressants, the lowest full-time average wage in the UK (OâConnor 2017) and having eight of the 10 most deprived neighbourhoods in England (âEnglandâs Most Deprived AreasâŠâ 2019), positioned it as a âleft behindâ town. The large vote in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum, amounting to 67,5%, the highest in the Lancashire region (âEU Referendum: All 14 Lancashire Districts Back Brexitâ 2016) and one of the highest in the country, strengthened such an opinion.
In the light of the perception that Blackpool is going down, it is not surprising that many of those who can, leave the resort, to seek a better life elsewhere, leading to a BBC journalist stating that âyoung people might disappear from E...