The Impossible Rise of Blackpool: From Empty Beach to Europe's Las Vegas

[00:00:00]On an autumn night in 1879, close to a 100,000 people crowded onto a stretch of Lancaster sand to watch eight electric lamps switch on. They called it artificial sunshine, a light equal to 48,000 candles thrown across the water, and grown men wept because most of them had lived their whole lives by gaslight and candle flame. 40 years earlier, this beach had been almost nothing but a handful of farmhouses and windswept sand. This is the story of how the emptiest coast in England became the entertainment capital of the world. And it is stranger than it first appears because Blackpool was not built in spite of the grim industrial north. It was built by it. Think about that for a moment. [music] The town that sold light and leisure and sea air. The town that would one day be called the Las Vegas of the North was the direct product of the smoke and the noise and the endless factory clock that people came there to forget. The mills made Blackpool as surely as they spun cotton. To understand how you have to go back to the beach before there was anything on it at all. For most of its history, Blackpool was a place almost no one had any reason to visit. It sat on the flat exposed edge of the filled peninsula. A scatter of farms and fishing families looking out at the Irish Sea. There was no harbor worth the name, no industry, no grand houses. There was sand and wind and a discolored [music] stream running down to the water that gave the place its blunt, unloly name. Then, in the middle of the 18th century, a peculiar idea took hold among the wealthy.

[00:01:43]Doctors began to insist that bathing in cold sea water and even drinking it could cure almost anything. Suddenly, a bleak northern beach had a purpose. The wellto-do started to arrive in small numbers to take the waters. And in 1781, two local land owners built a private road to make the village easier to reach. Stage coaches began running from Manchester that same year and from Halifax the year after. But this was still a trickle, not a flood. A gentile little resort for people with time and money. [music] And there were never very many of those. By the early 19th century, Blackpool was growing, but slowly, the way a village grows. What it needed was a machine that could move people in their thousands [music] cheaply and faster than a horse could ever manage.

[00:02:33]That machine arrived on rails [music] in 1840. The Preston and Wire Railway opened across the Fielder, though at first it did not even reach Blackpool.

[00:02:44]It ran only as far as Poulton, a few miles in land, [music] and travelers finished the journey by horse, bumping along the last stretch to the coast. The line had been built to serve a rival port, not the beach. But something unexpected happened. [music] The struggling railway discovered that the most profitable thing it could carry was not freight and not the gentry. It was ordinary working people packed into [music] cheap excursion trains desperate for a single day beside the sea. So in 1846, a branch line was pushed through to the town itself and the trains [music] came steaming straight onto the seafront. And that is when the trickle became a torrent because the railway had connected Blackpool to the most crowded, hardest working, most tightly wound landscape in the entire world. The cotton towns of Lanasher, the mill towns of the industrial north.

[00:03:40]Which brings us to the strangest engine of Blackpool's rise, a tradition called the wakes. The wakes were ancient long before there were factories. [music] Originally, they were religious festivals, the yearly feast days held to honor the saint. A parish church was named after a night of vigil that slowly turned into a holiday of fairs and drinking and dancing. For centuries, they were about faith. Then the industrial revolution got hold of them [music] and turned them into something else entirely. And here is the detail that makes the whole thing so strange.

[00:04:14]When the great cotton mills began shutting their gates for a wakes week, they were not doing it to give their workers a rest. They were doing it because the machinery needed maintenance. The looms and the spinning mules ran nearly every waking hour of the year, [music] and once a year they had to be stopped, cleaned, and repaired. It made sense to shut the whole mill at once and send everyone away while the engineers worked. [music] The holiday that built Blackpool was invented for the machines, and the people were simply let out alongside them. And because the entire mill closed on the same days, the entire town emptied on the same days. [music] The chimneys stopped smoking, the printing presses of the local paper fell silent. The corner shops pulled down their shutters because there was no one left to sell to. A whole community, tens of thousands of people would move as one body toward the railway station and pour onto the trains for the coast. The scale of it is hard to picture now. In 1860, in a single wakes period, more than 23,000 people traveled from Blackpool by train from one town and Olden was only one of dozens. Burnley, Bry, Bolton, Rochdale, Preston, Wigan, each with its own assigned week, carefully staggered across the summer, so they would not all descend at once and break the railways under the weight of them. On the morning a town's week began, the railway laid on special trains, timetabled for one purpose, to carry a whole community [music] to the sea.

[00:05:47]The station platforms filled with families in their Sunday best. Cardboard suitcases and buckets and spades.

[00:05:56]Children wild with the strangeness of it all. And one after another the trains pulled out crammed to the doors. A town would arrive at Blackpool almost intact so that once you got there you would recognize half the faces on the prominard. Your neighbors, your workmates, the man from the shop on the corner. All of you washed up together on the same shining strip of coast. There is a quiet irony buried in all this.

[00:06:25][music] When the mills closed for their wakes, the smoke over the hometowns finally lifted. And for a few days, the air there was actually clean. And yet everyone left anyway, streaming toward a beach to breathe sea air they could suddenly have had at home. They had come for something the clean air could never give them. Escape from the clock. That relentless unforgiving rhythm of the factory floor. 12 months of it. Saved up and spent in a single week of freedom.

[00:06:59][music] And spend it they did. These were people who had put money aside all year, penny by penny, in savings clubs set up for exactly this purpose, so that when the week came, they could arrive with a small fortune and blow the entire lot in one glorious spree. Blackpool understood this from the very beginning. It did not want gentle, thrifty visitors who lingered for a season. It wanted crowds who came with a week's wages burning a hole in their pockets and every intention of spending it all. So the town set about building the most efficient pleasure machine the world had ever seen.

[00:07:45]It started with the peers. In 1863, Blackpool opened its north pier, a long elegant walkway reaching out over the sea designed by the great pier engineer Eugenius Burch. 20,000 people came to its opening. From the start, it was meant for the better sort of visitor, a place of orchestra concerts and quiet prominadating where respectable families could take the air. But the working crowds pouring off the trains wanted something louder than a gentle stroll.

[00:08:17]So in 1868 came a second pier, the one now called Central. And it was built for fun. open air dancing, cheap thrills, noise and music and crowds. They called it the people's pier and it drew the mill workers in their thousands while the North Pier kept its gentile distance. Right there in those two peers standing side by side, you can see the whole social divide of Victorian Britain mapped onto a beach. The refined and the rockus separated by a few hundred yards of sand and the numbers climbing off the trains kept swelling. In the first year of its life alone, the North Pier drew more than a quarter of a million visitors. The permanent population was rising too from a few thousand souls at the middle of the century toward the 14,000 who would call the place home by the 1880s. And almost every one of them, it seemed, was somehow in the business of separating a day tripper from his wages. Blackpool had stopped being a village that happened to have visitors.

[00:09:20]It had become a factory whose only product was pleasure, and it retoled itself year on year to make more of it.

[00:09:27]The town was electrifying in every sense. A grand indoor pleasure palace, the Winter Gardens, opened in [music] 1878 to give the crowds somewhere to go when the weather turned, which on the Lancaster coast it very [music] often did. And then came the moment we started with, the lights. By the late 1870s, the town was booming, but it was also nervous. Money was tight, and Blackpool needed a spectacle to keep the crowds coming. So, the council took a gamble.

[00:09:58]They spent £5,000 on an experiment almost no one had attempted, [music] electric street lighting. On the Prominard, they installed eight towering carbon arc lamps powered by steamdriven engines. [music] And in the autumn of 1879, they switched them on. The effect was overwhelming.

[00:10:17]People who had never seen anything brighter than a gas flame stood beneath a light equal to tens of thousands of candles and struggled to understand what they were looking at. The newspapers [music] called it artificial sunshine.

[00:10:32]Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people traveled from across the country just to witness it. And to give the crowds a spectacle worthy of the moment, the town staged a mock naval battle out on the water. A sham bombardment that filled the night with noise and [music] smoke while the electric lamps blazed overhead. This was a full year before Thomas Edison would even [music] patent his electric light bulb. Now, Blackpool has long claimed to be the first town in Britain with electric street lighting, [music] and you will hear that repeated everywhere. The honest truth is a little more complicated and [music] in a way more interesting. London had actually strung electric arc lamps along the Tempame's embankment the year before in 1878.

[00:11:18]But here is the difference that mattered. London found the new lights expensive and troublesome and within a few years quietly switched its streets back to gas. Blackpool did the opposite.

[00:11:28]Blackpool looked at electric light and saw an attraction, something it could sell. It grabbed hold of the idea and never once let go. And it would spend the next century and a half turning light itself into the thing it was famous for.

[00:11:44]The commitment to modern wonder did not stop at lighting. In 1885, Blackpool opened Britain's first electric street tramway, running along the prominard, drawing its power from a channel cut into the road. [music] It was so early, so ahead of its time, that the great industrial cities had nothing like it.

[00:12:05]And it came with its own perfect little irony. The sea that the tramway was built to serve kept flooding the power channel with sand and salt water. And when the electrics failed, the crews had to hitch horses to the [music] electric trams and pull them along by hand. The future dragged forward by the past. By now, you can see the shape of it. A beach that had been nothing was becoming a machine for manufacturing joy, powered by electricity, [music] fed by the railway, filling up week after week with the human output of the mills. But everything so far, the peers, the lights, the trams, was only the overture. The single structure that would crown Blackpool as the undisputed capital of the north had not yet been built, and the two men who designed it would both be dead before it ever opened. So, what could possibly be worth that? The answer was standing in Paris.

[00:13:04]In 1889, the Eiffel Tower had risen over the French capital and stunned the world, a latis of iron reaching higher than any structure ever made by human hands. And the story goes that a former mayor of Blackpool named John Bickerstaff stood beneath it or at the very least heard tell of it and had a simple audacious thought. Why should Paris have all the glory when you could build one here on the sand and charge the mill workers to ride to the top. A company was formed in 1890 and Bickerstaff threw himself behind it so completely that when the money ran short and the whole venture threatened to collapse, he bought up shares himself until a modest stake had swollen into a small fortune, staking his own name on the gamble. The design was drawn up by two architects, James Maxwell and Charles Tuke. Neither of them lived to see it finished. Chuke is said to have died on the very day the flag staff was raised to the summit. The day the structure reached its full height. They built a monument that would outlast them by well over a century and they never got to stand at the top of it. When it was done, the Blackpool Tower rose 518 ft above the prominard. It was at that moment the tallest man-made structure in the entire British Empire. It swallowed 5 million bricks in its base alone. And unlike its Parisian inspiration, it was far more than a tower. Underneath it, they [music] packed an entire entertainment complex, a circus, a menagerie, a ballroom, all wrapped around the iron legs. When the wind blew hard off the Irish Sea, the whole tower would gently sway, and the crowds inside would feel the future move beneath their feet. It opened on the 14th of May 1894 with almost no ceremony at all. [music] It did not need one. Around 70,000 people paid their sixpence to get in on the early days. Another sixpence to ride the lift to the top [music] and another still to see the circus. The gamble had paid off completely. A Lanasher seaside town now had its own answer to the Eiffel Tower, and it was pulling in money by the fistful. and the tower was only the centerpiece. [music] In 1893, a third pier had opened, the Victoria, now called [music] South, completing the trio. In 1896, a man named William Bean, who had failed to make it as an advertising man on Madison Avenue in New York, came home to England with a headful of Coney Island and began laying out an Americanstyle amusement park on the dunes at the south end of the beach. It would grow into the pleasure beach, one of the great fairgrounds of the world. Roundabouts became roller coasters. A flying machine built in 1904 still turns [music] there today. And between the grand attractions ran the Golden Mile. A dense, glorious clutter of everything a day tripper [music] could want. Stalls selling rock and fish and chips and candy floss.

[00:16:11]Fortune tellers promising to read the future for a single coin. [music] donkey rides along the wet sand at low tide.

[00:16:19]Photographers, sideh shows, and slot machines rattling away in the arcades.

[00:16:23]It was loud [music] and cheap and completely without shame. And that was exactly the point. Blackpool had built a place where a working family could for a few precious days [music] spend their money freely and answer to no one at all. Above all of it, the lights kept growing. What had begun as eight lonely ark lamps swelled over the years [music] into the illuminations, a vast electric spectacle stretching for miles along the front, switched on each autumn to stretch the season past the end of summer and squeeze a few more weeks of visitors [music] out of the shortening days.

[00:16:59]The turning point came in 1912 when a member of the royal family, Princess Louise, [music] arrived to open a new stretch of prominard and the town draped the seafront with around 10,000 colored bulbs [music] to mark the occasion. The crowds were so entranced that the council was begged to stage it again.

[00:17:18]And so the illuminations grew into a fixed autumn ritual larger every year.

[00:17:24][music] It was the same instinct that had driven everything else. Take the ordinary, take the darkness, and turn it into a reason to come. By the 1930s, [music] Blackpool had become something almost without parallel.

[00:17:37]7 million people were holidaying there every single year. 7 million funneled onto one strip of coast, staying for days or a week at a time. On a busy summer night, the town could hold something like a quarter of a million visitors all at once, sleeping in a [music] dense forest of boarding houses that ran back street after street [music] from the seafront. And those boarding houses tell you everything about the strange self-renewing engine [music] the town had become. Many of them were run by women, the famous Blackpool landladies. And a great number of those women had once been holiday makers themselves. [music] They had come from the same mill towns on the same wakes weeks saved for years and loved the place so much that they came back for good to run a house of their own. The visitors became the hosts. The town literally reproduced itself out of the people who came to enjoy it and it ran like the machines that had [music] made it. Week after week through the summer, One Mill town would pack up and go home on the very trains that carried the next one in, so that the boarding houses barely had time to change the sheets before Olden gave way to Bolton and Bolton to Blackburn and Blackburn to Burnley, an entire industrial region processed through a single resort in careful staggered shifts. Inside the tower, in the great ornate ballroom, thousands of couples circled the floor beneath the high [music] painted ceiling while an organ filled the room with sound. The circus played on beneath the iron [music] legs, and the lifts ran all day long, carrying six penny [music] passengers up toward the clouds. Picture it at its height, the tower blazing against the night sky.

[00:19:26]Three peers thrust out into the black water, strung with bulbs. The trams sliding along the front beneath the ark [music] lamps. Ballrooms packed with dancing couples. The great organ playing. The smell of salt and frying [music] and candy floss. The roar of the roller coasters. And everywhere, everywhere the light. For the families who came, people who spent 51 weeks of the year in the shadow of [music] a chimney breathing coal smoke ruled by the factory hooter. This was far more than a holiday. It was a glimpse of another world entirely. [music] A week of being warm and bright and free and then the long train home to the mill, which is the final quiet irony of the whole story. Blackpool's genius [music] had always been to manufacture what the north was missing. The mill towns lacked light, so Blackpool [music] sold them light. They lacked open air and freedom and color, so Blackpool sold them all three. The one thing it could never manufacture, the one thing it could only fake with electric bulbs [music] and call artificial sunshine was actual sunshine. The real reliable warmth of the sun. And in the [music] end, that was exactly what undid it.

[00:20:40]From the 1960s onwards, a new machine appeared to move people [music] in their millions cheaply and faster than ever before. This time, it was the airplane.

[00:20:52]Package holidays opened up the beaches of Spain [music] and Italy to ordinary British families. And those beaches came with [music] something Blackpool never could promise. A sun that was actually guaranteed to shine. [music] When the price of a fortnight in the Mediterranean fell within reach of a working family, the choice became painfully [music] simple. Real sunshine or artificial. The crowds began to thin. The wakes weeks faded as the mills that created [music] them closed down one by one, taking with them the whole rhythm of life [music] that had sent entire towns to the coast together. The boarding houses that had [music] once filled to bursting were left half empty, and aging infrastructure built for a flood that had slowed [music] to a stream, and the town that had risen so improbably fast now faced the far slower, far cruer work of decline. But go to Blackpool today and you will find that the machine has not stopped. The tower still stands, still swaying [music] gently in the wind, still swallowing visitors into its ballroom. The tram still run along [music] the front, the last traditional tramway of their kind left in Britain.

[00:22:05]Direct descendants [music] of that flooded little line from 1885.

[00:22:10]And every autumn, without fail, the lights still come on. miles of them now.

[00:22:15]More than a million bulbs drawing crowds back to the prominard in the cold and the dark exactly as eight lonely ark lamps did almost 150 years ago. It is worth remembering what that beach used to be. A few farmhouses, wind and empty sand and a discolored little stream. A place with no reason to exist. And then the factories of the north without ever meaning to breathed a whole town into being. [music] A town built on their own smoke and their own exhaustion. A town that took everything grinding and gray [music] about the industrial age and turned it for one week a year into light. They came [music] to see the artificial sunshine and for a while on that impossible beach. It shone brighter than the real thing ever [music] could.

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