Category Archives: Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage

Essentially Victorian Blackpool

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Blackpool Promenade (2003)

Blackpool Promenade (2003)

When I last stayed in Blackpool for a birthday celebration we took a walk along the North Pier at dusk.  On the way back to the promenade I ended up in conversation with two siblings, Richard, who was twelve but looked sixteen and had lost a tooth in a rugby match, and Natalie, eighteen, who was about to read medieval history at a university of her choice.

Natalie, who’s grown up down south and whose immediate family usually holidays abroad, was fascinated by the unfamiliarity of being in the great working-class resort of the north-west.  I pointed out that the Tower is a vertical pier – sturdy engineering topped with a fairy-tale structure five hundred feet above the sea.  When it opened in 1894 anybody with a few pence in their pocket could stand nearly five hundred feet in the air, an experience otherwise only accessible by balloon.

When we returned to the promenade a tram glided past, one of those huge double-deckers gleaming with light.  I mentioned that Blackpool had one of the first electric street tramways in the world, dating back to 1885.  At least as important, in historical terms, is the fact that the Corporation tramway department pioneered the development of Blackpool’s greatest stroke of municipal acumen.

To mark a royal visit in 1912, the tramway electricians were asked to festoon the promenade with coloured lamps, which drew so many extra visitors that from 1913 onwards, interrupted only by two wars and the General Strike, the Illuminations, as they were called, extended the Blackpool season by anything up to two months, adding to the prosperity of landladies, hoteliers and shopkeepers, enhancing the profits of the railway companies and subsidising the municipal rates from the increased profits of the trams themselves.

It made practical sense, during the busy summer season, for tram engineers to work on the Illuminations, while all their vehicles were needed on the road, and the autumn visitors kept the trams busy to the end of October.  Eventually, a separate Corporation department was established to run the Illuminations, and until the establishment of the National Grid, Blackpool had to buy additional power from Preston Corporation, because their own generating works couldn’t cope with the extra load.

As I pointed out to Natalie, when people go to see the Blackpool Illuminations, they’re doing something essentially Victorian – admiring electricity.

Details of this year’s Illuminations are at http://www.blackpool-illuminations.net.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Reginald – and Reg

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Blackpool Tower Ballroom

Blackpool Tower Ballroom

U3A in Sheffield has an admirable Lunch & Lecture event twice a year, and I was invited recently to be the “turn” with my lecture Fun Palaces:  the history & architecture of the entertainment industry which, inevitably, includes a segment on Blackpool Tower.

At the end of the lecture a gentleman came over and discreetly pointed out that I should not refer to the Tower’s most famous organist as “Reg” Dixon.  To Blackpool people, he was and is always Reginald Dixon.  In future, I mean to get that right.

As it happens, Reginald Dixon was born and bred in Sheffield.  He learnt to play at the Cemetery Road Congregational Church on the southern edge of town, and worked as a professional organist at, among other cinemas, the Heeley Palace, where he had to keep an eye on the level of the River Sheaf as it flowed past the building, in case it threatened to flood the orchestra pit.

When he applied for the vacant post as organist at the Tower, he bluffed in saying he could play dance music, but his idiosyncratic style proved ideal for the demands of accompanying ballroom dancers, rather than silent movies, on an orchestral organ.  His contract began in March 1930;  he made his first radio broadcast a month later, and by 1933 was able to persuade the Tower Company to install a completely new, three-manual, thirteen-rank Wurlitzer with a carillon and an additional piano.  The original Tower Wurlitzer was transferred to the Empress Ballroom in the Winter Gardens.

Reginald Dixon became one of the most potent of Blackpool’s legends.  He is famed for ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’, but when he reinaugurated the Wurlitzer after the 1956 fire he began with the first tune he ever played in the Ballroom, ‘Happy days are here again’.  He made a point of accompanying Christmas concerts and performances of Handel’s Messiah on the Wurlitzer.  He switched on the Illuminations in 1956 and was awarded the MBE in 1966:  he played his final concert at the Tower on Easter Sunday 1970.  He died, aged eighty, in 1985.

Actually, there was a Reg Dixon also.  He was born in Coventry in 1915, and died in 1984.  He was a comedian popular in the 1940s and 1950s, the closing years of variety. His catch-phrase was “I’m not well.  I’m proper poorly.”  There is interview-footage of him at http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=78574 and further footage at http://deanocity3.piczo.com/coventrystvandradiopersonalities?cr=5&linkvar=000044.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The well-kept secret of St Anne’s-on-Sea

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Tram shelter, St Annes-on-Sea

Tram shelter, St Annes-on-Sea

I made a flying visit to St Annes-on-Sea to present my lecture ‘Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of seaside resorts’ to the newly-founded Fylde Decorative & Fine Arts Society a few days ago.  For a society that’s been up and running for less than a year they’ve achieved an enormous amount – over 200 members, an award-winning website, visits to Yorkshire and Krakow, Young Arts sponsorship, a church-recording project and strong connections with other organisations in the region.  They meet at the United Reformed Church, St Georges Road, on the first Wednesday of each month from October to July, and have room for further new members.  See http://www.fyldedfas.org.uk/index.htm.

Kate Cartmell, the Programme Secretary, paid me a warmly-appreciated compliment when she pointed out that my description of Blackpool as a seaside resort “gave the place dignity”.  Sometimes people think I’m joking when I describe the Tower Ballroom as the finest piece of rococo decoration in the North West:  I was heartened that Kate recognised I wasn’t being ironical.

I wish I’d said a little more to place Lytham St Annes into the context of the history of the British seaside.  The Fylde coast tells the whole story, in essence, of how railways and, to a lesser extent, steamships, drove the holiday industry.

The landowner Peter Hesketh Fleetwood gave his name and lost his fortune to the wildly over-ambitious resort of Fleetwood, which was quickly overtaken by the small landowners and businessmen who made Blackpool the premier resort of the North West.

This process was helped by the decision of another landowning family, the Cliftons, to sell up in Blackpool and develop Lytham as a superior, “select” alternative that they could tightly control.  When the Cliftons were in need of cash in the teeth of an agricultural depression, they sold to a developer the land on which St Annes was built from 1875.  Meanwhile, further south, two more landowning families, the Scarisbricks and the Bolds (the latter related by marriage to the Fleetwoods), worked jointly to build spacious, elegant Southport.

To the far north, on the Lune estuary, another miscellaneous collection of landowners threw together Morecambe, in its day phenomenally successful as “Bradford-by-the-sea” and now less a resort than a dormitory for Lancaster.

You can walk round each place and pick up its character very quickly – Fleetwood, St Annes and Southport planned with a ruler and set-square; Morecambe and Blackpool strung together piecemeal;  Lytham, carefully constructed at the gates of the big house, Lytham Hall.

A quick trawl through the new Pevsner (Lancashire North) compels me to return to Lytham St Annes to explore the astonishing quality and variety of its architecture.

Watch this space…

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.