What a Blighted Beach Town Says About England’s Forgotten North
As a Brit, statistically speaking, you do not want to be born in Blackpool. If you are, you’ve certainly lost the postcode lottery. You have the worst life expectancy of anywhere in the U.K.—seventy-three years if you’re male, almost six years below the national average. You live in one of the most violent parts of Britain, encompassing seven of England’s ten most deprived neighborhoods. It’s a place where twenty-five in every thousand people use crack cocaine or opiates, and nearly seventy-three per cent of residents are overweight or obese. In 2024, one in fifty-two children was in state care. Blackpool is, by many measures, awful, and yet Brits cannot stop visiting.
Blackpool is a seaside town that sits on the square-shaped Fylde peninsula of northwest England. It is forty-one miles from the domineering metropolis of Manchester, the home of the new U.K. Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. Generally, outcomes in education, salary, and life expectancy are worse in the North of England—a defining feature of the country’s well-established regional divide. For its part, Blackpool, colloquially crowned the Vegas of the North, functions as the North’s id, featuring sprawling casinos and tawdry entertainment smorgasbords that often include—but are not limited to—cross-dressing pantomimes, magic shows, and tight-trousered Elvis impersonators. It’s a home for gamblers and grandmas, criminals and candy sellers. Chris Moss, a travel writer from Lancashire, told me that Blackpool is primarily made of “garish frontages, crappy shops, run-down public services,” and added that “the tackiness is the built environment.”
The thumping heart of these gaudy surroundings is the Golden Mile, a stretch of seafront promenade where you can find the austerity of seaside Britain manifest: penny-arcade amusements; fortune-teller palmists; dodgy fish-and-chip shops; sticks of rock, a hard candy sold often at seasides and decorated with British phrases like “GOBSHITE” and “FAT SLAG”; and kitschy donkey rides.
In the national consciousness, Blackpool has become a morbid caricature of working-class Britain—a place where binge drinking, violence, and vomit are in view of teacup rides, kids on the beach, and plastic pirates. Liam Hyde knows that all too well. Hyde, now twenty-nine, grew up in Blackpool—he’s what locals call a Sandgrown’un. But, after attending university nearby, in Lancashire, he packed up his things and left for Manchester, in pursuit of better job prospects. “Whenever someone asks me where I’m from and I say Blackpool, they’re, like, ‘Oh, God. I’m sorry.’ ” Personal anecdotes from members of the Blackpool diaspora often escalate into baffling tales of social decline. Georgianna Wells, a twenty-seven-year-old Sandgrown’un, told me that she once witnessed a man catch a seagull with his bare hands and bite into it. She also showed me a photo of a man walking a seagull across the road on a leash, as if it were a dog.
There is a word in British English—“naff”—that describes a specific kind of outdated, unfashionable aesthetic. Blackpool is full of naff things: cheap bingo, washed-up entertainers, hats that read “KISS ME QUICK.” Despite—or because of—its naffness, Blackpool is consistently one of the most popular domestic vacation spots in the British Isles. In 2024, Blackpool had more than twenty-three million visitors, bringing over two billion pounds to the local economy. Blackpool’s popularity is not exactly new. The seaside resort was once the pinnacle of Victorian holiday-making. In 1879, it was one of the first towns in the world to have electric street lights, described, then, as much-needed “artificial sunshine.” (Blackpool gets, on average, a hundred and forty-seven days of rainfall a year.) Millions of Brits would visit to bathe in the town’s frigid waters and waltz to a world-famous Wurlitzer theatre organ in a sprawling ballroom connected to the town’s five-hundred-and-eighteen-foot, Eiffel-inspired Blackpool Tower. By the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of families living in cotton-mill towns across the North would take affordable weeklong trips by the seaside—a tradition known as Wakes Weeks—with Blackpool a prime destination. The town became so beloved that Hitler had it spared from the Blitz, despite its military significance, in the hope that Nazi troops would one day goose-step down its unbombed boardwalks.
Today, the town’s Victorian grandeur is rotting and crumbling away, its cast-iron piers corroded by sea salt. The story goes that cheaper flights and package holidays from the nineteen-sixties onward sent most Brits to sunnier shores abroad. In response, the town shifted its marketing to late-night booze-ups and wedding parties (known, in British parlance, as stag dos and hen dos), and subsequently grew a reputation as a sandcastle Sodom. This downturn in the local economy was made worse by decades of austerity measures and brain drain. At this point, the town’s name has become synonymous with loss and decline in the U.K.
Recently, on a day of elusive Blackpudlian sunshine, I found a sightseer named Anthony waiting with his luggage at the train station. The sixty-five-year-old was headed home to Manchester after a long weekend by the sea. Anthony is a hulking, bald man with pale skin and even paler eyes, and he was dressed in an island-print tropical shirt. He visits Blackpool seven times a year, yet readily admitted to me, as he puffed a cigarette, that “it’s a bit of a shithole.” During his latest visit, Anthony had indulged in a time-honored Blackpool trifecta: drinking, karaoke, and pub-bound socializing. But he’s careful not to stray too far from his usual haunts. “When you start getting to the backstreets,” Anthony said, “you see how the place has really gone downhill.”
I spoke with another frequent visitor, Alison O’Neill, a sixty-year-old from Chadderton, near Manchester, who told me that she first started visiting Blackpool as a child. Now she goes up to four times annually, often staying at the same hotel, for nostalgia and convenience. “Well, I know what I’m getting when I go,” she said. Alistair Lindsay, forty-two, from North Somerset, travels for more specific reasons: he’s an acolyte of the Northern-soul movement of the nineteen-seventies, a subculture predominantly made up of geriatrics vigorously dancing to obscure American soul records, for which, Lindsay confirms, “Blackpool has become something of a mecca.” But the glint of disco balls can only distract for so long. “Only thirty yards down the road, you start to see boarded windows in these condemned buildings,” Lindsay told me. “You want to look at that seedy underbelly? You don’t have to look too far.”
On one of these downhill backstreets is the tautly named Higgitt’s Las Vegas Arcade Blackpool & £1 Burger Bar. Its limited floor space is divided between a raised kitchenette and a waiting area stuffed with gambling machines. When I arrived, the bald head of the owner, Chris Higgitt, surfaced through the grill’s plumes of smoke. In a different life, Higgitt would be a showman, a real Britain’s Barnum. He speaks of himself with a rehearsed authority. “I am the pound-burger man,” he said, adding, “I’m quite good in front of a camera—I’ve got the confidence.” Higgitt makes YouTube videos about his life in Blackpool, and told me that he was attempting to create an online soap opera about Blackpool, starring locals, to try to draw tourists in.
Higgitt served customers to the very last second of his shift, claiming that he must cook a burger every twenty seconds to keep the business viable. After he closed up, I noticed that the shutters were adorned with a spray-paint tocsin: “THE DADDY HAS LEFT THE BUILDING.” Before his turn to burgers, Higgitt spent fifteen years as an engineer in the automotive industry. Now he spends his time in shorts and a greasy T-shirt. “Escapism, Blackpool’s all about escapism,” he told me. “We’re not pretentious in Blackpool. If you want to have a bit of true, honest working-class fun, this is the place to come.” But he understands that the town might not be for everyone. “It’s Marmite.”
Polarizing yeast-extract paste may be right. Paul Theroux once wrote that Blackpool was “real clutter,” a place of “foolish and flimsy” buildings with “vacationers sitting under a dark sky with their shirts off, sleeping with their mouths open, emitting hog whimpers.” Bill Clinton, on the other hand, after a trip to a local McDonald’s with the actor Kevin Spacey, in 2002, quite enjoyed the place. “I like the city, I like the weather,” he said, even if, he admitted, it was “kinda sleazy.” Walking past a complex of small shop fronts for souvenirs and fish and chips, I ended up at the Wescoe Guesthouse, a small bed-and-breakfast owned by Alton Hobbs. When I shook his hand, Hobbs apologized for the plastic glove; it was covering up a wound he had sustained the day before, when a seagull attacked him for a chip. Hobbs, wearing a dark-blue designer polo and silver aviator glasses, decided to move to Blackpool in part after learning about the town’s shockingly low property prices—which can often be as much as a hundred and fifty thousand pounds below the national average. Now, he told me, he has no plans to move ever again.
We sat in the Wescoe’s dining room, drinking cups of tea. A Tripadvisor trophy loomed pointedly over his shoulder; a robot vacuum patrolled the floor for crumbs. “Excuse the robot,” he said politely, before launching into his frustrations with Blackpool’s reputation. “People slag off Blackpool. It kind of pisses me off a bit, because, yeah, it’s rough around the edges, but you show me a city in the U.K. that isn’t.” A hoop earring in his left ear sparkled as he spoke, as did his pearlescent teeth. Hobbs told me that his visitors are mainly interested in visiting Blackpool’s more sanitized offerings, but have a sense of curiosity about its dodgier elements. This usually means staring at it, open-mouthed, from a safe distance.
Gawking has a long history in Blackpool. In the late nineteen-thirties—after failing to find an audience among the prudish art class—the sculptor Jacob Epstein’s work was shipped and displayed in Blackpool to “adult only” audiences, as a salacious peep show. Today his work sits in the Tate. In the fifties and sixties, the Golden Mile was home to a menagerie of freak shows and sideshows where patrons could see young women dressed as “captive” mermaids and two-headed taxidermied monstrosities purported to be genuine Patagonian mummies. But, as the decades rolled on, Blackpool itself became a subject to gawk at. A strange love for, and morbid curiosity about, Britain’s worst town cuts across all sorts of demographics. In 2014, the Glaswegian photographer Dougie Wallace released a collection of photographs of incredibly drunk stag-do and hen-do parties in Blackpool. Some scenes include a woman lifting a man’s fat suit to spy his penis; a bridal party dressed in matching pink hi-vis jackets; and a naked groom attached to a lamppost by way of plastic wrap. To some, documenting subjects in this way is a way of celebrating them; to others, it means taking part in a safari of common people.
More recently, a rolling cast of content creators has taken to making day trips to Blackpool’s roughest wards to capitalize on the environs of its impoverished communities. Videos with titles like “The BRONX of Blackpool” document rows of condemned buildings, littered streets, and people with drug addictions. And locals have grown frustrated by the town council’s focus on developing the seaside promenade while ignoring the flotsam townside right next to it.
All the palm readers in Blackpool couldn’t tell you how the town might turn this around, but, in June, the council announced plans to bulldoze hundreds of properties around Central Drive—a street mere blocks from the boardwalk, and the third most deprived neighborhood in England—to build new affordable housing for locals and to revitalize the area. Reactions were mixed. I visited a few weeks later, and Alan Jones, a sixty-three-year-old man with a big white beard, took me on a circuit of the planned demolition, pointing out screes of rubble, dingy alleyways, and boarded-up houses. Jones, a keyboardist, has lived on Montrose Avenue, just off Central Drive, since 1996, after he moved from Wales to find a steady job in the local entertainment business. His accent and missing teeth softened all his words, even when they were biting. “They want the scum out,” he said. And who would the scum be replaced with? “In simplistic terms, white-collar workers instead of skivvies. Like abroad, when there’s all this ethnic cleansing. . . . It’s that sort of thing, only on the class scale.”
Jones encapsulates Blackpool’s inexplicable pull and its inevitable paralysis. According to him, his bid to become a live musician in bars and clubs around Blackpool was too late, stymied by the rise of recorded music. “The old karaoke took over,” he told me. Today, Jones receives disability benefits and has two eighty-millimetre cysts on his brain. He has grown to loathe Blackpool, and yet he said he simply cannot afford to move. Councillor Lynn Williams, the leader of Blackpool Council, assured me, over e-mail, that the replacement homes will be for “existing residents and those with a local connection.” But Jones’s frustrations echo those of many in Blackpool, and other communities in northern England. One of Burnham’s first acts as Prime Minister was to open No. 10 North, a government office in Manchester. “For forty years, power and resources have been sucked into the center, and too many communities have felt forgotten, without the attention and investment they deserve,” Burnham said. He could have been talking about Blackpool.
After meeting with Jones, I ended up talking to a man who asked to go on the record as Fudgy. Fudgy, who is sixty-two years old and was wearing a black hoodie, is originally from Yorkshire and moved to Blackpool as a child, when his father was laid off. Eventually, he found a job selling blocks of flavored fudge on the boardwalk. But, Fudgy admitted, “I’ve never made fudge in my life.” Nearby, a council worker in a cherry picker hung Christmas bulbs over the promenade, even though it was the middle of summer. It was preparation for an annual tradition in the fall celebrating the town’s historic arc lamps, a boon for tourism in an otherwise quiet off-season. Despite growing up in Blackpool, Fudgy told me he had always resisted the tourist attractions on his doorstep. (Even as a child, he’d never gone up the Blackpool Tower.) And, after more than five decades, he’s not exactly sure why he’s still there. I asked him how Blackpool became so stigmatized, and he flipped the question back to me: “I don’t know, really. I mean, would you come here?” He picked up on my hesitation to respond. “There’s your answer.” ♦