Blackpool is more different from any other town than any town I know. Unfortunately, this is partly to do with the high levels of poverty in some areas. But Blackpool is also just inherently strange, a function of its exposure to the wild Irish Sea, with no cliffs, bays or harbour to mediate. For instance, the huge seagull that systematically barred my way into a Blackpool Gregg’s a few weeks ago (moving to its left as I moved right, etc) didn’t know about the deprivation stats. And the blond woman I saw dressed in white and driving a large white SUV along the Prom in a rainstorm, with a giant, coiffured white poodle sticking its head out of the back window as Rod Stewart blared from the car stereo, looked, if anything, quite well off.
There is a currently a big regeneration programme in Blackpool, whose Labour Council has formed a strategic alliance with the government to make itself a test case for levelling-up. Blackpool has traditionally been good at self-help. Lacking attractions apart from a wide, brown beach and the even wider and browner Irish Sea, Blackpool made its own glamour using electricity, hence the thunderbolt on the town’s crest. It adopted electric street lighting as early as 1879, with arc lights along the Prom, and these became the Illuminations by which the season was cleverly prolonged. In the 1880s, all three piers were draped with electric lights, like strings of pearls, and in 1885, Blackpool began operating the first electric tramway in Britain, the little tramcars proclaiming, with endearing immodesty, ‘THIS IS IT!’
When other British towns were short-sightedly getting rid of their trams in the mid 20th Century – usually because they shared road space with motorists, and the motorists, like spoiled children, refused to share – Blackpool kept its trams. They mainly ran along the Prom, which was widened in the 1920s to accommodate both cars and trams. One October evening about twenty years ago, I spent an hour in a traffic jam on the Prom, in typical Blackpool weather (an apparent hurricane plus torrential rain). It was a Saturday, and I was trying to listen to the football results on the car radio, but this was impossible because of a great blizzard of static from the Illuminations, which swung and creaked about overhead. Meanwhile the trams sailed happily by a few feet away.
That would have been in the last years of the so-called Balloon Trams introduced in the 1930s: beautiful, relaxed-looking, Deco, green and cream vehicles, either double or single-decker. I remember riding these down to the Pleasure Beach at the far south end of the Prom as a boy in the 1970s, and the tram seemed a fitting warm-up for the thrill rides to come. The Balloons had (and their replacements still have) conductors, so they were pleasantly sociable, and on busy days they might have two or three conductors. The interiors were cosy (you were out of the wind), with beautiful moquettes, although you might have to brush the sand off before you sat down. I liked going to the end of the line, to watch the conductor flipping all the seats to the forward-facing position, apparently out of sheer kindness – simply so that people could face the direction of travel, which was not strictly necessary.
The network has contracted over time. Until 1937, you could go as far south as Lytham, albeit by changing onto the Lytham system, which closed in 1937. (Lytham was, and is, posh. Les Dawson used to say that, when Lytham people played bingo, they didn’t shout ‘House!’, but ‘Bungalow!’) Until the mid-1960s, the trams ran inland to Blackpool North station, and any day now, they will start doing that again.
The modern ‘Flexity’ trams, introduced in 2012, have an elegance of their own. They’re all single-deck, gracefully shaped and with purple exteriors, not quite as attractive as the grey and gold Blackpool buses (which will soon be electrified) and often covered over with adverts, but then so were the Balloon Trams, which might have proclaimed in giant letters, ‘BRUCE FORSYTH “I’M IN CHARGE” SHOWTIME NORTH PIER’. (Blackpool trams and buses, incidentally, are run by Blackpool Council, making them a rare surviving example of ‘municipal’ services, a word redolent of old-fashioned virtue.)
As well as the modern trams, a service of heritage trams is operated, and excellent talks about these are bookable at https://blackpoolheritage.com. The heritage fleet is based at a depot in Rigby Road in downtown Blackpool, and this – marketed as Tramtown – will become a visitor attraction that, it is hoped, will do for Blackpool what the National Rail Museum does for York. The heritage trams include some surviving Balloons, both double and single-decker, and Bolton Tramcar 66, which ran in Bolton in Edwardian times – and there are some jokers in the pack: novelties, like the Trawler Tram, which mimics the logo of Fisherman’s Friend sweets, made in Fleetwood, eight miles north of Blackpool. When you see a heritage tram coming along the Prom, it looks ghostly, whereas the modern ones are just very civilised, promoting the sort of conversations I like overhearing…such as a party of teenage girls planning their evening: ‘We could get donuts and watch the sunset.’
The northern terminus of the trams is at above-mentioned Fleetwood, so much sleepier than Blackpool that it’s as if you’re suddenly wearing earplugs. The terminal stop is adjacent to a Victorian stone lighthouse, inspired by the one at Alexandria in ancient times, which always reminds me that Alexandria is one of only three places to still run double-decker trams, the others being Hong Kong and (by virtue of its heritage trams) Blackpool. I’ve never been to Alexandria, but I once rode on a Hong Kong double-decker as a typhoon blew up, stirring happy memories of Blackpool Prom.
Thanks for these essays. I wish the local railway line hadn't been dug up and replaced with a road; would've loved to journey down to Louth instead of driving. Buses are just not the same.