Blackpool Beach

Blackpool sits on the Lancashire coast facing the Irish Sea, with eleven kilometres of sand and a promenade running the length of it. It is the resort that mass tourism was invented at.

The mechanism was the railway and the mill. Lancashire's cotton towns closed for a week at a time — wakes weeks, staggered so that each town's holiday fell separately — and from the 1840s the trains brought entire towns to Blackpool for them. By 1900 it was receiving millions a year, the first town in the world to be built for working-class holidays, and its three piers, its Tower of 1894 modelled on the Eiffel, its Pleasure Beach and its Illuminations all date from that. The Tower Ballroom's Wurlitzer still plays.

The decline from the 1960s, as cheap flights took the same market to Spain, is as much a part of the record as the growth, and Blackpool now has some of the most severe deprivation indicators in England. The beach itself has improved sharply: bathing water here failed EU standards for years and was rated poor into the 2010s, and a major sewerage investment has since brought it to good, which is a real reversal. The Illuminations, running since 1879, were among the first public electric light displays anywhere and now extend the season into January.

The sand is broad, flat and firm, with a large tidal range and a shallow gradient — the sea goes a long way out. The Irish Sea is cold, around fifteen degrees in August. Lytham St Annes south along the same coast is the genteel version, and Morecambe north of it has the bay, the bird reserve and the Midland Hotel.

Blackpool invented the working holiday and then watched cheap flights take it to Spain. What remains is three piers, a tower from 1894, eleven kilometres of firm sand and a town with some of the worst deprivation figures in England. The bathing water, poor for years, is now rated good, which took a great deal of money and is worth saying out loud.