Martin Goodman in Blackpool

Place a resort in the North East of England, facing the Atlantic, and you have to come up with something special to attract the crowds during the cold snap of October’s weather. A hundred years ago, Blackpool took a lesson from Paris and built itself a tower, which dominates the strip of attractions along the stretch of seafront known as the Golden Mile. The Blackpool Tower was a marvel for Victorians, but 21st-Century visitors need something more tawdry.
_____Crowds come down from Scotland, and a cut-price airline has started jetting revelers up from the south of England, called in by the ‘Illuminations’. These are switched on at the end of the summer and run until the first week in November. I adjusted my expectations from something beautiful on learning the previous year’s theme for Blackpool’s lights: illuminated roadsigns.
_____The North Pier, one of three in the town, is a fine Edwardian relic with wrought-iron seats and a theatre at its end. Thousands of chattering starlings roost in girders that hold the theatre above the sea. An exhibition of photographs in the theatre’s gallery shows a September 11th disaster, this one of a fire on this pier in 1921. Looking north, the mountains of the Lake District were turning to silhouettes in the dusk. Eva Petulengro, one of the extensive network of Petulengros who have all the fortune-telling concessions in British seaside towns, waited for custom in her ornamental kiosk complete with Gypsy trappings, but the pier was empty.
_____It’s a blessing that Blackpool has left one side of its promenade clear of buildings. At dusk one evening, few people walked the broad sidewalk. Those that did could look down to the beach and the donkeys being gathered together in strings at the end of their day’s work. Double-decker trams rode the rails up and down the Golden Mile. Ranks of horses and carts waited to run visitors up and down the length of the lights.
_____The southern end of the Mile’s Illuminations had a nautical theme of seashells. The main event was saved for the northern section. This year’s theme was of heaven and hell. A chubby red devil sported his trident, while chubby pink cherubs posed with bows and arrows. The night was dark before the lights were lit. Arrows flew from the bows of cherubs, tridents from the arms of devils, and a battle between heaven and hell was waged across the street. It wasn’t stunning, but it was jolly enough. Lights flew up and down the outline of the Tower, and I turned back to the darkening sea. Sand, sea, gulls, mountains one way, Blackpool the other. It’s one of Earth’s clearest borderlines between heaven and hell.
_____What is the hell of Blackpool? Foul mouthed comics on the pier. Bands of men and women set loose from stag and hen nights hoping to collide in the streets and clubs. Women buying high-priced shots of "Sperm" in Funny Girls transvestite nightclub, Bailey’s creamy liqueur in suggestive plastic bottles. Bed and breakfast houses stuffed with kitsch. It’s where Britons go to shimmy out of prudishness and gawk and swagger and bellow and grope. It’s where you can shuck off drab, care-worn, debt-ridden lives for a mindless day or two. Plans are underway to bring in new casino licenses and spin the place into the Las Vegas of Europe, so poor people can throw increased debt at the chance of a fortune.
_____The dreams and lights are a shimmer of gold but the name, of something stark and cold in which light gets lost, is the most real thing about the place. Blackpool.

Martin Goodman is the author of I Was Carlos Castaneda: The Afterlife Dialogues and In Search of the Divine Mother: The Mystery of Mother Meera (click to purchase).

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