A Guided Tour Through the Vegas of the North

Content Warning

Graphic depictions of poverty and homelessness.

Murky waters ride up a rubble wall of nostalgia and wash away all remnants of romance. Ambling, zombified faces stare down the distance of the seafront to a soundtrack of yesteryear’s holiday. From the panopticon of Blackpool tower the harsh cold light of day reflects off a formless sheet of pressed and curved aluminium. Swaying spoons of anthracite plastic scrape at overcast sheets, vulturous seagulls dance and observe their prey beneath, skeletal rusted legs erode into an ambivalent sludge. 

It begs the question: how much does it cost to restore a town to former glory? Where are they hiding the bodies – all 300 million of them?

Recent reports declare that Blackpool Council is due to secure over £300 million in an effort to regenerate the town, but the plan is as worthwhile as Roy Chubby Brown’s standup. You only need to walk along the seafront to see for yourself. And so, dear reader, I welcome you to Blackpool! Join me on my tour as we ride the Big Dipper straight into the blackened armpit of hell. 

Lined with massage parlours, Turkish barbers, and deadbeat fathers, Blackpool is now the number one destination for the desolate. Whether it’s businesses boarded up or buses burnt out on the field, you don’t have to look hard to see the dull sheen of a once crowning jewel of the North. The place used to be visited by kings and queens. Now the place is inhabited by a more modern definition of queen. Today, our greatest royal is the “Gypsy King” himself, Tyson Fury. It makes you wonder why the Civil Service wants to move here. Maybe we can provide a nice orange curtain to cover their shifty little shadow activities. Or maybe they just really love gaudy degentertainment and cheap booze.

On our walk, I wish I could let you speak with Marco Pierre White about the opening of his restaurant Marco’s (how creative), which boasts the prime location adjacent to Ma Kelly’s – the head of a golden triangle of debauchery. London. Paris. New York. Milan. Blackpool. I wonder if he’s any good at karaoke or fighting? I should pitch the show Marco Pierre White’s Central Drive Nightmare, in which he single-handedly revives the town with his acerbic pomp and pretension (food for thought). Unfortunately, he won’t step foot in Blackpool.

As you enter the al fresco opium dens of fickle pleasure, and pass through the dazzling sensory destruction of a neon arcade, the air thickens with the vaporous ether of generational amounts of homeless piss and alcoholism. Clutch your pearls in horror and clasp onto your iPhones, but don’t worry: they’re only after a tenner. 

Dingy doorways border the path to retail heaven. Blanketed by black mould and bodily fluids, they provide salvation from the elements, or simply a place to pass out safely. For many of the homeless in this town, these doorways are a social club and the closest thing to housing in the liminal transience of a world that ignores them. 

Bulging and brightly coloured shopping bags pass by in an endless pursuit of automated retail pleasure. It’s like NASCAR. The homeless spectators claw through the invisible fence between them and the speeding shoppers, their decrepit hands snapped off by the brute force of reality. Seedy and sordid, the undergrowth claws for light. If this was painted, it would’ve been by Goya. 

As we move past Blackpool’s forgotten people, the grey sunlight leaves the impression of some human-ish shadow. They flicker alone in our ever-shortening peripheral vision; just ignore them, whatever you do.

Follow me down a narrow walkway illuminated by unreadable lettering and you’ll venture where few YouTubers dare point the camera: a subterranean urban enclave between an abandoned police station and the Funland arcade. On either side stands two imposing, green-stained concrete pillars, their surfaces slashed with black spray paint.

A small, decomposed man angles his head upwards towards me, behind his hollow eyes a thousand-yard stare. Fidgeting and picking, he releases a mucosal mumble from his concave cheeks. His pained words are blocked by the dissonant chatter of passers by. The ragpile of a man magically animates and stands, and two small dogs press their boney rib cages to his boney legs in search of approval. I ask him what his message to the Council would be.

“Why would they care what I think?” the man exclaims. I almost can’t hear him as his anxious head movements and angered expression muffle his words. Twitching and looking around visibly distressed – permanently waiting – he reaches down to scratch his bony fingertips into the thin fur of the right-hand dog. “I think the council are fucking shit, mate.”

Fair enough. How do you put it better than that? I move on.

“A new home for the Government! Are you taking the piss?!” one disgruntled mother barks from behind a pram. She leans over the bowing plastic carriage to feed a crying baby, her face stretched with disbelief and righteous angst. “What about building healthy communities for the people, not fucking office workers? Calling a prefab shack behind a metal fence a ‘community skills centre’ doesn’t cut it.” Her nose is red and cold, and her finger points accusingly to the newly erected shell of a presumed government building.

“We want answers, we want help,” another younger mother joins in. She sounds equally desperate and confused at what even needs doing and where to start – there’s just so much to do. 

It’s not just the civilians that think this way. “Don’t get me started, it’s clear to everyone the Council thinks more about the tourists than they do the residents of this town,” a local Student Council member tells me. “£4.5 mil on the illuminations but £250k on community outreach, it is disgusting to me.” 

Politicians certainly always lie, but numbers do not. The past few years have seen a multitude of false promises, fall outs, and failures to achieve a set goal. The tactic seems to be: pay a Z-list celebrity to switch on the illuminations and blind everyone to how shit of a job you’re doing.

As we stroll by the monotone ocean we can see an independent society ingrained into the seafront. They inhabit low-roofed, magnolia dugouts like hermit crabs. Each one flogs cheap and tacky wares to the pilgrims travelling far and wide to reach the famed tangerine promised land. Burrowed into the base of plastic and brick mountains, emblazoned with signs that stab the eye, they don’t harass, because buying something is a formality. The Classic Seaside Shit Seller. It’s an honest day’s work. Cheap transfer prints hang from rails, the opportunity to immortalise your experience (because God knows you were too drunk to remember it yourself).

The food is as false as the tan. Peering into the back of a small donut and burger shop is enough to catch an immune disorder and a hormone imbalance. The walls are insulated by the grease of artificial preservatives and chemical sweeteners, not too far off what the celebrities are made of in Madame Tussaud’s just next door.

“I wanna picture with all the Avengers!” a portly child clad in a galaxy print Fortnite sweatsuit blurts out with mindless levels of excitement.

Blackpool has become nothing more than just a stop gap and cheap weekend destination for tourists looking to get as shit faced as possible outside their own town. We’re like a nighttime nursery for adult children. This is such a craze that the local government has decided to tailor redevelopment and new employment solely around these activities. As one young woman who has been directly impacted by this told me: “If I wanted a permanent, well-paying job I would have to move away. It’s all temp tourism jobs here. I’m paying to work, basically.” This reallocation is doing nothing more than driving out locals further afield to survive.

Blackpool has become a cheap madam for the masses – peddling short spells in the fleeting sun and the never-ending nighttime debauchery. Businesses here come and go faster than the tourists. Blackpool, once the home of comedy. Now a tragic joke.