The Strictly Come Dancing bandwagon may have left for the year, in a flurry of sequins and hairspray, but TV’s biggest show has had an extraordinary impact on Blackpool.
From the top of the oxblood red Blackpool Tower, now closed until March, you can see the resort’s Victorian piers, the Fylde coast stretching into the distance, and on a rare clear day, the Lakes.
But it’s the dancing renaissance, in large part due to Strictly, filmed at the town’s Tower Ballroom, that has given the town a new spring in its step.
Blackpool Dance Festival will celebrate it’s centenary next year – the town was the spiritual home of ballroom long before Strictly, and hosts many competitions.
But the TV show has cemented that reputation for a new era.
People are flying from all over the world to take part in tournaments here – spending thousands on training, flights, accommodation and competition fees.
When the M.E.N. visited this week, the illuminations had ended, the sky was grey, and BBC filming was over for another year – but Strictly had left its sparkle.
Locals had plenty to say about the seaside town’s grittier side as well.
David Nixon works at the Compass Cafe, having moved from South Wales 37 years ago when he was 21, and says ‘a lot of investment’ is coming in.
“Blackpool has gone up and down and it is starting to go back up again,” he says.
“You’ve got all these new hotels being built and there’s been so much work creating the new promenade.
“But at the minute there’s more charity shops than anything else.
“Big retailers like Marks and Spencer and Debenhams are just about hanging on.
“I wouldn’t say I am proud of Blackpool and I do not think I would move here again, while there is a lot of regeneration,” he says.
“Strictly Come Dancing has had a positive impact and is seen as one of the biggest earners for Blackpool.
“But there are certain places around Blackpool where I will not walk after a certain time of night and people wouldn’t bring their kids in at a weekend night as it is full of stags and hens who are drunk and being animals.
“It’s an amazing place but in winter there’s nothing to do”, he says, as he looks out of the café window.
“People come down here from Scotland to live and they can’t get a job and they end up living in squalor and taking drugs,” David adds.
“Blackpool needs a really big uplift and the council needs to invest in the small guest houses with no en suites as well as the big hotels.
“Hopefully things will turn round, I really do hope so”, he adds.
While it has a special place in the lives and memories of millions of tourists and day-trippers from places like Manchester – and remains hugely popular with visitors – Blackpool’s image has suffered in recent decades, some visitors simply arrive on the Fylde Coast and turn left for Lytham St Annes.
Yet Blackpool’s visitor numbers have grown – from 17 million in 2015 to 18.2 million in 2018, and it makes up 40 per cent of Lancashire’s tourist economy.
But the rub has always been that vast visitor numbers don’t match a pitifully low Blackpool Gross Domestic Product and long-standing issues with school attainment and health – alcohol, smoking, drug misuse and poor mental health.
But like one of the tankers on the horizon in the Irish Sea, where the slate grey sea is almost indistinguishable from the cloud, Blackpool’s fortunes are beginning to turn.
While there are still street beggars and chaotic individuals around on a drizzly and cold November day, there are also silver-haired daytrippers, neon-clad runners and dog walkers with pugs and chihuahuas on long leads.
Nicole Fitzsimmons, 24, fears for the future for her daughter Ruby, four, who has just started school.
“There are lots of good parts about living here,” she says.
“There’s a really good sense of community where I live and people do help one another.
“But crime is really bad and it’s getting worse.
“There’s a lot of knife crime and you see 13-year-olds carrying knives to defend themselves which is ridiculous.
“It’s definitely changed for the worse since I was a kid.”
Nicole says she won’t venture out alone at night.
“I’m very cautious,” she explains.
“But the TV programme Strictly Come Dancing has had a really good effect as it has brought more tourism to the town and benefited the hotels and local shops and businesses.”
She urges the authorities to provide more support for people with substance or alcohol addiction and housing issues as there’s ‘a lot of Spice going about’.
“It’s all very well for shops and hotels on the Promenade to look nice, but you go a few streets back and it’s like the Bronx,” she adds.
Despite the issues, the town’s regeneration chief says the pace of positive change in Blackpool ‘is quickening’ following a number of false dawns.
Since 2015, they say they have made real in-roads in tackling the ‘deep-rooted negative perceptions’.
The sea defences have been strengthened and the Blackpool Tower and Winter Gardens revamped.
LightPool brings 465,000 more visitors, extending the appeal of the popular Illuminations.
Construction has begun on the tramway extension, there have been road bridge improvements to stabilise Yeadon Way and £100m has been invested into businesses.
The long-awaited redevelopment of Blackpool Central – which was once going to house a doomed Las Vegas-style casino – is now on track.
It will be the home for the UK’s first ‘flying theatre’ where guests will be able to ‘fly’ around.
A conference centre will be built by the Winter Gardens, where it’s hoped high spending visitors will flock to help fulfil the town’s ambition to be a year-round destination; the Vegas of the North.
And Blackpool Museum is to open on the Golden Mile celebrating its role in popular culture as the ‘birthplace of mass tourism and entertainment.’
But in the heart of town, at the Masala Indian Takeaway on Abingdon Street, Faizel Adam was boarding up a window after the business was targeted for the third time.
“I got here at 8am,” he says. “The window had been broken for hours and no-one had bothered to report it.
“It’s the second time in three weeks the window’s been broken by idiots looking for money.
“It’s just junkies, not racists.
“We’ve lived here all our lives and not had problems.
“Everyone knows who we are.
“There have been so many robberies in this area.
“We did ring the police but five or six hours later we’re still waiting for them.
“It’s not going to make us leave our business – but it’s very annoying.”
The streets, near Blackpool North train station, are where a controversial multi-million pound tram extension is taking place as the streets are dug up and buildings demolished to make way for a new terminus.
Taxi driver Bill Lewtas, Secretary of the Blackpool Licensed Taxi Operators’ Association, says cabbies are ‘very supportive’ of the regeneration and ‘Blackpool will have an exciting future.’
But he adds:”The negative from our point of view is the tramway extension.
“Most people we meet seem to be averse to this.
“Massive disruption and congestion have arisen because of this during an extremely long construction process and it seems the potential benefits will be minimal.”
Bill says that in his four decades working in the resort, cabbies have relied heavily on the seven-mile Promenade as a thoroughfare.
“The previous administration made a serious mistake when they block paved the Promenade and made it a strange mix of narrow roads and too many zebra crossings”, he says.
“The issue of congestion on the Promenade, combined with concerns about worsening congestion when the tramway is extended, have never been addressed.”
In the Repository, by Sacred Heart Church, selling rosary beads, statues of the Virgin Mary and nativity scenes and 2020 calendars, Glaswegian James Conlon, 73, bemoans the resort’s decline.
“When I came here as a kid, it was a really buzzing place,” he says.
“But it’s not now.
“If you walk round the town there are more shops boarded up and problems with drugs and alcohol that you see when people are sat in doorways begging.
“It needs decent shops as well as hotels.
“I no longer feel safe working and living in Blackpool and I’ve been living here for around 15 or 18 years now.”
Tourism bosses are optimistic however.
Strictly Come Dancing first ventured to Blackpool in May 2004, on the third episode ever shown. The final in 2005 was also held at the Tower Ballroom.
It gained momentum and Blackpool Week became a regular annual event in November from 2009.
Now it is an eagerly anticipated part of the show as celebrities vie to ‘get to Blackpool’ in the early stages.
“We have a couple of decent four-star hotels now,” Alan Cavill, Director of Tourism in Blackpool says, with pride.
“The Boulevard hotel has a planning application for an additional 70 rooms after being open a year.
“There’s a Hampton by Hilton and we have the Premier Inn in the middle of town. Unlike major cities, we had not got lots of hotels in the centre of town,” he says.
“Work will start on a Holiday Inn, which is due to open in April 2020.
“Hotels, though, are absolutely still an issue and we have a lot of the old style accommodation and housing.”
Meanwhile, a £300 million regeneration of the Central site has just been signed off.
The site, currently the Central Station car park, magistrates’ court and former police station, will be developed in phases over the next eight to nine years.
The project could bring 600,000 visitors a year, with a combined spending power of £75 million, and up to 1,000 jobs.
Alan Cavill points out that ‘unlike Manchester and London’ there’s no shortage of private rented housing in Blackpool – and this brings its own difficulties.
“It’s true that we have issues with absentee landlords,” he admits.
“We are working very hard to try and improve things.
“One of the issues is if you run away from the problem, you run away from the solutions.
“I don’t know anybody in Blackpool who is not working on this problem.”
As part of the regeneration, a new Blackpool Museum will celebrate the town’s relationship with popular culture and the role it has played.
” It’s very exciting”, the tourism chief says.
“Blackpool’s famous for Strictly and ballroom dancing.
“It is very much part of our culture – competitive dancing and the festival has grown year-on-year.
“It has definitely seen the Strictly effect.
“The pro-am tournaments are worth a colossal amount of money,” he adds.
“We had one US lady who spent $50k on training and flying over here for them.
“Blackpool is the equivalent to ballroom dancing of Wembley or Wimbledon.”
The Tower Lounge – once a magnet for heavy drinking – has been replaced with a Harry Ramsdens to bring in a more family-friendly crowd.
“It’s a very different atmosphere,” Alan Cavill says.
“We still want people to have a good time, but we are also family-orientated.
“While I’m proud of the change we’ve achieved, what I would like to happen is that no one arrives at Blackpool station, with their clothes in a plastic bag, thinking the streets are paved with gold and looking for the happiness they can’t find.”
Psychotherapist Steve Pope, who works in Blackpool, says: “In my work every day, there are still increasing numbers of people with drug and alcohol problems and suffering from anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
“While it is a national problem, things are very much polarised in Blackpool.
“We still have a migrant population arriving thinking that Blackpool is the land of milk and honey.
“The problem is they start flatlining when they rapidly become very lonely.”
He says the town’s officials may have ‘fancy new illuminations, statues and a silver ball on the prom, but you go 50 metres off the prom and you still get the same problems with poverty.’
Despite its issues – Blackpool is still a mecca for working people looking to let their hair down – and for performers pursuing their dreams.
“It’s been an incredible town for me to move to”, says Liam Halewood, 33, a singer and Boy George impersonator who moved from Liverpool a decade ago.
“I love the pizazz and in your face attitude that it’s got,” he says.
“I think it’s like a little Vegas of the North and reflects Britain.
It’s had a lot of flak in the past.
The resort is ‘about giving families happy memories on a budget’ as not everyone can afford trips abroad, he says.
“Strictly’s one of the most famous shows all over the world and when people are looking it up online, ‘Blackpool’ flashes up – and it’s such a great advert.”
This content was originally published here.
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