Seaside Special - Blackpool birthday party: Lancashire
From Southport to Blackpool. The sublime to the ridiculous? Not quite. For all Southport’s genteel, let’s-retire-somewhere-nice persona, the place left me a little underwhelmed. For all Blackpool’s kitsch, tack and brass, I have a soft spot for the town. I’ve been coming here for years. As a kid we visited the illuminations in October, regularly staying in a boarding house on one of the many identical streets of two-and three storey Victorian terraced b&bs that all led to the seven-mile seafront. Mrs A’s Mum and dad came here for their honeymoon and returned in 1997 to celebrate their Ruby Wedding Anniversary. We came up to surprise them for a party, my daughter only a few weeks old. Blackpool’s emergence as a resort is similar, if a touch more dramatic, to the growth of the Scarboroughs, Great Yarmouths, Morecambes and other popular destinations of our great British seaside. The town’s growth has been fairly rapid since the late 18th century, when it was transformed from a