The Road to Little Dribbling (42 page)

You see Blackpool long before you reach it, thanks to the distant eminence of Blackpool Tower, Lancashire’s answer to (and near replica of) the Eiffel Tower. Blackpool Tower is actually only about half the height of the original, but it seems as big because it is so solitary and striking, and it is nearly as venerable. It was built just five years after the Eiffel Tower went up.

Blackpool has a spanking new promenade. The town spent £100 million upgrading it in recent years, mostly to improve sea defenses, but the exercise also gave the town two miles of broad, artfully sinuous, thoroughly pleasing walkway. It isn’t so much a promenade as a piece of sculpture that you walk on. It curves and dips, divides into multiple levels, incorporates ramps that must be wonderful for skateboarding, and steps that can serve as seats. It is the nicest promenade in the world, as long as you keep your gaze fixed firmly out to sea and don’t look over your shoulder at the town facing it, for poor old Blackpool isn’t much to look at these days.

When I first came to Britain, 20 million people—equivalent to a third of the national population—visited Blackpool each year. Now it is fewer than half that. Blackpool has always been cheerfully downmarket, but in those days it was good-natured and fun. Today it is depressed and half derelict, its streets empty by day and intimidating by night.

According to the
Blackpool Gazette,
more than a hundred business premises in the middle of town were empty. One hundred and fifty hotels were for sale. A short while before, the
Guardian
had declared the New Kimberley Hotel, a once-proud establishment on the seafront, the worst hotel in Britain. The owner, Peter Metcalf, had just been jailed for eighteen months for a string of serious safety breaches, including having no fire alarms, nailing shut fire-escape doors, and supplying water to only half the hotel’s ninety rooms. This followed an earlier conviction for twenty food hygiene offenses.

All the statistics for Blackpool are depressing. It lost almost 11 percent of its jobs between 2004 and 2013, making it one of the three worst-performing towns in the country. In 2013 it was declared the unhealthiest community in Britain. It has the highest proportion of alcohol-related deaths. Forty percent of pregnant women in Blackpool smoke. Men die five years earlier than they do elsewhere in Britain. Like many other seaside towns it has become a sink for deprived people. The patrons of the New Kimberley Hotel weren’t holidaymakers. Those people stopped coming long ago. They were the indigent and semi-homeless who stayed in a squalid, dangerous fleapit because it was all they could afford. At the rate Blackpool is going, soon that is all there will be.

That is a pity because Blackpool should be a pleasure. The air is invigorating, the views lovely, the beaches vast. Blackpool Tower remains one of the jauntiest structures in Britain. The town has two piers, the world’s most ornate and luscious ballroom, its venerable amusement park, some good theaters, and a lot of fine Victorian architecture.

All Blackpool needs is to make itself safe and wholesome again, and give people worthwhile things to spend their money on—some decent shops, amusing shows, a selection of clean and inviting restaurants. Here is a really zany idea. Why not have the government get involved? The things Blackpool needs to do—smarten itself up, create decent jobs, improve its facilities, make itself appealing to respectable visitors—are things that are clearly best achieved with a big, well-directed master plan involving grants and incentives and targeted investment. What is actually happening? Well, according to a
Guardian
report, Blackpool’s principal recent big idea for regeneration is to introduce an improved park-and-ride scheme and to provide charging points for electric cars in its main parking lots. Somehow I don’t think that is going to swing it.

The first thing I would do if I were put in charge of Blackpool (and I am not saying I want to be put in charge of a place where the number one activity is drinking a lot of beer and the number two activity is throwing it up again) would be to bring back the traditional seaside shows. These have changed in a most dismaying way. All along the front were advertisements for shows that featured either Elvis or Queen tribute acts or comedy revues with names like Cirque du Hilarious starring people that no one has ever heard of (almost certainly for a reason). Something very important has been lost.

Years ago, I spent a month in Blackpool for a
National Geographic
assignment, and I made a point to take in all the shows. I particularly remember a popular comedy duo called Little and Large, who at the time were big television stars. They were splendid: quick-witted, likable, and absolutely expert at engaging with the audience, with a quip for every person’s profession or hometown or spouse or style of dress. I have never had so much fun in a theater. Afterward I interviewed them backstage and was taken aback by how drained they looked. Eddie Large (who had a heart transplant soon afterward—no wonder he looked tired) made the point that there was no one coming up behind them, that they were in effect the last music-hall performers. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he was of course right.

After that, I took our younger children to seaside shows from time to time, and they were always great. We saw a children’s act called the Krankies at the Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth, for instance, and it was delightful. The music was loud and infectious, the jokes broad but enjoyable, the support acts deft and accomplished. The whole thing moved along at a noisy, lively clip and was done with considerable polish. It was something the British did superlatively well, and now it is all gone. I find that very sad.

I walked quite some distance along the front, past one dying hotel after another. It would soon be time for the curious spectacle known as the Illuminations. This consists simply of the town switching on a zillion strings of colored lightbulbs all along the seafront early every autumn as a way of extending the summer season a little. The Illuminations date from a time when electricity was exciting, but somehow the tradition has survived and remains an attraction. But this innocent pastime of yore has come increasingly to clash with the new Blackpool tradition of drinking and being menacing. Three days after my visit some five hundred youths gathered in the center of town and began to destroy property at random. Loose objects were picked up and hurled at the police. What exactly provoked this outburst of high spirits wasn’t specified in the press, but presumably it involved the volatile chemical reaction you get when you combine strong beer with small brains. Three policemen were hurt and twelve youths aged thirteen to twenty-two were arrested. And Blackpool took another step toward suicide.

I retraced my route to Lytham. When I reached the end of the Promenade, I turned and had a last look. The lights in the seafront amusements were just coming on. The Tower stood grandly above the town. From a distance, Blackpool looked great.

—

It was quite late, getting on toward evening, when I shuffled back into Lytham, and I was tired, but fortunately there was an excellent and restorative pub called the Taps just behind my hotel and an Indian restaurant called Moshina’s (hygiene rating of five—well done, fellows) a door or two down from it, and the combination of these two left me with warm feelings toward Lytham and the world for some distance beyond. I had a little stroll through the town after dinner and was delighted to find that Lytham on close inspection was even better than on my earlier flying appraisal. It had terrific old-fashioned shops. I was particularly taken with a menswear palace called George Ripley’s. It was gloriously of another age—the kind of place that sold cardigans with stripes and chevrons, sweaters with zippered pockets, ties with patterns that look like champagne bubbles on hallucinogens, jackets with pointed collars that could be used as weapons in a street fight. I didn’t wish to own any of these clothes—I am a Splendesto man myself, as we know—but I was very pleased to find that there are evidently still people in the world who do want them. Long may Mr. Ripley prosper, say I.

Nearby was “Tom Towers’ Tasty Cheese Shop, est. 1949,” which I thought was impressively venerable until I came across Whelan’s Fish and Chips, “est. 1937.” They both looked awfully nice. The town also boasted an old-fashioned department store called Stringers and a good-looking bookshop, Plackitt and Booth.

On the basis of all this, I nominated Lytham as best small town in the north of England, and in a spirit of celebration I wheeled into a cheery-looking establishment called the Ship and Royal for a quick one before bedtime.

II

One of the things that impresses me about Belgium—and we are of course dealing here with a very short list—is how reliable the train timetables are. You can be confident not only that the 14:02 to Ghent will be on time, but that it will always arrive at and depart from platform two, and no other. The platform numbers are printed on the timetables; that’s how confident they are.

The people who run Britain’s rail network take a slightly more relaxed approach to getting people from place to place. I remember one day at King’s Cross station in London, not long after we moved to Norfolk in 2003, I found that the ticket machines wouldn’t give me a ticket to Wymondham, my nearest station, so I went and stood in a long line and explained the problem to a man who had once answered a British Rail ad that said: “Wanted: cheerless bastard to deal with public.”

“You have to go to Liverpool Street for trains to Wye-mund-ham,” he said flatly, mispronouncing the name. (It’s pronounced
win-dum
.) “Trains from Wye-mund-ham don’t go from here.”

“Well, for the past month I have been going to Wymondham from here via Cambridge,” I replied.

“Can’t do that,” he said.

“Do you mean I physically can’t do it or that it isn’t permitted?”

“Both.”

“But I have been doing it. Look,” I said and dug out an old ticket that stated clearly: “Wymondham to London stations via Cambridge.”

He studied the ticket but refused to allow it to be entered into evidence.

“So what’s it going to be?” he said. “People are waiting.”

I sighed and told him just to give me a ticket to Cambridge.

“You won’t get to Wye-mund-ham from there,” he promised darkly.

“I’ll take my chances,” I answered, and he shrugged and gave me a ticket. At Cambridge, I bought another ticket on to Wymondham but missed the connection because I was standing in a ticket line when the Wymondham train left. I wrote a letter of complaint and the next time I went to the ticket machines at King’s Cross, they allowed me to buy a ticket to Wymondham. So now thanks to me you can travel from King’s Cross to Wymondham, though I wouldn’t actually recommend it as there is bugger all there. In that respect, it is rather like Belgium.

—

I had reason to reflect on all this the next morning when I bounded cheerfully off a morning train from Lytham to Preston, intending to transfer to the 10:45 to Kendal. I clutched a sheet of printed instructions that made this seem a reasonable ambition, but there was no 10:45 train listed, to Kendal or anywhere, on the television screens or on the printed timetables on the wall. So I walked to an information desk and asked the man there about it.

“Ah,” he said as if I had touched on an exceedingly interesting point. “The 10:45 to Kendal is actually listed as the 10:35 to Blackpool North.”

I stared at him for a long moment. A voice in my head said, “If you are expecting the 10:45 train to Kendal but are told it is the 10:35 to Blackpool North, you could be having
A STROKE
.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Well, you see, the train divides here. Half of it goes to Blackpool North. That’s the 10:35. At that point the remaining part of the train becomes the 10:45 Windermere train, which calls at Kendal en route. But there isn’t enough room on the television screens to put all that, so we don’t put anything, to avoid confusion.”

“But I am confused.”

“That’s the problem!” he agreed enthusiastically. “In trying to avoid confusion, we seem to have created even more. People come up to me almost every day asking where the 10:45 is. Shall I show you where to stand?”

“That would be very kind.”

He walked me to platform three and positioned me very specifically. “The train will arrive at 10:28. On no account get on the front four coaches or you’ll end up in Blackpool.”

“I’ve just come from there.”

He nodded significantly. “Quite. Be sure to get on the rear four coaches only.”

“So this is where I stand?” I said, pointing to the ground directly under my feet, as if a move a few inches to the right or left might spell catastrophe.

“Right there, and don’t get on the next train or the one after that, but the one after
that
.” He looked slightly concerned about me. “All right?”

I nodded without confidence, then stood and waited. Across the way, on the facing platform, a small group of hobbyists known as trainspotters stood with clipboards and notebooks. These are people who stand on rail-station platforms and jot down the engine numbers of the trains that pass. They collect as many numbers as they can, and then presumably go to a café and sit around talking about which numbers they are still hoping to find one day. They all looked like the sort of people who had never had sex with anything they couldn’t put in a closet afterward. I tried to imagine what the rest of their lives was like if this was the fun part, but couldn’t.

Two more trains came in, and then the flickering screen confirmed that the 10:35 to Blackpool North was the next train due, but was running a bit late and was expected at 10:37. More people came along, many of them accompanied by a station employee, and were positioned on an exact spot, with considerable pointing at feet. Well, you can imagine the frisson of consternation that swept along the platform when a train pulled in unexpectedly at 10:29. Was this the 10:35 arriving early or another train altogether? Who could tell? There were no railway employees to be seen now. I was reluctant to move from my spot, having been told on no account to leave it, but the man beside me volunteered to go and find out. He left and never came back. After a few minutes, I boarded the train and an older couple sitting at a table asked me anxiously if this was the Windermere train.