This seaside town has been named the best in the country and has a resort pedigree that stretches back well over 150 years, but it also has plenty of modern day challenges
Everyone has a story to tell about Blackpool. Usually a bad one.
Whether it’s tales of optimistic family holidays that turned into washouts, hotels mysteriously burning down, or stag-dos that bump into far-right protests, it’s the kind of place that people enjoy dunking on.
“What’s going on around here?” I asked the bartender of one town centre pub on my first evening in town.
“F*** all!” he said joyfully, before handing over my £3 pint.
In one, quite literal way, he was onto something. Blackpool has a big problem with emptiness. Specifically, empty shops. Wander five minutes down the road from the Tower, and there are rows of crumbling units with boarded-up windows, clearly long vacated. Others seem occupied but shuttered against the winter winds and lack tourists. It’s a jarring experience, walking from the flashing lights and boinging sounds of the mega-arcades into a deserted lot piled with rubble.
The statistics don’t make for good reading. The town of 144,000 has the third-highest rate of empty shops in the country, according to the Centre for Cities, with 17.6% closed. In some areas, like Central Drive, the figure is 30%. Blackpool also has the second-most abandoned buildings, with one for every 45 people.
Some, such as the £7.6m easyJet Hotel on the prom that never materialised, or the vast, long-empty Odeon, are particularly annoying for residents. And for the newly elected Labour MP for Blackpool North, Chris Webb, who beat Tory Scott Benton partly by promising to tackle the problem.
“I am greatly concerned about it. There are far too many empty properties in the town,” he told the Mirror.
“Once you go past South Pier, you get to Bloomfield. It is the most deprived place in the county. The boarded-up shops there have an impact on whether people travel further out to great places like Waterlow Road and Bond Street.”
While a lot needs to be done, progress is being made. When I visited, builders were hammering away inside the Odeon building, which was adorned with a ‘Coming Soon – June 2026’ banner promising a family entertainment megaplex. An ‘Empty Properties Task Force’ was launched last month to target landlords of long-term vacant properties with Compulsory Purchase Orders, while cash is being splashed on modern retail units and green spaces in Central Drive. Under the new ‘High Street Rental Auctions’ initiative, the council can now sell off five-year leases for shops that have remained empty for over a year, which should help to inject a bit of life into the harder-hit areas.
As much as a lick of paint and Pride of Place funding won’t fix all of Blackpool’s deeply rooted deprivation issues or significantly lower its crime rate, it could help to bring the two versions of the town closer together.
In the summer, Blackpool is the same buzzing pleasure resort that has been enthralling millions of beach-dwelling, rock-chomping Brits since the Victorian age.
In the winter, however, it is a different story.
As soon as I stepped off the train on a dark February afternoon, a frosty gust of wind doused me in the famous North West precipitation. Somehow, I’d arrived in the only part of the country that wasn’t enjoying the first sunny shoots of Spring.
The combination of crumbling properties and miserable weather creates a stark vibe, utterly different from the sandcastle-and-donkey-rich summer months.
“It’s dead quiet out,” the Holiday Inn hotel receptionist remarked as we watched a few hunched raincoated figures push through the wind. For a town that relies on tourism to bring in £2 billion a year and support 30% of its jobs, becoming a relative winter wasteland is a big problem. And one that Blackpool might finally be answering.
Trainline data show that Blackpool is at the beginning of an off-season popularity boom.
Sajjad Motamed, the firm’s UK country manager, explained: “We’ve seen winter rail trips to Blackpool rise by more than 90% compared to last year, with particularly strong demand for weekend breaks. What’s striking is that the growth isn’t just coming from the North West – we’re seeing demand from right across the UK, for example, bookings from Edinburgh have more than tripled year-on-year. It suggests people nationwide are rediscovering classic seaside destinations outside of the traditional summer season, whether for a short getaway or to explore somewhere they may not have previously considered.”
Although the particular Thursday afternoon I’d turned up on was grim to the point that everyone sensible decided to stay inside, the spike in train bookings to a town recently named the country’s best by the Telegraph is borne out by official council figures. In 2023, Blackpool welcomed a record 21.5million visitors, a 5.3% rise in just a year. There are high hopes that 2024 and 2025 will increase the numbers further, once the stats are in.
So why are people coming in the winter?
One reason is cost. Blackpool was recently crowned the UK’s cheapest seaside resort, thanks to delights such as £1 burgers at Higgitt’s Las Vegas Arcade, £3.90 fish and chips at Bentley’s on Bond Street, and £6 breakfasts at Peekaboos. Come winter, room rates are slashed as hotels fight to fill the thousands of rooms in a town with the third cheapest property prices in England and Wales, according to Land Registry data.
Another is the growing selection of off-season activities.
I dropped into the 2024 opened Showtown Museum, which tells the story of Blackpool’s entertainment history through highly interactive exhibits and tapdancing staff members. Until April, a fascinating exhibition is telling the story of little people in the entertainment industry. It is difficult to imagine today, but the Blackpool Tower’s skygardens were once converted into a miniature village “populated” by little people.
Now visitors to the town can stop off at Showtown before heading up the Tower and down into the dungeons on the same Blackpool BIG Ticket that delivers 50% savings and costs £31
Throughout the year, there are plenty of free exhibitions on show at the listed Central Library, home to the Grundy Art Gallery.
After soaking up a bit of culture, you can head to the town’s iconic, year-round Coral Island. I’d bet a tub of 2ps that there is no bigger, more impressive or absurd arcade in the country. Stretching across a good number of football pitches’ worth of lurid carpeting, Coral Island is packed with one-armed bandits, coin droppers, the latest VR tech, and an indoor rollercoaster that wheels over the heads of the gamblers below.
Who cares if the Pleasure Beach is shut for the winter when you’ve got that?
As much as Mr Webb insists the town’s “reputation for stag and hen dos is greatly diminished”, it’s hard to argue that Blackpool isn’t a booze town. Whatever the season, across its 166 bars and pubs, you’ll find dozens of drinks deals cheap enough to make any Up From Londoner swoon. For a quiet but affordable pint, the Churchill is a good bet. For something a bit more late-night and rowdy, the Galleon delivers live music and a great atmosphere most nights.
For Mr Webb, the “missing piece” to the winter tourism slump puzzle would be an all-purpose indoor arena, designed for expos and eSports. Its arrival is uncertain and some way off yet, but talks with the owners of a Premier League football club are promising, the MP says.
This seems like a natural step for a town with a deep-rooted entertainment pedigree. From Strictly to George Formby, people have long come to Blackpool for a show. When I visited, Derren Brown was at the Grand as part of his Only Human tour. At the start of the performance, he uncorked several big cannisters of laughing gas into the auditorium to lull the crowd into a pliable state before having his mystifying, merry way with us.
Whether the gas was real or not, what wasn’t fake was the uproarious laughter of the audience throughout his two-hour set. Lancastrians are a friendly bunch. Whether it’s the charming staff in Stefani’s Pizza joint, a smily mum who stopped her pram for an impromptu chat, or the jovial reaction of an audience member publicly outed as a thief by Brown, there’s a good chance Blackpool will offer you a warm welcome, however miserable the weather.