Blackpool

From ARRSEpedia
Blackpool_Storm.jpg
Come to Sunny Blackpool

Windswept, freezing and (usually) rain-lashed resort on Lancashire's Fylde coast. There's nothing like an early morning dip amongst the oil drums and used tampons to set you up for the day ahead - providing, of course, that the tide is in - thus saving you a five mile tab across the mudflats to actually get your feet 'wet' in that open sewer otherwise known as the Irish Sea.

Popular with Porridge Wogs - to whom the climate is positively Mediterranean - most normal people tend to opt for a truly foreign holiday, rather than spend two weeks either:

  • eating cold fish 'n' chips in a wind-battered bus shelter on the esplanade
  • being constantly and totally off their tits on Tennents Super
  • spending their Giro money in the arcades
  • being enthralled by the nightly appearances of either Keith Harris, Roy Chubby Brown or Les Dennis at the end of the pier show

Quality entertainment I'm sure you'll agree. The irony is that two weeks in Blackpool will cost you around the same as a fortnight scuba diving in the Seychelles.

Blackpool is generally perceived to be the UK equivalent of Las Vegas: casinos, lights, chavs, sex shops etc. Whether Blackpool really is the gambling Mecca of the UK is debatable, as the residents of Stalybridge seem to think it is. Stalybridge is known as Stalyvegas - but only to Mancs.

Despite many... alright one or two... happy childhood memories of Blackpool, the resort is a shadow of its former self. The paint is faded and the plaster peeling. The Polynesia Ballroom has lost its exotic alure and is now just a shabby shithole that is more tacky than a very sticky thing that's just crawled out of a glue pot in a Sellotape factory. Sad really, and best avoided. Seychelles anyone?

As Alan Clark wrote in his diary, "Isn't Blackpool appalling, loathsome ...? Impossible to get even a piece of bread and cheese, or a decent cup of tea; dirt, squalor, shanty-town broken pavements with pools of water lying in them - on the Promenade - vulgar common 'primitives' drifting about in groups or standing, loitering, prominently."