I've not quite run out of photos of people on the Pleasure Beach and, there is even the odd one or two included here, but as I've been going through my somewhat large collection of photos looking for people who just happened to get in the way of my camera, I've found a number that remind us there were and are other places to enjoy oneself in Blackpool!
Starting with these two brave girls. I have a feeling that although the sun is shining, this was quite early in the year - the year in question being 1978 - and it was not an altogether warm day for paddling!
This is somewhere around the same year (give or take a couple). Taken from the South Pier as the sun sets over the Irish Sea - a touch of poetry almost crept in there... I must watch out for that and resist the urge!
On Sundays in the summer of 1978 the bandstand in Stanley Park used to feature performances by the odd beat combo... These were different days - dancing was still banned on Sundays. On a Sunday night in the Tower Ballroom the organist would play a concert rather than dancing tunes. You try dancing to the Dam Busters' March to see what I mean... The groups in Stanley Park played slightly religious things like Turn, Turn, Turn to avoid people getting up to shake a leg and being turned into a stone circle on the edge of the boating lake.
Not on the Pleasure Beach but very close to it! The two girls on the hat stall spotted my camera and started calling out to me (I was younger and a touch more streamlined then...) I asked them to put on a hat each and took the photo without thinking that the hats would totally block the overhead lights from touching their faces. Flash guns in those days, on most SLR cameras at least, were something you carried in a shoulder bag and clamped onto the camera when needed. Definitely not something you just flicked up to take a photo on the spot! I'd have been better off with a Kodak Instamatic and a flash cube here!
I'm cheating slightly here, because this is my good lady, the long-suffering Miss Franny making daisy chains for our daughter in Stanley Park, 1983.
Also from 1983 an informal gathering of sun seekers in the Memorial Garden near the Metropole. This would be frowned on now, but I don't think it was seen as such disrespectful behaviour then.
This was a night in either 1986 or 1987 when the Blackpool & Fylde Photographic Society had an evening at the Pleasure Beach to take shots of "People". Some of the shots from that night have already made an appearance in earlier articles and there's another here of fellow member Doris admiring one of the stalls where you rolled table tennis balls down a perspex slope and they then bounced about a bit before going into numbered slots. No matter what I scored I always seemed to come away with either a pencil or a screwdriver...
Another mid 1980s shot. They were totally absorbed in each other and it wasn't too difficult to get a shot without being obtrusive!.
This may have made an appearance already on the blog - or perhaps just on FaceBook where there was a discussion about this Giant Slide which was moved from the Pleasure Beach to the end of the South Pier where it kept people happy between the demise of the Pier's theatre and the installation of the inverted bungee jump and the swing ride that sent riders flying out over the side of the pier. Personally I preferred the theatre...
And this time we'll start where we began, on the beach. And I'll just confess quietly that should have read "end where we began"... - though in fact the statement is true...
You learn something new everyday...I didn't realise the slide went to the South Pier after it left BPB. I spent hours on there as a child when it was at BPB.
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