Fourth 1977 Blackpool Photo Album, 2: The Golden Mile

Blackpool's Golden Mile features on today's flashback to 1977, with reminders of the Dr Who Exhibition, Lewis's department store, the building of Coral Island and the Golden Mile Centre.

I start with the Lewis's store as the only shot that is less oriented towards the holiday maker. Though it did draw them in their thousands of course. The store, which opened in 1964, is still fondly remembered in the town and added considerably to the aesthetics of the Promenade with it's turquoise tiling and backlit frontage. In 1977 it carried red, white and blue ribbons for the Queen's Silver Jubilee. It closed in 1993.

Another fine sight on the Golden Mile, though a brand new use for the building, was Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium. Celebrating the startling and freakish amongst both nature and achievement, it was fun to visit and brilliantly stand-out at night when the large signboard lit up with bright red neon. A short time later Ripley installed a glass tube that fed water from a pool below to a huge tap that, as the water cascaded from the tube seemed to be flowing from the tap. The water then obscured the pipe so that the tap seemed to be suspended on a column of falling water. It was very effective. Sadly I have no photograph of it.

An out of season shot of Ripley's, also showing the Golden Mile Centre.

This was Blackpool's first large purpose-built amusement arcade. It would eventually become Mr Bee's and today houses the Sea Life Centre.

Together with Ripley's it dominated the Central Beach area of the Golden Mile. The bright blue and yellow of the Silver Jubilee commemorative tram passes by and the two port-a-cabins towards the left are the Lost Children's Centre (white) and a first-aid post in blue. There's a Wall's ice cream kiosk on the beach and I think the other one is selling seafood type rubbish for the southern visitors...

Why anyone would eat jellied eels and whelks is beyond me, though the practice of putting unidentifiable pap on meals and sandwiches is sadly spreading northwards. When people in the south say "we'll eat out" I invariably hear it as "we'll eat owt..." The number of times I went to London for work and had to point at something on a buffet saying "what the hell is that???" doesn't bear thinking of. But for all their culinary short-comings (they seem never to have heard of a crust for instance), the people are remarkably likeable!

For a couple of years the Golden Mile Centre hosted an exhibition of models and puppets from the Gerry Anderson TV portfolio. Twizzle, Torchy the Battery Boy, Four Feather Falls, Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray (Whoopee - colour!) (Waah! We still had a black and white telly!), Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, UFO, Space 1999... I used to go in and just lap up pleasure until it got dark and they threw me out...

An early season shot before they installed a massive and animated ogre figure over the end of this building to advertise The Horror Crypt. My goodness gracious, that steamed up a lot of people in the council who shouted their disgust and distress loud and clear, ignoring the fact that it was carrying on a great tradition of the Golden Mile. Farther into the distance are the green girders that would later hold up the roof of the new Coral Island centre, due to open in 1978.

The Devil's Den was a short-lived exhibition next door to the Brunswick which has opened a self-service fish and chip cafe. Self-service in those days meant you got a tray and slid it across rails whilst you gave your order and then waited for it to be plated before sliding the tray to the till. It wasn't too many years since this would have been unthinkable - that your order wouldn't be taken and served by a waitress in black with starched white apron. "What do I do? What do I do???" muttered people helplessly as others sat at empty tables, fuming because they had been there half an hour without anyone taking their order... The same people a few years later let food go cold in MacDonalds whilst they searched for cutlery...

The old-style open sheds full of flick-ball games, Ber-o-Mat one-armed bandits, pinball machines so old they didn't have flippers etc. were in their last throes. The old houses and hotels behind them that they were built onto had been neglected so long that they were in danger of collapsing. Nothing above ground floor level had been in use for decades.

The kiosks at the front of the arcades were the last bastions of those oh-so-scrummy hamburgers (which now had to be called beefburgers due to advertising law) which were fried on a griddle and then propped up in a row on the back of the griddle plate amongst a pile of fried onions that kept them hot. Asking for lettuce (even though it would have been lettuce and not some sort of weird-looking "salad leaf", then still correctly thought of as inedible) or pickle or a slice of tomato would have earned you guffaws of hysterics. Only recently was it becoming acceptable, though not yet the norm, to ask for a slice of cheese. You had your bun, a burger, lots of fried onions and it was normal to put ketchup or mustard or possibly both on it.

Youngsters have always wondered why old people get so grumpy. And I can now say that for every generation it's because everything that has been familiar and comfortable and good seems to get swept away by following generations. To those youngsters who read this I can say with all surety that you will feel like this yourself when you get older. Sadly though the generation between mine and yours is doing their best to ensure you will never get chance to do this yourselves because they are destroying things for you already, having got into power and now looking after their rich chums whilst dancing with their fingers in their ears in case they hear something that might prick the last remaining vestige of conscience they might have. Robin Hood, we need you back more than ever...

The other reason older people are grumpy is that it is, actually, quite good fun...

Down at Chapel Street, opposite the Central Pier. At the end of the building is an exhibition of props and costumes from Dr Who. The entrance is the Tardis itself, which can be seen halfway down the side of the building. Another of those bits of Blackpool's past that seems to be lovingly remembered. Incredibly almost, we were still only on the fourth Doctor at the time. Tom Baker played the Doctor from 1974 to 1981, lasting not quite as long as did the exhibition which lasted from 1974 to 1985.

As I write it is New Year's Eve. Tomorrow will be 2016, so a Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope it will be / is / was!

Return to Blackpool's Golden Mile Index

A Drive Through The Illuminations

It's been years since we did it. Driving through the famous Blackpool Illuminations, that is.

Last night I was dying to get out of the house and find some fresh air. A day either peering at a computer screen or talking on the telephone had left me feeling a bit cooped up.

I suggested a ride out into the countryside and Fran countered it with a suggestion we go shopping but we could go to the Asda in Fulwood, north Preston. So a compromise and we set off around 7:00pm taking all the back roads through Elswick to Broughton then cutting down the A6 to just past the M55/M6 junction and then across to the Asda.

We bumped into Rachel and Katie in Asda and caught up on a bit of news, then zig-zagged up and down every single aisle - oh joy - because we had no idea where stuff was.

Fran claimed she was disappointed because she had wanted to go to look around the clothes section and it was closed off. There was someone watching over me after all... It was daylight when we went in. It was pitch black when we came out.

So I headed back for the A6 but then turned left towards Preston until I hit the old Blackpool Road and we drove through Lea and then left through Warton and Lytham, then along the front at St Annes and so to Squires Gate at the start of the Illuminations.

By the time we got to the Pleasure Beach we had joined a crawling queue of traffic. This surprised me a bit, I didn't think the Illuminations were that popular these days to have such a queue mid week, but obviously they still draw visitors in.

So we stayed mostly in first gear and inched our way along the Promenade, seeing all 3 of the current illuminated trams - the trawler, the warship and the wild west train.

I turned off at the Gynn, just before the large standing tableaux along the cliffs at North Shore. They are best seen on foot and we'll go another night.

But I had had my fresh air, mingled a bit towards the end with exhaust fumes. It also struck me as we drove along the Golden Mile how the smell of frying onions has totally disappeared, such a shame! In the 1970s and 80s until the yellow M and Burger King arrived, burgers were griddled in their scores and kept hot by piling them on their ends in a heap of fried onions. They were put in a bun with or without onions and you added ketchup and mustard to taste and they were gorgeous! You wouldn't have dreamed of putting salad or pickles on them in those days but they tasted fantastic.

I don't often do burgers these days and if I do it has to be as a meal, not in between meals. As a teenager calories used to bounce off me. Now they cling on hard and fast...

I was driving of course so the photo is an old one. But interestingly for the past day or two it has been the one getting the most hits at Flickr, where you can see a larger version.

Flickr have recently changed how this works. Follow the link then click on the photo. It will be shown on a black background but then you will see a link for view all sizes.

More from London, 1981

In the previous entry I finished with a couple of shots of a hotel room I stayed in back at the end of January 1981. It was my first trip for work and my first stay in a hotel with more than 12 rooms...

It's hard to take photographs of London that will have changed a lot in even thirty years. London does have some buildings that have disappeared in order to make space for things like more modern office blocks mainly. The gherkin building etc.

But the buildings that get demolished in London tend not to be the ones that you would photograph as having some great architectural features anyway. So to illustrate the point...

Admiralty Arch in 1981 looked exactly as it does in 2010. The thing that makes this photograph so nostalgic is that Austin Princess, heading past the Mall into Trafalgar Square.

My Dad used to have one of those Austin Princesses. He bought it after having a purple (yeuch!) Austin Maxi. The thing I remember most about those two British Leyland cars is that you could take hold of the gear stick and move your fist in a large circle of about a foot diameter and the gear lever would not snag at all but would happily perform the same circle. It's just not right...

My brother used it after Dad had finished with it, until the point where the rust had disappeared into one or two rather gaping holes in the doors and body... It was either going for scrap or... actually he sold it to a visiting Monster Truck show and they crushed it in their show by driving over it in a pick-up truck with rather large wheels...

Likewise the interest in this shot taken on the same trip is the already rare Commer Karrier van parked on the kerb. These were once seen everywhere. The forerunner I suppose of Ford's hugely successful Transit van. They were used a lot by the Post Office and could be seen beetling around the train station, picking up mail and packages delivered by rail.

In fact the only photograph from the trip that had any architectural or non-vehicle-related interest was this one.

Piccadilly Circus, with the traffic still passing either side of the statue of Eros (even though it wasn't meant to be Eros in the first place). Also the familiar neon signboards have yet to be replaced with video walls. JVC were about to become giants but at the time were only known for those new-fangled VHS tape thingies. And Wimpy - ah... Wimpy! Britain's own burger chain where burgers were served on a plate with chips and peas and cutlery... Or you could have a sausage bender, where the sausage was nicked and cut so that it could be rolled into a circle...

McDonalds and Burger King were on the horizon but had not yet ousted Wimpy who in this photograph are still advertising hamburgers in the window.

The Trades Descriptions Act came out in the late 1960s but it had taken them a while before they decided that as burgers were made of beef not ham, they should be termed beefburgers!

Actually hamburgers were so known because they were mainly introduced to America from the German port of Hamburg... They were introduced into Germany by that most gently persuasive of salesmen, Ghengis Khan, whose hordes didn't stop to eat so they had to eat hand held food whilst riding. To help them do this they ground their meat and shaped it into patties, placing them under their saddles so that they would be tenderised by the continous bouncing of their bodies. I'm sure McDonalds have a different way of tenderising their burgers these days though...

And finally...

...because I knew you really wanted to see this! This is the remains of the Austin Princess with my nephew standing proudly in front of it, following its demise under the wheels of the monster truck. It was now a wedge at both ends instead of just one...