Blackpool's Syndicate aka ABC Theatre

On Satuday as I was walking through Blackpool with camera at the ready I stopped to take a photo of the old Syndicate night club building.

I always think of it as the ABC Theatre, but it started life as the Empire Theatre and Opera House in July 1895. The opening performance included turns by Miss Maggie Duggan, who was a male impersonator and also Mr Quinton Gibson, who impersonated females. If they had only got together they could have saved a lot of bother...

Plagued by financial problems the Empire closed in 1900 to be turned into the Hippodrome and opened as a circus, but ten years later was refurbished inside with a raked floor which allowed use as both a cinema and variety theatre. Associated British Cinemas (ABC) took over the building in 1929 but a planned rebuild was interrupted by the Second World War and it was 1963 before the theatre was rebuilt and opened in grand style with a lavish Summer Season show called Holiday Carnival and starring Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who released an extended play album (EP) also named Holiday Carnival.

The stage had a revolving section built into it. Some of the greatest names from the 1960s and 70s played there, including The Beatles, Morecambe and Wise and many more. ABC used it to stage the televised Blackpool Night Out shows during the 1960s.

Then in 1981 the cinema became a triple screen cinema and that was the end of the live shows, though the stage, orchestra pit and dressing rooms still existed at this point. The name changed again to Cannon (1986) and MGM (1993) but at the end of 1998 the cinema closed for good. Four long years later it reopened as the Syndicate nightclub after a massive refurbishment that saw all of the theatre interior and workings removed. It closed in 2007, reopened and stuttered along for special events and a spell as a Polish night club.

The council have plans for a car park for a few years before it turns into something else. One idea has been for a high quality hotel to try to woo conference trade back to the Winter Gardens. We shall see.

At the moment, the Syndicate cladding is coming off and some of the old decorative brickwork from pre-1963 days is being uncovered. There was a lot of feeling in the town that the building should not be lost, but conversion to almost anything else would have been prohibitively expensive. The days of variety shows that I remember with such affection are sadly all but gone. Britain's Got Morons (sorry - "Talent", though that is patently untrue...) is about the last bastion of variety these days.

Very, very, sad.

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Where The Trains Ran To Blackpool

I was doing a bit of scanning last night. In my folders of black and white negatives I've now reached mid 1985.

This one made me go "Wow...!"

Taken from the road bridge on Waterloo Road opposite the site of the South Shore Station featured a couple of entries ago, this shows the route that through trains used to take to arrive at Blackpool Central Station.

The station was demolished in 1964 against the recommendations of the Beeching Report which had recommended closing North Station instead. Blackpool Central Station had more platforms in 1901 than some London Stations in the current century.

The station site itself was replaced by Coral Island, though not until the later 1970s. The space left by the removal of the railway tracks remained largely wasteland until the late 1980s although Blackpool's main police station occupies some of it.

All sorts of rumours floated around Blackpool regarding planned use including Disney's European theme park. That eventually was built on the outskirts of Paris instead.

Almost inevitably the site became a huge car park with the large embankment turned into a link road joining the end of the M55 motorway and channeling cars directly into Blackpool and the car park. To make it seem more like a strategic decision and less like desperation the Corporation gleefully set up ticket machines along the Promenade, bringing to an end decades of free parking for visitors.

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Blackpool South Shore Station Demolition

It always happens that the things I should photograph, things that are about to disappear, I never seem to get round to until they either are no longer there or are already smashed to bits.

As witness these photos of Blackpool's South Shore railway station, the buildings of which, when I arrived with camera in hand in March 1985 are well on the way to nothingness... I could also cite the lack of any colour photos of those stocks on wheels I featured a while ago. Long gone by the time I went looking again with some colour film in my camera.

And yet I regularly take photos of things that don't change over and over again. Take a typical town. People take photos of its grand public buildings, town halls, parks etc. Not so much the shops on the High Street. Particularly not the small shops on the High Street. But they are the things that change. They are the photos you can look back on and come over all nostalgic. Stonehenge looks pretty much the same as it did when I were a lad. The stones I mean not the now elaborate entrance and gift shop. You see? The small shops...

So I have no photos of the South Shore station before its demise. No photos of the wonderful model railway set that resided within. #fail as my Twitter friends would say.

South Shore station today is still in use as Blackpool's second terminus. Just a couple of shelters adorn the platforms. The line that comes to it splits from the main route into Blackpool North at Kirkham and stops at Lytham, St Annes and the Pleasure Beach.

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More Blackpool Town Centre News

Following on from the entry posted on 11 April, I took the camera back into town this morning.

It was reported in the Evening Gazette that Yates's Wine Lodge had been further demolished as the rotunda had been in danger of collapse. There's not a lot of the old place left now.

Yet another incidence of arson has hit Talbot Road, this time further away from the seafront, beyond the train station where the construction site of some new apartments was razed to the ground on Thursday night, causing the evacuation of 160 people from their homes, at least one of which lost its roof in the blaze.

Birley Street meanwhile is looking particularly hideous with these ugly gantries for the "sound and light system" (it's what every town centre street really needs...)

On a much more positive front though, the area in front of St John's Church on Church Street is showing some real promise as the paving starts to be laid. It really does look as though it will be a stunning space if it matches the artists' impressions that have appeared on hoardings.

And it crossed my mind whilst I was taking photos of Yates's - or the remains of Yates's, I should say - that I have never photographed the Town Hall, so today I rectified that oversight. To the right, on the corner of Talbot Road and the Promenade the old Clifton Hotel has been taken over and refurbished by Travelodge and now sports their logo.

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