Blackpool Gateway Progress

The last time I had a look at the Blackpool Gateway building work was way back in April. So I thought it was time for another look!

I'm up on top of Wilkinsons car park on Talbot Road. We're looking at Cookson Street, as it joins Talbot Road. New council offices are being built on the left, on the site of the Your Father's Moustache club and a couple of car parks. On the right is what used to be the bus station.

The old bus station hasn't been a bus station for quite a bit really. It was a dark, dangerous place to be where buses came in at one side, maneuvered to orientate them to the right place and left via a second exit. The stands were completely uncluttered by pavement, so would-be passengers had to cross a large expanse of what was virtually an indoor road where queues often had to move to allow another bus into an adjoining space.

It had a number of years of use as a car park and the plans now are to turn the upper storeys into a multi-storey car park - it did have that function before... and introduce retail outlets on the ground floor.

A little further inland, a supermarket is being built on what used to be Seed Street car park and before that Blackpool's only WWII bomb site. It was hard to tell the difference...

Shifting the lens to telephoto, here is the Ramsden Arms hotel and beyond the tower blocks of Queen's Park, themselves scheduled to come down before too long. They are to be taken down a floor at a time, rather than dropped with explosives. Takes all the fun out of it from a spectator point of view...

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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 Town Centre Rejuvenation

The Council have announced (ages ago actually) that the area from the railway station into town was going to have a massive redevelopment.

It's started by finishing a job that Hitler started in the Second World War. One of his bombers got a bit lost during the blitz on Liverpool and unloaded its bombs over Blackpool, destroying houses in Seed Street. In the event the row of terraced properties was demolished and the area has been in use ever since as a car park. The properties facing, the houses on Buchanan Street, have now been demolished. The plans for the new development as shown in the local paper several months ago looked very grand. There seems little point to me in putting up loads of shops and offices whose rent will eat up every bit of profit - that's the problem with all the market stalls we have in grand buildings like the old Woolworths building Pricebusters etc.

More to come...

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