More About Morecambe's Polo Tower aka Blackpool's Space Tower

This is by way of an update and correction to my article on Blackpool's Space Tower on 15 March 2015. I ended that article by saying the Tower had now been demolished at Morecambe. Thanks to a response on Facebook by Dave Oldfield, I now know that not to be the case.

The tower itself is still there, fulfilling its secondary and contracted purpose of mobile telephone mast. These photographs were taken yesterday on 30 March as I found myself in the Morecambe vicinity and stuck the camera bag in the car boot to take advantage of being near!

The revolving gondola has indeed gone but the tower is indisputably still there. A rather sad remaining reminder of the Morecambe Pleasure Beach or Frontierland as it became in its later years.

There are a few other elements of the park remaining too as this photograph shows. Thank you Dave for posting a response via Facebook and giving me a chance to give the true facts. I know... it's rare I allow facts to get in the way of a good story...

Blackpool Pleasure Beach's Space Tower

I have blogged about this ride at the Pleasure Beach before, way back in 2008, but I was miserly with the photos then. In those days I only put a single photo on every article so, thanks to a prompt by James who left a comment asking for more photos of the ride, here's an update.

The Space Tower was opened in 1974, a 160 feet high column with a slowly spinning pod that rose to the top, spun round a couple of times and came down again. It gave some fabulous views over the Pleasure Beach itself and from the top on a good day you could see the mountains of the Lake District, the rides on the horizon at Southport's Pleasure Beach and even the Isle of Man. The latter, if I'm honest, called for not a good day but an exceptionally good day!

The pod in which riders sat had a single bench seat in a circle facing out. This was uncushioned plastic and after a bit most visitors stood up to let the pain die down!

I took this shot in black and white with a red filter on the camera to darken the blue sky almost to black. It also had the effect of turning the bright red building (which housed an amusement arcade) to white. Access to the ride was down a glass-enclosed ramp close to Watson Road and the exit from the ride was above this and led into the arcade itself. The rather weird looking structures with the curve at the top in the left foreground carried lights to illuminate the Log Flume at night.

Because the ride started to rotate as soon as it started to rise the tower and continued to rotate in the same direction at the top and on its way back down, by closing down the lens of the camera and keeping the shutter open for the full length of the ride I created this rather ethereal column of light, the spirals being caused by the tiny lights on the pod. In order for the photo not to be washed out and over exposed whilst the ride was at the very top, I simply put my hand over the lens to block all light until just before it started to come back down again.

A sunset shot, enhanced a little if I'm honest by another filter. The little purple and white striped dome on the left was a camera obscura.

A colour attempt at the column of light. Not quite as successful due to a bit of a breeze blowing on that particular night that rocked the tripod that my camera was sitting on. The ride lasted until 1993 when it had to come down to make way for the new roller coaster, the massive Pepsi Max Big One. It was dismantled and taken to the company's pleasure park at Morecambe, then embarrassing its employees by making them dress as cowboys for the wild west-themed Frontierland. Even this didn't save the park from falling into hard times and it closed in the early 2000s, the repainted tower in sponsored colour scheme as the Polo Tower (the tower itself painted to resemble a tube of Polo mints). The Tower was the last bit of Frontierland to be demolished, but inevitably it came down eventually in 2004.

Addendum: That last sentence was a little premature - thanks to a response to my article posted on Facebook by Dave Oldfield, I was prompted to go for another look and there it was, still standing on 30 March 2015. For a look at the remains of the tower on that date see this entry from 31 March 2015.

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1977 Blackpool Photo Album 7 - The Pleasure Beach

We've done it. We've reached the end of our series from the recently unearthed photo album of Blackpool. The photographs were all taken in 1977 and I hope you've enjoyed looking through them with me. Today we'll be taking a stroll through Blackpool's Pleasure Beach. In contrast with the earlier articles in this series, most of the photos this time have already been seen either on this blog or elsewhere in the past. The consolation is that they all show either rides no longer with us, or ones that were under construction in 1977, so there is something in every photo that you can't see today.

The Monorail is only very recently decommissioned as a ride. But never-the-less, it has gone, never to trundle slowly round the concrete pillars holding up the track. Pictured is the futuristic enclosed train that everyone hoped for. Unfortunately the door seals were so good that after a mere five minutes regardless of whether snow was falling, you were sweltering in the heat from exhaled breath and neighbours' body heat! The springs on the doors were really strong too, so holding a door open with your foot to get some much needed fresh air was an exhausting business!

Just in front of the monorail train and on the other side of the track we see the backs of giant animal figures which overlook a row of children's trampolines. Behind them we can just see the black square hole of a bridge over the Pleasure Beach Express. Two of the Pleasure Beach "woodies" roller coasters can be seen in the background. On the left a curve of the Grand National and to the right, the riser of the Roller Coaster.

We've seen the tall thin column of the Space Tower a couple of times already in this series, but here is the gondola that spun round and rose in a spiral up the tower. It remained in Blackpool until 1993 when it had to come down to make way for the Big One, roller coaster. It was moved to Morecambe's Frontierland and renamed the Polo Tower, being repainted in appropriate colours. It has the distinction of being the last bit of Frontierland standing.

In the same area were these rockets. This was an old ride - I have a photo of me and my brother on it that was taken around 1964. Each rocket had a lever control that raised or lowered the rocket as they went round. Riding high was a more comfortable ride as the angle you sat at was either leaning inwards at the top, in which case gravity counteracted the centrifugal force, or leaning outwards at the bottom which added the gravity force to the centrifugal force and your left shoulder took a bit of punishment against the side of the cockpit!

The Log Flume was an immensely popular ride in its time. It was built over the old boating lake in front of the Big Dipper. There were two long downward ramps during the ride which resulted in the fibreglass log carriage splashing down into the chute that carried the water along with the result that riders stood a good chance of coming off the ride considerably soaked. On the lake itself the motor boats had been replaced by the rafts of the Tom Sawyer Ride. This was a slow ride along a series of scenes that would have been better screened off, with just a few tableaux of mannequins and animals that you might see on the Mississippi. I could say it was a bit like the Mississippi stern wheeler ride at Disneyland - but only if you believe that Mr Jinks and Pixie and Dixie were as good as Tom and Jerry...

In 1977 the Pleasure Beach were making a big thing out of their new ride, currently being constructed on the southern half of the park. This was called the Steeplechase and had three parallel tracks running round a twisting layout with occasional rises to go over the "jumps". A horse-glider that reminded onlookers of the Derby Racer roundabout is displayed whilst work is ongoing so that visitors could imagine what it would be like to ride. On the left is the station of the ride being built.

The Virginia Reel was another superb ride that many people thought of as their favourite. It dated from 1922 and in 1977 would have just five more years to stand. Riders sat around the inside of a tub which revolved whilst clattering around a sloping track that zig-zagged back on itself like a piece of corrugated cardboard seen end-on. A great ride for courting couples - as I recall...

Well there you go... We've been through the pages of this photo album in seven instalments. When I picked out this photo album I had a few to choose from. It wasn't even the only one from 1977. It wasn't even the only one with a photo of the Steeplechase under construction... So this series may have come to an end, but there will be another. Not straight away, perhaps, but then... I don't want to get boring, do I?

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Mixed Nostalgia

A bit of an assortment again for this entry. I've been going through a few of my old web pages from the Freeserve days, long before the blog started. Over the years 2002-2004 I featured the following items.

The first one is the old Space Tower from Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It had ended its days in Morecambe at the short-lived incarnation of Morecambe Pleasure Beach as Frontierland.

Frontierland was a mid-1980s attempt to "theme" the park as a wild west town. We may not be as grim up north as the jokes make out, but the average worker does in fact feel just a little self-concious I expect, wearing western garb and yelling "Yeehaw!" every now and then. As I remember, they didn't smile or enter into the spirit of the thing as much as their Disney counterparts over in Florida might have done. Frontierland closed down in 1999 although a few portable rides remained in use for a further year.

By the end of 2000 only the Polo Tower and the Log Flume remained. These photos were taken in 2004 and the Polo Tower remained only because it was in use as a telephone mast. It was to remain a while longer as the contract was in force until 2013.

A 1960s Fidelity tape recorder taking seven inch reels of a quarter inch wide magnetic tape and recording at a speed of three and three quarter inches of tape per second. This is a four-track machine. That means that a bit of sound quality was sacrificed in order to record along the tape twice in each direction. Imagine four stripes along the tape - stripe 1 along one edge of the tape is recorded on as the tape passes from its own spool to the spare. Then the spools are turned over and the now full spare spool is transferred to the left hand spindle. On the next pass, stripe 4 on the other edge of the tape now occupies the same position as stripe one had done.

Next the Track 2-3 switch at the bottom centre of the tape deck is depressed and the two middle tracks can be recorded on over the next two passes. On some models both stripes 1 and 3 could be recorded on during the same pass, allowing a stereo signal to be recorded. On turning the tape over the next pass would record on stripes 4 and 2. On this machine that wasn't possible but you could record twice the amount of music on a tape.

I used to have a similar Fidelity Playmaster but it was only a twin track machine - one stripe being recorded in each direction. No stereo and no push button 1-4 and 2-3 buttons in the middle. In fact the space taken by those buttons on the machine shown held a magic-eye light which acted like a sound level meter when recording.

I'm sure many of you will recognise this little optical piece of equipment. It's a View-Master - it was used for viewing a stereo (see the clever link with the previous item? What? Oh, yes the Polo thing was just a red herring...) Ahem! It was used for viewing a stereo pair of images to give the illusion of a picture in 3D, 3 dimensions with a feeling of depth. They were really popular in the 1950s and very early 1960s which is when this bakelite version dates from. Later they were plastic and bright red and the View-Master reels you could buy changed from photos of the world to naff subjects like Scooby Doo and other cartoon figures.

In other words, they changed from being aimed at adults to being a child's toy. In the mid 1960s I had quite a collection of reels showing scenes of the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland and a set that showed the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

What I always wanted in my early teens - but never actually managed to get - was a View-Master stereo camera which let you take your own 3D photos. Taking 3D photos is not hard. You can do it with a normal camera just by taking a photo, moving the camera six inches to one side and taking another - providing the subject does not move in the meantime... The hard bit is in viewing them so that one eye only sees one of the photos and the other eye only sees the other. They have to be lined up just so. It is possible for the eyes to actually move apart a bit too much - which is why watching 3D films in the days of green and red glasses made your eyes so tired. All my View-Master reels got thrown away long ago in some great Mum-induced tidy-up. Shame...

A Little Lights Relief

Whilst Blackpool Illuminations are shining out a mile and a bit away from my house, I'm also being reminded of the display from 1982 which has been going through the scanner recently.

Blackpool changes so rapidly that 30 years is enough for some of the photos to be totally unrecogniseable to visitors and residents of today.

This first shot was taken just south of the Star Inn at the bottom end of the Pleasure Beach. No Ocean Boulevard with its string of shops and kiosks blocking the view of the Pleasure Beach's Log Flume.

And if there were no Ocean Boulevard today the Log Flume is no longer there to be seen... Also no longer to be found are some large tableaux which used to be found at South Shore as well as the Bispham cliffs. Some can be glimpsed in the distance on the far left hand side of the photo.


This one is from a little further north. We are just south of Watson Road for this one.

The familiar blue and red structure of the Big One roller coaster is many years off yet. On the corner of Watson Road the Space Tower takes riders up and around as it spirals up to the top, spins for a couple of revolutions and comes back down again.

Below it is a camera obscura. The bright archway welcomes visitors to Blackpool and the Pleasure Beach. From this point on a busy night cars will take a couple of hours at least to reach the end of the illuminations at Bispham!

By putting the camera on a tripod and leaving the shutter open whilst the Space Tower went up and came down, the lights on the outside of the ride's disc corkscrew up and then cross their own path as the ride comes down.

This must have been a very calm night without any wind as the shutter had to stay open for around three minutes to take this!

And I finish for this time with a much-loved display of clowns. Alternate displays juggled balls and tossed them over the roadway or squirted each other with water pistols - with rows of light representing the water.

There's just another two and a half weeks to go before this year's display turns off until the end of next August.

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Vanished Blackpool - Space Tower

There are lots of photographs in my collection of things that no longer exist. Even were I to limit the photographs to my home town of Blackpool, there are still lots of photos showing things that are no longer there.

This photo showing the Space Tower at the Pleasure Beach is one such. It opened as a new ride in 1974, a 160 feet high column with a slowly spinning pod that rose to the top, spun round a couple of times and came down again. It stood next to the Watson Road junction with the Promenade and for around 20 years was a landmark of the Pleasure Beach.

It stood in the way of the development of the Pepsi Max Big One in the 1990s and was taken down in 1993 and re-erected in the company's Frontierland park in Morecambe, repainted in green following a sponsorship deal with Polo Mints. That park has since disappeared but the last time I was there, the only thing that still existed to show the park had been there were the sad, neglected remains of the Space Tower. More Vanished Blackpool to come!

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