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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Hot and Cold Running Round Blackpool

I found a little time on Saturday morning to run round Blackpool with a camera.

The construction work on the new Gateway site (why do I want to cringe when I hear that name?) is moving on and I wanted to get some photos before the site is totally transformed into new buildings.

The towers are the stair cases for a new building on the land just east of the old bus station, itself neatly wrapped in bubblewrap ready for the magic to be worked inside.

It was cold and windy so I decided that, having got these shots, I'd head for somewhere a bit warmer and took refuge in the Houndshill. Cold and windy always brings tears to my eyes these days and I find people giving me strangely sympathetic looks as I walk past with tears streaming down my face... Even if I beam at them I can tell they are thinking "Aw, he's putting a brave face on it but something must be wrong..."

I'm standing on what used to be Adelaide Street. These days we have Adelaide Street East - which is what we are looking towards - and Adelaide Street West, which I can look towards by the simple expedient of swivelling my hips (no, lady I am not Elvis...) around 180 degrees. My God, that hurts...

There's a whole host of forgotten streets where, until the Houndshill came along, you could stroll in the rain and drive your Ford Anglia or Morris Oxford. Now you can still walk some of them but they are tiled, not tarmacced, they have ceilings not sky and the shops on them stretch back so far they cover the next street along which has disappeared altogether.

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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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Bygone Blackpool

Negatives from 1976 were going through the scanner last night. It was the year Fran and I were married and moved to Blackpool and I can't believe how long ago it is now. Blackpool has changed a lot since then and the change continues and will forever continue.

Here's an image that illustrates that point very well. It was taken in May 1976, probably over the Spring Bank Holiday, though I'm not certain of the exact date. There's a fair number of poeple on the Promenade though!

The pedestrian footbridge was built towards the end of the 1960s, the only one of a planned number of bridges to be built. It looked ok on the Promenade side but led to a grotty dingy platform of concrete on the other side that was isolated and not pleasant to walk past in order to get down to street level. The bridge was finally demolished earlier this year. Gone is the wonderful viewpoint for taking photos of the Illuminations, trams, parades, storm waves...

However progress continues - it is Blackpool's official motto, let's not forget! And so the sea wall curves that caused those fantastically high smashing waves during stormy high tides are now in the process of disappearing themselves and Blackpool's seafront will be a graceful sweep of steps that for some reason the Corporation want to call the Spanish Steps, as though Blackpool has any reason to feel fondly for our European cousin that has taken so mch trade away from the town's hotels and guest houses!

Once they are in place the high smashing waves soaring up to wet the tops of the lamp posts will be things of the past. Storms will be a lot less spectacular - but perhaps will cause less loss of life. I hope so. Far too many people have been swept out by a wave they were dodging...

On the left of the photo is something that was to disappear from Blackpool not all that long after the photo was taken. The pleasure boats and the ancient World War II vintage lorries that towed the boats to the sea and then ferried passengers to them from the beach.

Boat trips from Blackpool were not spectacular I'm afraid. It's a long straight piece of coast. No rocks, no seals, no dolphins or sharks, no corners to go round for a different view. Just the long line of Blackpool that for 15 minutes got thinner between sea and sky and then got fatter as the half hour trip returned. "That were nice!" someone would say. But it was just the boatman trying to cheer passengers up...

Blackpool - as a borough with a Corporation - was 100 years old in 1976. Visitors had been going to Blackpool for a bit o' fun since before 1876, but some semblance of order, things like sewers and stuff, started to be seen in Blackpool from then. Well... started to not be seen in the case of sewers...

The tram was duly decorated for the year. The following year the words "Blackpool Centenary" were removed and the words "Silver Jubilee" were installed in their place. Progress moves onwards - but don't miss a trick!

Blackpool's Golden Mile 1980s Style

Ages since I added to the occasional series of Vanished Blackpool so here's a quick one to savour!

Savour may not quite be the most apt word, and I'm not sure I should have used style in the title as the Golden Mile in July 1981 showed little flair for style.

The buildings had originally been houses - you can spot gable ends towards the right. The original Golden Mile started as stalls in front gardens. The householders sold drinks for the beach and were so successful that they learned that if they knocked down their garden fences or railings and let out the front garden they could earn fortunes.

Drinks stalls were joined by quack medicines, sideshows, and some really tasteless stuff. One not-so-rich newly wed couple spent their honeymoon in a glass case "Starving to Death for Love", just one of many questionable shows which included the (arguably wrongly) defrocked Rector of Stiffkey, who exhibited himself in a barrel. He later died in the jaws of a lion in Skegness when, whilst preaching from inside its cage, he inadvertantly trod on its tail...

But despite the boarded up windows and horrendous dilapidation of the upper storeys of the buildings, I always think of this section as the last bit of the Golden Mile with character...

There was an excellent burger bar there too before burgers became the bland stuff you get at franchise burger bars these days. Fried onions and ketchup with none of this cheese and salad and grated onion nonsense! The late 1970s saw a rapid decrease in the small independant burger stalls. New Trade Description laws meant that the term hamburger had to disappear - as burgers were made with beef - and a new word beefburgers appeared on the menu.

Large version of the photo: Golden Mile

Blackpool Hounds Hill Centre 1982

One for the Vanished Blackpool series. I'm afraid I haven't stirred myself yet to take the camera into the newly refurbished and enlarged Hounds Hill Centre in Blackpool. I did note that it had a tiled surface leading down a slope towards the new Debenams that made me wonder about how slippery it might be when the weather outside was wet. I always seem to choose shoes that at the merest hint of moisture skid all over the place leaving me floundering and waving my arms about like windmills whilst onlookers point and laugh...

Anyway, by way of making up for this lack of photographic effort, here's an older photo, shot in 1982 of the then relatively new Hounds Hill Centre when it had an open front much used by buskers. One of the regulars I remember was a Franciscan monk who, to his credit, never laughed when I fell over on a wet floor...

A bit of music always provided a good atmosphere and at the time there were some good musicians playing lively music.

A folk band playing jigs and reels at the rear entrance to Houndshill.

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Blackpool Tower and Beach

A couple of today's photo uploads to my Flickr account.

I could almost have included this in the Vanished Blackpool series as these days it is rare to see the number of people on the beach that you see in this photo from around 1980.

Even by the 1980s the beach was still a favourite spot for tourists to park a deckchair and put up a wind break. The Council used to employ a number of staff every year to man stations all along the promenade, hiring out deckchairs and windbreaks by the day or half-day.

A path from the slade has to be kept free of deckchairs as this is the route down which the lifeboat will be brought in case of an emergency. Most of the ice cream koisks still relied on insulation and lots of ice rather than generators and refridgeration to keep their ice cream cold.

Moving into the Tower for a photo again taken in the very early 1980s, this shows the Tower Ballroom.

Phil Kelsall is playing the Wurlitzer, although the dance floor is empty as this was a Sunday night. Dancing was still not allowed on Sunday nights and instead the organist gave a recital of film music, popular classics and fun items.

When he played The Dam Busters March the Ballroom vibrated as the very loud sound effect of a Lancaster Bomber was played over the organ music!

Vanished Blackpool - Tram Depot

Whilst no town can ever hope to preserve all of its historic buildings without halting all progress, this loss was a particularly sad one.

The tram depot on Rigby Road Blackpool was subject to a lot of public interest in 1982 as the town at the time had just three years to go before it celebrated one hundred years of electric trams. It was the first town to have electric trams as well as being the only town in England to retain its trams to the present day. There were calls for the building to be preserved to house a museum to the tramway system (something that Blackpool still doesn't have in 2008). However the building was demolished shortly after I took this photograph on 18 March 1982. Nice Ford Cortina MkIV parked outside too.

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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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