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This article took three months to research and compile. It was written for a good friend of mine for his website, where it currently resides, a website not on the history of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach but of the seaside town of Blackpool in England. He's now happily married and his site is now construed towards an advertising business, Blackpool4All, while the old site remains for the fun of all that come to Blackpool. The pair are devote Christians... So here's a link to their site and one for, of course, the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. http://www.blackpool4fun.com and http://www.blackpoolpleasurebeach.com. HUMBLE BEGINNINGS: THE PLEASURE BEACH AT BLACKPOOL. The first initial references describing Blackpool as a seaside resort is around 1840. Before this, it was considered a quiet place of fields and presentably a village with coarse B+B hotel accommodation fronting the Irish Sea, its imagery on old sketches of the beach looking towards what later was to become the Promenade were stark. No slates for the rise from the sand, as is seen today, just an incline of it steeped high with pathways formed by numerous visitors’ feet treading a course down to the flat seabed. Plenty of horses, people aback them, and drawn carriages can be studied in the Blackpool front c. 1840 David Cox painting amidst the gold flavour of colour weeping a shiny puddle of water. The same year Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood – Lord of the Manor of Rossall – bankrupted his estates in extending the railway from Preston to his newly created town of Fleetwood, the line passing within five miles of the Blackpool coast. Other travellers made their way by cart or wagon from Poulton-le-Fylde causing with it a demand for excursions to Blackpool, creating a need for a new line of track from Poulton to the seaside town. In many ways, it was Hesketh’s dream, only a fraction of his beloved railway built; the fulfilment of his plans would have seen the lines passing by the Fylde coasts for more years to come failing the incredible rise of what Blackpool would become to the North of England in the twentieth century. The resort town grew exceedingly slowly with the gentle tide of visitors to it. There was no Promenade and certainly no entertainment, not even a shadow of public amenities with a very scarce effectual local administration in the area for those times. In 1861, there were less than four thousand permanent residents in the town and inevitably, with progress things would change. The ‘Cotton Famine’ brought on by the American Civil War gave immense sufferance to the cotton mills of the towns in Lancashire, this may have caused a dwindling of the crowds that came to Blackpool, as plans were immediately put forth to build amenities to attract the ‘better class’ visitors. In 1862, the Blackpool Pier Company erected the North Pier, completed in 1863 and for a small fee of 1d; the genteel of the public could walk the planks avoiding the throng of lower classes on the streets. In this same year, a series of terraced houses built on North Shore, Claremont Park, remained a private road for a few years and only entered by payment of a toll. This opulence was intended for a ‘better class of visitor’ to stay at the seafront. In 1864, came the Fylde Water Company, created to pipe water into Blackpool from the reservoirs in the Pennines. There were several grand hotels built attracting success for a while, the Clifton Arms constructed between 1866 and 1876 directly opposite the North Pier preserving the name of Talbot Clifton, who was the Lord of the Manor at Lytham. He had purchased the manorial rights from Sir Peter Hesketh in 1842, utilizing a strip of land covering Talbot Road Station to the frontage of the pier. |
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