On Wednesday 21st January, I boarded the 9.33 for Blackpool from Platform 14 Manchester Piccadilly station.
10.35 the train terminated at Preston – thus far and no further.
Thinking on my feet, I legged it rapido to Preston Bus Station and just about caught the 68 bus to Blackpool.
Already an hour or two behind time I elected to alight at Squires Gate, and take a walk along the South Promenade toward the town centre.
The promenade is home to a plethora of public art works and sculptural shelters.
The Great Promenade Show originated from the major redevelopment undertaken by the then Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to replace and strengthen the 2km long South Promenade’s seawall flood defences. This £20 million project entailed removing the existing Victorian promenade and replacing it with a new well-designed concrete promenade on two levels. The upper level was to incorporate ’roundels’ every hundred metres, on which it was intended to site specially designed features, including wind shelters and visual displays possibly representative of the history of Blackpool. A Millennium Lottery bid was made by the Council to this end, though a commitment to start building had to be made before the outcome of the bid was known. The bid was unsuccessful, but the sites for visual features along the new promenade remained, as did the Council’s commitment to occupying them. At this point, responsibility for managing the project shifted from the Council’s Technical Services Department to its Education, Leisure and Cultural Services Division.
Like a sinister exhibit in one of Blackpool ‘s Victorian freak shows, the skeleton of a killer whale made from pulsating dark blue neon can be viewed through portholes within a metal tank like a decompression chamber.
The work was subsequently removed.
The structure has been on display for the public to enjoy for over 15 years and was deemed unsightly due to corrosion, which is why the decision was taken to remove it. PTSG Building Access Specialists Ltd planned the decommissioning and contract crane lift from start to completion.
Designed to be viewed in motion from the adjacent tram track and road, the photographic image of a swimming child laser cut into an 8m long curved stainless steel screen gradually resolves and disappears again as the viewer moves past.
Glam Rocks by Peter Freeman
Inspired by Las Vegas and the Blackpool Illuminations, three large pebble-like modelled shapes glitter after dark, as hundreds of fibre optic light points on their surface slowly change colour and sparkle.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Michael Trainor and The Art Department
Blackpool is known as the “ballroom capital of Britain”. This rotating ball 6m in diameter, covered in almost 47,000 mirrors, has been claimed as the world’s largest mirror ball, and is named after the 1969 film about a depression era ballroom marathon in the USA.
Desire by Chris Knight
An abstract sculpture 8m high, contrasting rusty corten steel with shiny stainless steel spikes, inspired by the town’s reputation as a destination for ‘dirty weekends’, and its hidden ‘fetish scene’. It casts the shadow of a spiky heart on the promenade.
Swivelling Wind Shelters by Ian McChesney with Atelier One
Three 8m high, stainless steel shelters turn like weather vanes, keeping their occupants away from the prevailing wind. Designed by architect Ian McChesney, in collaboration with engineers Atelier One, the graceful sculptural form of the shelters, shaped like whales’ flukes, is structured like an aircraft wing, vibrating in strong gusts of wind.
Sandcastle the UK’s largest indoor water park.
Sandcastle opened on 26 June 1986 on the site of the former South Shore Open Air Baths as a joint public/private partnership. Operation of the facility was taken back into Blackpool Council ownership in 2003. A significant investment in new attractions costing £5.5M was also agreed, which was delivered in two phases, with the second opening in 2006 on time and on budget.
In 2012, Sandcastle opened two new Aztec-themed slides, one with a chamber called ‘Aztec Falls’, and a toboggan-like slide called ‘Montazooma’.
Situated adjacent to the South Pier at Blackpool was the open- air swimming bath. Elliptical in form, it was designed in the renaissance style of architecture, with white ivory terracotta, known as ‘Marmola’. It was said to be the largest and finest of its kind in the world and similar in design to the colosseum of ancient Rome.
Built at a cost of around £70,000, Designed by JC Robinson – Borough Architect, it was officially opened on the 9th June 1923, the same day as the first Blackpool Carnival, by the Mayor of Blackpool, Councillor Henry Brooks. The opening ceremony was followed by a short swimming exhibition in which Blackpool swimmer Lucy Morton took part. The following year Lucy was to win a gold medal in the 1924 Paris Olympics.
Sadly in 1983, following years of neglect and falling attendances, the bath was demolished.
Built to the designs of Joseph Emberton for Leonard Thompson; restored and altered 1972 and 1977-9 by Keith Ingham. Reinforced concrete in the International Modern style. Circular plan, the circle broken by three principal projections marking the main entrance and foyer, the main exit and the main public stairs. The key to the plan were the central kitchens on the ground and first floors, serving (on the former) a number of restaurants and (on the latter) a banqueting room. Kitchens now on first floor only. The result is a sequence of intriguingly curved rooms; originally there was no public access to this inner core area or directly across the building, but this has now been provided. The basement contained stores, a billiard room and sports facilities, now in mixed use. Between ground and first floor is a mezzanine office range, with private flat over. Top floor built as roof garden, provided with a glazed curtain wall in c.1940 by Emberton and largely infilled as an extra floor in 1972.
Within such a tight network of suburban streets, restrained Modernism sits alongside the traditional semi, the grand villa and humble abode. A smattering of stained glass and an original door here and there.
One example of a curved Crittall bay, sitting next door to a distant uPVC cousin.
Hesitant examples of Arts and Crafts and hints of Tudorbethan, subtle shades of sub Lutyens, the odd Art Deco detail.
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Blaise Pascal
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
In 1896 the area to the east of central Stockport is a potpourri of emergent industry, railways, a river and agriculture – a product of the second Ice Age, the subsequent formation of the Mersey Valley and the Industrial Revolution.
By 1911 there is an expansion in the housing stock.
A comprehensive history of the area cane be found here.
In 1918, the UK property landscape was dominated by private renters, who made up 75% of all households. At the time, only 25% of the population owned their own homes.Over the next few decades, home ownership gradually increased, reaching about 38% by 1958. This shift was accompanied by a decrease in private renting, which fell to 41% during the same period.
The most significant growth in home ownership occurred between 1958 and 2003. The percentage of owner-occupiers surged from 38% to 70%. This period saw a corresponding decline in both private renting, which fell to just 8% in 2003, and social renting, which peaked at 29% in 1978 before declining to 22% by 2003.
The pattern of home ownership has been determined by a number of factors –
The Property Owning Democracy – Coined by British MP Noel Skelton in 1920, the concept emphasised the terms ‘property-owning’ and ‘democracy’ as a conservative response to left-leaning ideas of liberalism and socialism.
Right to Buy scheme, introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Housing Act 1980, allowed long-term council social tenants in England and Wales to buy their homes at a significant discount, fostering homeownership but drastically reducing the stock of affordable social housing, leading to ongoing housing shortages and debates over its legacy.
The Property Ladder which commodifies housing. Where once house and home were largely for life, the upwardly mobile homeowner wishes to continually acquire value and status through trading ever onwards and upwards.
Socially the role of the home has also changed over time, once a place to be outside of – working or playing, the home is now possibly a place of both work and play. A larger percentage of weekly earnings is now absorbed by housing costs, and the lure of the multi-channel Smart TV, gaming systems, take away food and supermarket lager, nails the residents’ slippers firmly to the laminate flooring.
This has gone hand in hand with the trend home improvements and extensions – fed by glossy magazines, design led property TV shows advocating a New England, Shabby Chic, Maxi/Minimalist Vibe.
Welcome to the new England.
It’s January 2026 and I have taken to the area between Mauldeth Road, Thornfield Road, Queens Drive and Didsbury Road.
What is actually going on in my locale? – The only way to find out is to go and take a good look around.
Symbol of middle-class aspiration, conservatism and compromised individualism, the semi-detached house is England’s modern domestic type par excellence.
Semi-detached houses are the most common property type in the United Kingdom. They accounted for 32% of UK housing transactions and 32% of the English housing stock in 2008. Between 1945 and 1964, 41% of all properties built were semis.
Semi-detached houses for the middle class began to be planned systematically in late 18th-century Georgian architecture, as a suburban compromise between the terraced houses close to the city centre, and the detached villas further out, where land was cheaper.
Although semi-detached housing is built throughout the world, it is generally seen as particularly symbolic of the suburbanisation of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The homeowners quest for the individual within a typology, no two doors the same, render re-rendered, period details largely erased, occasionally preserved, windows awash with white uPVC, along with the more recent incursion of one shade of grey, front gardens replaced by unimpressive pressed concrete car parking, cars and more cars, bay windows held at bay by red brick walls and well-trimmed beech hedges.
My pink half of the drainpipe Separates next door from me My pink half of the drainpipe Oh, Mama – belongs to me
My baby takes the morning train He works from nine till five and then He takes another home again To find me waitin’ for him
Sheena Easton
Welcome to the land of Terry and June – the seemingly complacent home to the newly aspirational classes, anathema to those thrill seeking Modernists, embracing the dynamism of the city, or those Ruralists protecting the integrity of the countryside.
Tradition has broken down. Taste is utterly debased, the town, long since degraded, is now being annihilated by a flabby, shoddy, romantic nature worship. That romantic nature worship is destroying also the object of its adoration, the countryside.
The growth of British towns and cities, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution, created a demand for new homes, the earliest developments were close to the centres of production and administration. Followed by the creation of outlying estates for the fleeing middle classes, as the smoke began to billow and the trains and buses began to run.
Originally the work of speculative private enterprise, followed by homes built by the local authority along with charitable institutions.
My own experience has taught me that Suburbia is architecturally diverse, socially less so, as various areas are segregated by class, and perhaps less so by ethnicity and/or culture.
The majority of the population live in Suburbia it seems, there now follows a selection of the suburban sites which I have visited in the last ten years or so.
In search of Suburbia.
There are areas of Victorian terraced housing Manchester which survived clearance – such as Jetson Street in Abbey Hey.
By 1931 1.1 million council houses were built and 2.8 million privately owned homes.
Post WW2 the emphasis was on an expansion of social housing, along with a growth in privately owned property – detailed information and analysis of social housing can be found here at Municipal Dreams.
These homes were at times both temporary and of non-standard construction.
This prefabricated house was originally built for the good folk of Doncaster, later finding itself in Humberston Fitties
These Wythenshawe BISFHomes designed by Frederick Gibberd, the so-called Tin Town are still very much habitable homes.
Post war development was inextricably linked to the New Towns.
The new towns in the United Kingdom were planned under the powers of the New Towns Act 1946 and later acts to relocate people from poor or bombed-out housing following World War II. Designated new towns were placed under the supervision of a development corporation, and were developed in three waves. Later developments included the “expanded towns”: existing towns which were substantially expanded to accommodate what was called the “overspill” population from densely populated areas of deprivation.
Dating from 1886, it was originally part of the Glasgow City and District Railway, the first underground railway in Scotland, and as such the station is built below the surface of the surrounding streets. The station was built using the cut and cover method, with the original walls being visible on the open air section at the western end of the platforms.
In 1968 it was demolished due to it being in the path of the new Glasgow Inner Ring Road, and the surface access to the station was moved to its eastern end, with a new surface building constructed as part of the Elmbank Gardens office complex in 1971 – the building was designed by the Richard Seifert & Partners.
I was there in 2024 to photograph the Charles Anderson mural.
Constructed in situ – one third has now been removed at the northern end
Charles Anderson studied drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art under David Donaldson, Mary Armour etc, graduating with Diploma in 1959. The following year he entered The Royal Scottish Academy painting competition for Post Graduate students and won the Chalmers Bursary. Joan Eardley – one of the adjudicators- took a keen interest in his work and encouraged him to exhibit at the RSA the same year.
Following a period of five years teaching art, He worked as a professional mural painter and sculptor for the next thirty years on major art and design projects throughout the United Kingdom, carrying out commissions for a wide variety of clients including local authorities, property developers, banks and major insurance companies. His most prestigious commission to date was the result of winning a national sculpture competition to provide a bronze figurative group which is entitled “The Community” for Livingston New Town in 1996. In early 1997 he returned to the painting of easel pictures and contributed to the annual exhibitions of The Royal Glasgow Institute, the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours, The Royal Scottish Academy and The Paisley Art Institute. He has works in various private collections throughout the U.K. and abroad.
Modern Mooch 