Birthday Boy 1998

Selling Heather on the Prom 1998

These characters were part of the unofficial life of the Prom.  Claiming to be 'Gypsy Foretellers' they used to stand in the most populous part of the Promenade and  thrust a sprig of heather into your hand as you went by.

If you took it, as many did, the woman on the right of the picture used to chase after you and make you pay an exorbitant price for it, claiming you had 'bought it'.

I saw plenty of people taken for a fiver or a tenner just because they were too embarrassed to say no.

The official stallholders hated them because they weren't  subject to the council license fees and moved them on whenever they could.

Public Toilets on Central Drive 1997

 

These were the old 1930s toilets on Central Drive, just in front of Coral Island. 

If I recall correctly they were designed with a glass roof to illuminate the interior. They also had an attendant to keep it clean and keep an eye on things.

During the regeneration project they got replaced with something modern, strictly utilitarian and lacking in any kind of imagination - save for a brief nod to it's previous design. 

I suspect the attendant is long gone too.

See the Google Streetview image below. 

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South Shore on the Prom 2000

Tribal loyalties and their boundaries can be defined to the narrowness of the width of the street or a ginnel.

Blackpool, apart from hosting holidaymakers, students and Japanese ballroom dancers also was home to refugees from  the simmering civil war in Northern Ireland - in particular Unionists. There were a couple of  streets near me where the houses had the Red Hand of Ulster flag on permanent display.  In particular one house who had a Union flag on a pole in the garden. Walking past one evening when they had left their curtains open I could see through their window as they sat down to dinner - not only did they have a portrait of the Queen hanging next to one of Winston Churchill on the wall but there was also a Union flag tablecloth.

I have always thought that excessive patriotism was the refuge of the insecure and the insular. 

Aboriginal Busker, 2000

One of the many unusual street workers that found their way to Blackpool in the Summer season. He looks authentic especially with those markings on his body. Note also the chalked kangaroo on the bottom right.

Happy Dayz, Promenade, 2000

I expect this has happened to most of us. Being grabbed by Mum and having our clothes changed in public. I bet once changed he was also treated to a face wash with a spit-dampened  hankie.

This is a typical visiting family to Blackpool. Mum, Dad, the kid and Granny. A walk along the prom to collect a teddy bear and some prizes, then home by the evening.

I was shooting a lot like this at the time; slow shutter speed with fill in flash to get a combination of sharpness and blur. When I got it right it conveyed some of the energy and vibrancy of Blackpool.

The Last Donkey Ride, 1997

This must have been in November - just before the closed season, when most of the amusements shut down for the winter. The donkey rides were always the last to disappear because they needed feeding and exercise.  A walk between North & South pier was a last chance to get some business from the  few remaining visitors.

Mr B's, Promenade 1999

Woman in search of a Hen Party 1999

The wrong kind of fun 1997.

Funland was always open - even when everywhere else had closed down for the season. When you couldnt see its vomit coloured neon you could always hear  the jarred and jangled notes of Oh Susannah  that bled out from its doors and stayed in your head for hours.

During the season it was just another amusement arcade trying to extract your money, but when the Illuminations were turned off it became a lighthouse attracting bored and  skint kids looking for a bit of excitement  in a zombie town.

It was also a magnet for creeps and dubious characters of every kind - often morbidly obese men in shellsuits lurking in cars & takeaways  near the Prom.

Most of the streetwise kids laughed them off, but not all. Some succumbed to the lure of booze, cigarettes and the promises of the affection that they couldn't find at home.

Look up the sorry stories of Charlene Downes & Paige Chivers  if you need to know more.

Sexist, not sexy. 2000

This is on the Prom outside Mr B's in early 2000. It didn't make the final edit of my work possibly because back then it was  just a mildly amusing t shirt. With the passage of time though it looks increasingly bizarre, especially from someone whom you might have thought couldn't afford to be too picky.

I wonder if the t shirt tucked into the jeans without a belt look will ever catch on?

Thalidomide Artist 1997

I saw this guy outside the vile Hounds Hill shopping centre in 1997. He was drawing these incredibly intricate Disney characters with just his feet and selling them to shoppers. Initially I thought it was an elaborate scam, but I convinced him to show me  the stumps of his arms and he  explained that he was a Thalidomide victim - which if you are under about 40 was an anti-morning sickness drug given to pregnant women between the late 1950s and early 60s.

Thalidomide had the terrible side effect of grossly disfiguring the unborn children, many of whom died in early infancy.

The survivors fought a long battle against the manufacturers and distributors to get compensation for their disabilities.

I gave him a pound.

Pavarotti: Jimmy Savile's Great Mate.......

 The newsagents  window is  always  an illuminating portal  into the hidden economies of any  town and  Blackpool is no exception. Cash only bedsits, puppy farmers, massage services, and of course jobbing entertainers. 

I think I took this picture in 2000, probably struck by the incongruity of what I first thought was Pavarotti himself advertising in a newsagents window.

Like a lot of what you see through the viewfinder it worked in context, but not out of it, so it got relegated to the reject pile..... until Jimmy Savile died in 2011 and I read a BBC news report which had interviewed some of the mourners at his funeral in Leeds.

One of the first people in the queue gave his name as Roy Pavarotti Hunter.

By strange co-incidence I had only the previous day been rummaging through piles of slides and I instantly remembered him.

The article then went on to describe Roy's relationship with the then saintly Savile.

Mr  Pavarotti Hunter, a former maintenance man at Leeds General Infirmary, the hospital where Sir Jimmy worked as a voluntary porter and for which he raised money, Mr Hunter said: "He was my great friend, was Jimmy. He was a great guy.

"Passing through, I'd have a talk with Jimmy when he was shoving empty trolleys back. He was friendly with everybody."

Mr Hunter also recalled seeing Sir Jimmy DJ at the Mecca ballroom in the city, imitating his MC patter before copying the goose-scaring guttural honk that Sir Jimmy somehow turned into a trademark. "I was there." 

Roy's still available for booking if you need him, but I suspects he keeps the Savile anecdotes to himself these days.

Belle Vue Garage, Whitegate Drive 1997

I used to pass this rather lovely old example of Art Deco architecture most days when I lived off Whitegate Drive . It always impressed me that although it was something as utilitarian as a garage  it had been built with some thought as to how it would look.

In the late afternoon in November the last rays of the sun would just graze along the signage at the top of the building illuminating it like a Hopper painting.

If you look below you can see how it looked when captured by Google Streetview in 2009.

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Subsequently it became a Sainsburys. See the new building  here  and note how the architects have respected the design of the original structure.

 

Hen Party, Promenade, July 1998

A hen party moving along the Prom. Mostly friendly, but occasionally terrifying. The bride is one with the plastic penis attached to her head.

Trevor's Supermarket, Ribble Road, 1998

Why are these children crying? I have no idea, but  it must have held some interest for me to take a picture.

This is on Ribble Rd, between the college and Central Drive, and the reason I was there was to visit Trevor's - a shop of legendary status amongst students.

Actually, to call Trevor's a shop would be somewhat pretentious. It was a place where you could buy things to put in your mouth if you were skint & hungry. The first thing that struck you about the place is that it didn't have  any windows. It was boarded up with chipboard and barbed wire. It gave the appearance that  the owners  were anticipating the imminent collapse of civilisation or perhaps a zombie apocalypse. 

Once you got inside it wasn't any different. Trevor's mainly sold stuff in cans or plastic bottles  that was cheap and would last a long time if you didn't have a fridge. You could also buy a can of baked beans for 5p.

That said, the ladies on the till were always very nice to me - and it was one of the few places you could buy extra long Rizla papers.

My abiding memory of  Trevor's was meeting my friend Alex outside who'd just been to this chip shop which hired out video films. They had a very eclectic selection and on this occasion he got out a horror film about a woman with a talking vagina.

You could usually tell when someone had got a video from there because  the cases were always covered in a thick layer of chip fat which needed to be scraped off before inserting it into the video player.

You can see a picture of Trevor's as captured by Google Streetview below.

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The Dolphin Guesthouse, Woodfield Road, Blackpool 2000

Blackpool is the only place I've been where random strangers would see that I  had a camera and ask that I take their picture. They weren't interested in seeing it afterward or what I might do with it - they just wanted their picture taken. 

And so it was with this couple who, I think were the owners of the Dolphin Guest House, near the Pleasure Beach.

The humans were fine, but as you can see the dog had yet to be convinced.

What I find bizarre are the teddy bears that appear to have been subjected to lynching and hanged for their crimes. In fact they're vacuum cleaner covers made by the lady of the house to conceal the apparent shame of Hoover ownership.

Promenade August 1998

A big  part of Blackpool's appeal is it's location, which in the Summer months gets the sun falling directly onto the Promenade for most of the day and pretty late into the evening. If you look at a map of the world apart from Ireland there is no land between Blackpool & Canada, which I 'm sure gives it the special light that Edward Hopper would envy.

This is down by the South Pier at around 8pm, just as the sun is going down and  illuminating everything with a warm yellow glow.

As ever you can see the tower in the background.

Promenade 1999

This shot always reminded me of a 1993 film called Bhaji on the Beach, where a group of South Asian women from differing backgrounds go on a daytrip to Blackpool. It always struck me as unusual that despite being in the Northwest, close to Manchester and the big cities I never saw that many black or Asian people using the town as a holiday destination, so I was pleased to get a shot of the lady in the traditional  Sari with a British tradition of fish & chips.

I used fill flash to give a combination of sharpness and blur to work with the background.

Is Marxism Relevant Today? 1998

This must have been from around September or October in 1998 - Party conference season when the town became a focus of national media attention for a week when  the Tories or Labour Party came to the Winter Gardens. In addition to hordes of TV crews and journalists the hotels were rammed with political groupies hoping to get the ear of the influential. The police were also kept busy with forces being drafted in from all over the country to support the local constabulary.

All of these people needed accommodation and Blackpool's hoteliers did rather well out of the spectacle, jacking up their prices for those who were passing the bill onto the taxpayers. However the conference centres failed to adopt  the new technologies that were available for  delegates at other venues, and none of the major political parties have visited Blackpool in recent years.

Elvis on a Break, Adelaide Street West, 1999

                                                                      Sometime around Midnight.

Ginnel Kids, 1997.

In the Yorkshire/Lancashire idiom ginnels are the  alleyways that run along the back of terraced houses allowing access to and from the rear of the properties for residents.   They're a liminal space in that they're common areas, but not the pavement,  and are surrounded by private areas, the houses.

They're also great places for kids to congregate and socialise. The narrow lanes and high walls make it a natural place to kick a ball around.

Ginnels are usually quite narrow - about eight foot wide, but if you look at the ones here they're much wider, probably over twelve  feet.  I'm told this  indicates that the properties were built in the 1900s as part of the Council's plan to bring sanitation and hygiene to working classes of Blackpool - These look easily wide enough to get a dustcart through.

If you look at the right of the picture you may also see that the ginnels are paved with cobblestones - the only option then, but something people pay thousands for now!