It has been about a year since my Develop Your Creative Practice Grant. A chance through a lockdown and as the lockdown came to an end to experiment and try new approaches alongside The Old Electric a community theatre that arrived in Lancashire. My feelings and ideas are drawn from and to the community and the personality of Blackpool, Lancashire a victorian seaside town, (home), and how the place we live and narrative are fed back to us as residents. It surprised me to see that I have not posted here for over a year. With thoughts of community, photography, and creativity bouncing around my head continuously.
Charnley Road 2023
How lucky I am to be able to photograph. Photograph for a living, photographs to share, photographs for well-being, walks with my camera, and thoughts of how we can share the action of creativity. The power of the lens to tell our own story, when we live in a place like Blackpool, and how our story is often told for us. There is power in a lens, where we point it - for a long time, I have searched for alternative ways to tell the story of my home, Blackpool, those complex stories told in a new light that is accessible, a story that can be shared with care.
At Art College community art was not a thing socially engaged practice became the buzzy’ term 20 years on. But really when we make a creative action, surely those actions or any action stems from a personal or social experience. Surely the best creativity is where the artist is working through their own story, those stories that have had a big impact, traumatic or otherwise, and how the audience is inspired or connects to that creativity, what feeling they are left with - creativity as a human condition and does the environment we live in also impact just being?
Taking walks with my camera has always been a thing for me. The Develop Your Creative Practice Grant allowed me to connect with other photographers creating simple photo walks for exploration into Blackpool, a need to share stories, come together, and talk about our own experiences of Blackpool or living nearby. Some were nervous about walking around our hometown at dusk or in the evening. Or nervous about their camera, obsessed with sunsets, or just wanted to meet other folks. The Heritage Action Zone project in Blackpool further allowed me to create new photo walks for photographers to document those areas and buildings earmarked for development, spaces that we in Blackpool are in the market for and might be described as“Levelling up”.
Charnley Road 2023
It is unusual to live in a town where the economy is based on tourism. Our big employers might be seasonal or council based - mostly all roads lead to seaside entertainment, theatre, bright lights, and roller coasters. There have been resident cultures over the years after all seaside towns are always on the circuit for music, but when it arrives it stays only a short time perhaps, like an extended holiday maker that has run out of money. Blackpool town centre buildings are changing and changing quickly. Viewpoints and landmarks are disappearing or changing into something new. It is not unusual in Blackpool, Lancashire, UK for this to happen, we have always been a place of change with buildings redeveloped, knocked down, or replaced.
But I walk a few steps back from the promenade that day in February 2023 and wander around the streets upon streets of B&B’s - road, after road of grand Victorian buildings for miles - those spaces haven’t changed - they do have a charm and no doubt the stories they could tell.
It was how my family ended up in Blackpool, my grandparents bought a guesthouse here in the early ’70s relocating from The South West to try their hand at catering to the guests of the northern town through the high season which ran from March to November.
Walking with a camera it is cold that day, heading to Granthams a go-to place for artists in Blackpool, based on Charnley Road - it had been a massive art supply shop but since lockdown, everything went online to buy. I head there to buy some prints to test an idea I am working on for a Leftcoast project. As I walked down Charnley Road, I noticed the registry office had gone. Gone within a day I was told by Granthams staff, I wanted to travel further south towards where the new multi-story car park was being built. I am keen to see the progress and had noticed that the landscape of the tower from that viewpoint was being obscured. I am intrigued - the space holds a strong teenage memory for me. Young folks used to come together in the car park there with their new driving licenses and Fiesta cars circa 88, out of season with nowhere to go - boy racers.
Turning onto Central Drive - February 2023
I pass the multi-level B&Bs, past every name for a bed and breakfast you can think of. If you look up eroded grand exteriors, beautiful sash windows, and ground floor window’s set up for breakfasts “out of season”. I wonder how photography can bring us together but also how taking, making, and creating an image can be a solitary experience, one of reflection, seeking, and looking at the space around us.
Visual stories, memory. I look across the top of Central Drive, the site of the old train station, it was bombed in World War II but nearby the station accommodation still exists. The buildings are beautiful on closer inspection, with delicate ironwork, tall buildings with a faded promise of a roast dinner, and paintwork upon paintwork painted over and over again. A joke shop that seems important in a place that attracts a high volume of stags and hens. It is changing and changing quickly.
Top of Central Drive - February 2023
#Residentinatouristtown I think about my ongoing quest to photograph Blackpool in a different way. The photography walk I did with residents really made me consider how sad and lacking in love some of Blackpool’s spaces are. From a distance, decayed but on closer inspection a sense of lost beauty, a place where care had been applied and somewhere along the way forgotten. In a time of quick fixes and loss of community, we all head online for shops or social spaces, or social media approval and perhaps along the way lose our connection with the environment and each other.
Blackpool is a space built for visitors, cheap takeaway, and the same old same, an inflatable dingy, a stick of rock, fancy lights, arcades, casinos - I am just one street back from the sea now and a short distance from miles and miles of coastline - the coastline that could be walked, ridden on a bike, or a skateboarded - it is said that outside space is proven to be great for mental health - I walk with my camera to increase my own sense of well being. I look up, I look down. Litter and dog dirt-strewn streets, I see an old doorway, I see a multi-story car park being built. Perhaps to attract new visitors - I am looking for what brings us together.
I stop. This space was important to me and really why I was so interested to take this walk. An old Cinema building an old nightclub. February 2023
I STOP - this was the place. It was about 1990, the house music or rave scene had been running for a couple of years. Illegal parties happening across East Lancashire, I was too young to go really. But I desperately wanted to attend - I loved the music, it was hard to access, underground, DIY. We had headed to The Mecca Building at the bottom of Central Drive, we had been told Shaboo was relaunching.
December 1990 There was a queue outside the ginormous building, the place that had attracted the Northern Soul crowd in the 60’and 70s. But that night in 1990 in a wave of great expectation nothing happened, a swell of young people desperate to get into a space to listen to underground music heckled outside the building, this was not for the tourists, Blackpool young folks did not want the same things as the people that visited here. Then people began to run up Central Drive, Shaboo was not happening and the only club night happening that night was Hacketts. I was 16 - I had left school that summer and with a host of other young folks we ran and ran. Would we get in? Under age, big queue. The club had previously held an Acid House night on a Tuesday, which we had come across with the boy racers but there was no way I was being allowed out on a school night. But at 16 I began to make my own decisions and being part of the emerging house music scene was important to me. I desperately wanted to feel part of something.
My dad had been a Mod in the 60’s - he had told me story after story about music and attending parties in other seaside towns. How this was the time when I would meet great friends and dance until dawn. The facade of the building winked down at me - Once a cinema, then a nightclub then closed for years and years.
