Blackpool Audio Tour: The People Behind the Pleasure

Blackpool's towers and illuminations belong to the visitors. The streets and promenade between them belong to a different town — the tram drivers who ran Britain's first electric street tramway from 1885, the steeplejacks who fixed five million Accrington bricks into the sky, the ballroom organist who played for forty years without missing a Whit Sunday, the pier keepers who handed out deckchairs at dawn, the landladies on Charnley Road who took in mill workers by the dozen, the electricians who strung up eight arc lamps before Edison had patented the bulb. This is the Blackpool that the Blackpool Gazette and the boardinghouse registers remembered — the workers whose names rarely made it onto the illuminations.