In its mid-twentieth-century hey day, Blackpool’s seven miles of illuminated promenade was holiday heaven for millions of people from all over the UK. By the 1960s and 70s, the resort was attracting 17m visitors a year and was the largest holiday destination in the UK. Sadly, times changed, and with them the holiday habits of millions of British families. Blackpool’s brash and gaudy kiss-me-quick attractions were suddenly no match for cheap sun, sea and sangria on the Costas and Blackpool’s future became uncertain.

Today, Blackpool faces facing a spiralling decline in both visitor numbers and trading levels. The reasons are many: the popularity of overseas travel; higher customer expectation; and a growing sense of dissatisfaction regarding what Blackpool has to offer its traditional visitors. The repercussions of dwindling investment are reverberating across the region - the town is now statistically the tenth most deprived area in the UK.

The impressive regeneration of many of the UK’s urban centres (including nearby Manchester and Liverpool) in recent years only serves to widen the quality gap, emphasising with even greater eloquence the pressing need for bold innovation and inspirational planning as a catalyst for the imaginative transformation of our major coastal resorts. It’s time we made a start.

Blackpool will become a contemporary, world-class hub for quality, popular entertainment. The ‘People’s Playground’ project will embrace 3km of new seafront in Blackpool’s heartland. We aim to create a dynamic new environment, a thrilling spectacle designed to stop people in their tracks, an adventure free for all to enjoy.

We want to reinvent the British seafront, creating a world-class resort experience and transforming Blackpool into a year-round urban park where residents and visitors can meet and mingle; where magic, myth, spectacle, electric light, showbiz and fun inspire innovative public spaces. Most of all, to regain for Blackpool and its people the pioneering spirit and collective achievement and pride of its Victorian founders.