As he waves a frozen hand in the direction of the law courts and police station, words almost fail Doug Garrett, chief executive of ReBlackpool, the urban regeneration body. The ugliness of these concrete edifices speaks for itself. And yet a town planner once thought fit to plonk them right where millions of visitors every year could not help but see them on arrival in the centre of Blackpool.
"We want to take them out," says Garrett, simply.
And then there is Houndshill shopping centre. "Not the most attractive shopping centre you will have been in. And that's talking it up," says Garrett. "Sixty per cent of those who live in the Fylde go shopping to Preston and Manchester. We are trying to change that."
This change is imminent. A new big Debenhams is under construction, part of major improvements and expansion of Houndshill. As for the Winter Gardens, the venerable complex where every prime minister since the Second World War has addressed an audience, it is "well past its sell-by date", says the regeneration guru. As things stand, none of the main political parties has a conference planned for Blackpool.
The resort shows us its worst side from the moment you emerge from Blackpool North rail station. "You come into a bear pit," says Garrett, waving at some more architectural misdemeanours crowding above the station. "There is nothing here to say that you are somewhere special."
The solution here will be to create a plaza with views of Blackpool Tower, he says.
Even the relationship Blackpool visitors have with the seaside is dysfunctional. "A lot of people who go to Blackpool never go to the beach at all," says Garrett. "Even in the height of summer, it seems to have lost its relevance."
And this is where Blackpool's most innovative regeneration project comes in. Six new "headlands" are taking shape along the Promenade, bulging 60m seawards to create new public space so substantial that the headland opposite Blackpool Tower will be able to stage music events for up to 20,000 people.
These headlands mean the Promenade will undulate prettily along the Golden Mile, the harsh sea wall giving way to "Spanish steps", which offer a more enticing route down to the sands. Perhaps the sands will have even more allure in September when a beach volleyball tournament is staged, following on from a successful tournament last year featuring eight teams from across Europe.. An £85m upgrade of the tram system is in the offing too, with new trams to join the best of the heritage trams.
All this construction work means Blackpool, for now, looks even tattier than usual. But I have a confession to make: I've always loved Blackpool. Perhaps it is the thrilling seediness of it, the kiss-me-quick garishness. It is as if half the town has been fashioned by architects with grand ideas and the other half by drunken circus roustabouts.
If you needed evidence of Blackpool's uniqueness, and its survivor spirit, go to Funny Girls show bar. It is set in an old Odeon cinema, where a long drinks servery has been installed just beneath the apron of the stage, so you can place your order while gawping up at a well-drilled kickline of drag queens. We are greeted by one of the "bar trannies" who has a face like Charles Hawtrey and a bust like Marilyn Monroe. Entrepreneur Basil Newby is the man behind Funny Girls, but the undoubted star of the show is Betty Legs Diamond, a seasoned hoofer who is the lithe presence at the centre of so many of the cartwheeling, high-camp show tune routines.
Asked why she left the glamour and bright lights of the West End, Betty once replied in true Norma Desmond style: "I didn't leave…it followed me here."
The audience runs the gamut from gay men to parties of pensioners, and best seating in the house sometimes has to be booked weeks in advance.
Another reason to love Blackpool? The Tower ballroom. More ornate than the most boastful renaissance Italian architecture, when you stand on that dancefloor it is like being at the centre of a great gold-plated wedding cake.
"Bid me discourse. I will enchant thine ear," goes the legend above the huge stage. Beneath that noble Shakespearean sentiment, the stage of the ballroom is filled by a gigantic, grinning inflatable ape. It is the launch party for Jungle Jim's, the Tower's 25-year old adventure playground which has undergone a £3m transformation. There will be more investment in the Tower to come.
"We really need to upgrade the exterior of the building," says Geoff Sage, Tower general manager. "It's the north west's best-kept secret." Ten million come to Blackpool every year, and the first thing they all want to do is spot is the Tower on the horizon. Yet only half a million go inside, despite that magnificent ballroom, the Mighty Wurlitzer, the circus, Jungle Jim's and all.
Blackpool's other claim to uniqueness is found in an unassuming municipal depot whose weather-beaten sign reads: "Blackpool Borough Council Illuminations Division." Here they custom-make the lights which stretch along the sea front from August to November. Among the tableaux this year will be one titled Venus Reborn, designed by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.
These days, the illuminations have gone green, using energy-efficient LEDs instead of old-fashioned light bulbs. The daily cost of powering six miles of lights is just £349, with ten per cent of the power coming from wind turbines. Old displays are recycled by being sold on, some, bizarrely, to Zimbabwe. An eight-ton Thunderbird 3, still standing majestically on the Prom, has been sold to someone who, the joke goes, would like to remain anonymous.
But the gaping hole in Blackpool's future is the supercasino. It was Leisure Parcs, which runs the Tower, the Winter Gardens and Louis Tussaud's waxworks, which first came up with the idea of American-style casino regeneration at the start of the decade. Visitor numbers could be doubled within 15 years, went the theory.
When the government 14 months ago declared Manchester would get the first supercasino - before killing off the supercasino entirely - Blackpool Council leader Roy Fisher said: "For us it was the cake. For Manchester it was the icing on the cake."
What will now go on Blackpool's Central Station site, earmarked for the casino, has yet to be decided. A regeneration taskforce has put funding proposals to government.
"Blackpool is always up for the challenge," says Blackpool North and Fleetwood Labour MP Joan Humble. "By the end of the year, we'll have seen the completion of the work on the Promenade, the sea defences, ongoing work on the trams, the Hounsdhill shopping centre being redeveloped. Blackpool is in business.
"What the government response to our taskforce report showed was the very large amounts of money the government has invested in Blackpool. What we need is the private sector to match that investment, to give a vote of confidence in the town."
But what about Blackpool's growing reputation as binge-drinking Stag and Hen Party Central?
"The regeneration plans we have now have looked carefully at how to segment the market, how to try to ensure that parts of the town are being developed for one group of people and parts of the town for another group," says Humble.
The key word which crops up in conversation with all the movers and shakers in Blackpool is "quality". Some investment at the quality end of the hotel market is obvious - for instance, the Pleasure Beach's Big Blue Hotel, or the achingly chic Number One South Beach. But they are well outnumbered by tatty guest houses and pies-and-fries eateries.
In the two square miles with which ReBlackpool is concerned, there are 35,000 holiday bed spaces. "We have way more accommodation than is necessary and we have way less good quality accommodation than is necessary," says Garrett. "We need to see a lot of the poor quality accommodation taken out. A lot of it will fall away anyway because if you bring in a higher level , they will be squeezed out of the market."
It will be a long and painful process. Garrett recognises that while for most urban regeneration bodies, a brownfield site is an empty factory, in Blackpool it will be a person's home and livelihood - one of the many below-par hotels and B&Bs which must fail to create new sites of opportunity.
Blackpool now isn't just competing with foreign destinations, and other British resorts now. It's even competing with places like Manchester - the once smoky metropolis from which all those day-trippers once escaped to the coast.
"The cities have changed. They've reinvented themselves," says Garrett. "They've got their new spaces, their cultural offering, their weekend breaks and the rest of it. What we need to do is create something more special with a large cluster of attractions that brings people here, and it won't be for two weeks summer holidays the way it was in the past."
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