The Blackpool Illuminations!

A visit to Blackpool wouldn’t be complete without seeing the Illuminations!! We had been up the Blackpool Tower earlier that day, (enjoying the views!) so, we were up for hitting another of the town’s tourist attractions!

The tradition of the annual illuminations which light up the promenade dates back to 1879, when they first experimented with electric street lights in the town. It was a big event and many people turned out to see it. It was a huge success and the local council were persuaded to stage the ‘lights’ again in the September…thus starting the tradition which has now grown into a tourist attraction in its own right!

The lights currently stretch for about 6 miles and are turned on in August and stay lit up for 66 nights.

It had been years since I’d seen them, so we trotted off one night whilst we were up there recently to have a look.

It took AGES!!  We crawled up to the north end via the back streets – at rush hour, that probably wasn’t such a good idea!  And then it took us about an hour to make our way down the Golden Mile (which is the stretch of the promenade between the north and south piers)!

I didn’t do very well with my photos, they were all on my phone and taken through windows, but hopefully they capture the essence of the whole experience!

Imagine the smells of candy floss and chips rolling in through the windows too and that will just about finish off the image of the whole experience!

We encountered the large storyboards first – I loved these! I remember them from when we used to come down here as kids too, I think they were my favourite part of the lights then too!