Blackpool Promenade

About this place

Directly in front of Blackpool Tower lies a 2,200-square-metre carpet of black granite in which over a thousand quotes from British comedy history are set in blue letters, jokes, catchphrases and comic songs, more than 160,000 letters in all. The Comedy Carpet opened in 2011 at a cost of roughly £2.6 million, and people stand on it reading with their heads down, laughing or baffled. It is the honest way into the whole Promenade: this is a town that built its fortune making the English working class laugh, and it still does. The Promenade itself is a seafront road and esplanade of roughly 6.5 kilometres, from Gynn Square in the north to Squires Gate in the south, with the entrances to all three piers on it and the Tower looking down from the landward side. The part people actually mean is the Golden Mile between North and South Piers, about 2.7 kilometres of arcades, fish-and-chip counters, rock-candy shops and the clatter of coin machines. It delights children or wears out parents, usually both. Be clear-eyed about the beach: it is wide sand at low tide, but the Irish Sea is cold and often brown, and the wind is strong all year. Nobody comes here to swim. The easiest way to move along it is the seafront tram, which runs the full length every ten minutes in the daytime from Starr Gate to Fleetwood, linking the Tower with the Pleasure Beach and the Sandcastle waterpark without a car. An adult day ticket costs only a few pounds, and on selected days the vintage heritage trams run, which small children love more than any ride, though that service has been intermittent since 2024, so check before you promise it to them. The esplanade is completely flat and easy with pushchairs and wheelchairs, with benches and public toilets along the way. The season that changes everything is the Illuminations: from early September to the first days of January, and in 2026 from 4 September to 3 January 2027, some five miles of front from Starr Gate up to Bispham are lit nightly by more than a million bulbs and by huge illuminated tableaux, and a slow tram or car ride through the lights becomes a purely English ritual. They come on at dusk and go off at 22:30 on weekdays and midnight at autumn weekends. Outside that season, and above all in January and February, the Promenade is grey and empty with most of the kiosks shut, and then it deserves no more than an hour between the Tower and the Comedy Carpet.