Blackpool has many claims to fame: two spectacular ballrooms, three raucous piers and a tower so beloved that people wept when it was wrongly reported to be on fire last year. But until this week, in more than 170 years as one of the UK’s most popular seaside resorts, it has not had a proper museum.
This Friday, Showtown opens its doors: Blackpool’s museum of fun. Built for £13m on the site of the old Palace nightclub, it celebrates the outrageous past and present of the entertainment industry in the “Lancashire riviera”.
Visitors are taken through the resort’s rambunctious history, from the politically incorrect sideshow attraction of Jolly Alice, the World’s Fattest Lady (“She’s a whopper!”), to Strictly Come Dancing’s Blackpool specials, filmed at the Tower Ballroom each December.
The highly interactive museum mixes historical artefacts with games to play. Visitors can design their own illuminations, judge a Britain’s Got Talent-style show, or make a whoopee cushion expel increasingly loud trumps.
Exhibits include the Blackpool police cell that Harry Houdini escaped from in 1905; an Orville the Duck puppet; and a sausage-firing gun and toilet seat harp made by Charlie Cairoli, Blackpool’s celebrated clown. Cairoli’s routines were renowned for being wet and messy, and he prided himself on his secret recipe for the perfect custard pie.
There are dresses worn by Strictly stars, as well as cruise ship crooner Jane McDonald, and matching suits owned by Morecambe and Wise. Twenty-seven items have been lent by the V&A in London, including a lion tamer’s stick (complete with bite marks) and Tommy Cooper’s fez.
Nine years in the making, Showtown has had a difficult birth. It originally had twice the budget and was to be based in Pavilion and Horseshoe in the Winter Gardens until the council decided the financial risk in developing the Grade II*-listed building was too high.
Money was eventually cobbled together from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, various government and council grants, plus charities including the Ken Dodd foundation.
Lady Anne Dodd, Dodd’s widow, said she was delighted to support a museum in “Ken’s natural home of Blackpool”, adding that it was about time the resort’s culture was celebrated.
Despite the truncated budget and an unglamorous entrance opposite Poundland, Showtown works hard to bring the sunshine and hopes to attract about 200,000 visitors each year, with Blackpool residents getting in free.
“It’s a museum for people who don’t go to museums,” says Gary Shelley, the museum’s designer, from Casson Mann. “We’ve tried to focus on why would people come here when they’re in Blackpool doing something fun, they’re on holiday, they’re on the beach or on the prom. Why would you come upstairs, indoors to visit ‘a museum?’”
A boring traditional museum wouldn’t cut the mustard, he says, not when it is “talking to an audience that doesn’t go to those sort of places”. It was important to have multigenerational appeal: “Grandad, mum, dad and the kids. At least three generations should be able to come here and enjoy themselves.”
Lynn Williams, the leader of Blackpool council, hopes the museum will restore a bit of local pride: “A lot of journalists do feel the urge to write stuff about Blackpool without having been here, and very lazily describe the town in not very nice terms, and that does have an impact on people who live here. So to have something that’s a real celebration is particularly important for our children and young people.”
Showtown is a celebration of “happiness and enjoyment” and “a side of culture that is sometimes frowned upon”, said Williams. Snobs sometimes say that Blackpool “doesn’t have culture”, she said: “But it absolutely does, in bucketloads.”
• This article was amended on 15 March 2024. The Showtown museum hopes to attract 200,000 annual visitors, not 20,000 as an earlier version said.
