Past Prosperity Coast

If resort towns take your fancy

then you're spoilt for choice.

There are more than 150 around our coast.

But as their fortunes ebb and flow, what does it take for a town to keep its head above water?

To discover the secret of success we need to revisit the golden age,

when seaside towns were in their Victorian infancy.

That was also around the time people first started using picture postcards.

This one of the sands at Rhyl in 1913 says, "Dear sister,

"just a reminder from Rhyl we are having a good time and lovely weather,

"I trust your decision, if made, is for the best. Love EEG."

What I love about these cards is that all of them have been written here

in Rhyl, perhaps not far from where I'm sitting almost 100 years ago,

but here we are now getting a little insight into their thoughts

and their memories immortalised on these simple bits of card.

The messages from the past are charming, but it's the pictures on the flip-side that are the real

clue to how Rhyl thrived in those heady Victorian times.

Just look at all the people crowded on the promenade.

Harry Thomas has amassed hundreds of these postcards,

so who better to give me an insight into the unique attractions that used to draw holidaymakers to Rhyl?

People in those early years,

they'd enjoyed a day on the beach, they'd had an ice cream,

possibly a donkey ride, and they'd love walking along the prom

seeing the waves lapping beneath them,

or sit down on a lovely hot summer's day and read a book.

At the end of the pier visitors of the day could see the world famous

swimmers and divers diving off the end of the pier.

And of course we had the Rhyl Stately Dome,

which is the Pavilion theatre, well that's where the sky tower is today.

It was known as the stately dome of Rhyl, and at night they'd get dressed up

and go to the Pavilion to see the acts of stage and screen of the day.

Like the pier, that was demolished in 1973, unfortunately.

The grandeur in these postcards is just something else, isn't it?

Well, this is what I love about old picture postcards, they give us a window

in which we can reveal the past and shows a world lost for ever.

What these postcards show me is the scale of what's been lost here in Rhyl.

To understand why our seaside view has changed I'm meeting resort expert Professor John Walton.

There was competition from a lot of new waves of holidaymaking within and beyond Britain.

As people moved from the railway

to their cars and that broke old holiday travel habits.

And what about losing its iconic buildings like the pier

and the pavilion, I mean do you think Rhyl now suffers from a lack of identity?

Yes, what seems to have happened is that in the '50s and '60s nobody

was quite prepared to risk investing in new stuff when they didn't quite know what people wanted,

and by the time they'd realised that things were changing

it was a bit too late to rescue the old attractions,

and so the pier couldn't be sustained and other buildings

were lost, and they were distinctive buildings

that made you know that you were in Rhyl, and not somewhere else.

Do you think there's hope for Rhyl, could it re-capture its glory days?

Yes, I think the British seaside really is about to come back

into its own, and Rhyl should be part of that.

The sense of loss in Rhyl is a story that's repeated all around our coast,

as landmarks of the heyday of our seaside have slowly vanished from the landscape.

Crossing the Dee estuary, we leave Wales behind for England.

Halfway along the River Dee, on the banks of the Wirral Peninsula,

there's an entire village marooned, Parkgate.

Once a seaport, now it has no boats and no water.

200 years ago, if I'd been walking along this edge,

the water would have been lapping up 25 feet below me. This was one of

the busiest ports of the North West.

Now the water's gone, this is a seaside village without any sea.

Parkgate was just one of a series of ports built further

and further downstream as the River Dee silted up over the centuries.

Eventually nature got her way, and Parkgate was also left high and dry.

As we follow the Wirral northwards, the coast looks out

on to Liverpool Bay, where the great ships that served

the Port of Liverpool dominate the scenery.

For almost 300 years,

Liverpool has been connected to the entire world through trade and shipping.

Where once they berthed ships

now the docks are home to brash new business and leisure developments.

But 40 years ago it was a very different story.

ARCHIVE: Through the dock gates thousands of dockworkers are arriving.

In port there are nearly 90 ships waiting to be loaded or unloaded.

Every day 15 or 20 ships arrive with cargoes we need, every day 15

or 20 other ships sail taking away the things other countries need from us.

This is one of Britain's doorways to and from the rest of the world.

Those same quays are mostly deserted today, but it's not just the ships that have gone.

Being a docker was a way of life for people like Mike Cullen.

For 30 years he came down to the waterfront,

a workplace that's now a ruin.

This place looks as if it was abandoned 100 years ago.

Well, it is desolation but this was a working dock up to a few years ago,

though you wouldn't think so.

Looks like more than 20 years has passed here.

Anything that gets left soon gets over-run, doesn't it?

It's sad when you've lived in Liverpool all your life

and you've seen what these docks used to be and what they are now.

Some key landmarks have been saved.

But what's lost completely is the way of life.

In the early 1960s Colin Jones visited Liverpool Docks

for the Observer to capture the dockers' working lives.

When did you take these photographs?

In the winter of 1963 I came up here.

Because if you asked me when I thought it had been taken,

I'd have said the 1930s or even earlier.

It's amazing, isn't it?

We were doing a thing on the recession,

which in 62, 61 was terrible here,

the unemployment and the recession was beginning to bite.

-What age is this guy?

-Well, it's difficult to say, but I think he must be between 30 and 34.

-They always looked much older.

-Looks about 50.

Yes, sad, he died not long after the pictures were taken.

Again, it looks like a photo taken from the depression in the 1920s or something.

But when you were here it was busy and there were thousands of men, and to look at it now where it's dead...

It's like as if... It's like as if the atomic bomb has happened.

There's just a few crazy things left like the clock and these amazing buildings.

Colin's photographs bring home the gritty reality of the dockers' world.

Mike still remembers his first day on the job.

That was the first day, a bit of a culture shock.

You wasn't guaranteed a day's pay, you had to turn up at a pen,

and you got a tap on the shoulder, they gave you a book, and you were hired for the day.

If you didn't get a tap on the shoulder you didn't get hired.

You got your book stamped, they put AP on your book,

so attendance proven, so you'd get a nominal payment for that.

When you talk about turning up and maybe getting work and maybe not,

was it a case of who you were, whether your face fitted, who your dad was?

There were bosses there who had their favourites.

If you were a favourite you'd get a job.

And so guys were bringing up families on that circumstance.

It wasn't too bad for lads who were single or lads like myself

who'd only just got married and had no children,

but anyone trying to build a family on it, it was a horrendous way of working.

Loading and unloading ships by hand was arduous and dangerous.

It was all done under the careful supervision of the stevedores.

It was his job to store the cargo in such a way that it

was going to be safe when it went to sea and none of the cargo moved.

So it was more of an art, more of a skill?

It was a skill, yeah. He got a shilling an hour extra for being a stevedore.

The skills of the dockers and stevedores

put them in a position of power, controlling the imports and exports that kept the country moving.

It was a power that their unions weren't afraid to exploit.

But the shipping companies had an ace up their sleeve,

a trump card that would consign the dockers' way of life to history.

And the end came packaged like this.

The simple metal box that changed the world, the container.

Once container ships entered shipping lanes around the globe,

the lives of the dockers would never be the same.

As the old ways vanished, the new docks built to embrace container ship technology thrived.

With containers and other cargo the Port of Liverpool is now

busier than ever, but with a fraction of the workforce.

The future of Liverpool as a port and a city looks assured,

but that success was built on the backs of its dockers.

Southport is the home of Britain's oldest pleasure pier.

But this 140-year-old edifice has recently had a £7 million facelift.

The new pavilion perched at the end may look space-age,

but take a step inside and you're transported back in time.

This is one penny arcade that really lives up to its name.

The slots here will only accept old pennies,

and all the amusement machines are the real thing, some dating back to the 1930s.

I love these machines,

but at the same time there's always a feeling of melancholy about arcades like this,

because it was the kind of place you ended up in when it was raining and you couldn't go on the beach.

But I remember the day trips to seaside resorts,

I was just as happy to get in here and get some money from my dad

to play these machines, as I was to do anything else.

And I'm not leaving here without that little black car!

Yes!

Crossing the Ribble estuary, we reach the Fylde coast, and the restrained charms

of Lytham St Annes, no preparation for what's in store as we head for its noisy neighbour to the north.

Blackpool is Britain's most visited seaside destination.

How has this resort succeeded when others have gone under?

The flashing lights and the in-your-face razzmatazz

might not be everyone's cup of tea, but to many this is the Las Vegas of the north!

In the cold light of the morning after,

the glamour fades but the resort rolls on.

What I want to know is how Blackpool has always continued to pull in the punters.

Tourism expert Professor John Walton is on hand to help me out.

Well, John, here we are in Blackpool and what strikes me first of all

is that it seems to have retained all its major attractions.

To me the view is largely unchanged.

Yes, you've got the tower dominating,

to the right the big difference is the gigantic wheel.

It came down in 1929, it was actually put up in 1896 just two years after the tower.

The idea was brought over from the Chicago International Exposition of 1893,

they tried it out in London and Blackpool had to have it,

because Blackpool had to have everything that was new.

What do you think the key innovations that Blackpool latched onto have been throughout its history?

Blackpool was always very keen on being first with things or early with things, so it had probably

the world's first public tramway system running along the seafront.

And Blackpool was very early in having electric lighting so Blackpool was very proud of being

in the vanguard of new developments, and of course its town motto is "progress".

Blackpool has always imported ideas from around the world to attract visitors.

The saying, "Las Vegas of the north"

has more than a ring of truth.

The American influence runs especially deep here at the Pleasure Beach.

Blackpool has made a virtue of its past by preserving its heritage.

Scattered amongst the state-of-the-art thrill rides are attractions

that hark back to the park's origins over a century ago.

And this is one of the oldest in Europe.

And it's just one of many innovative attractions imported here from America.

The inspiration came from a visit to Coney Island in New York by William George Bean in the 1890s.

Bean returned to Blackpool to build an American-style amusement park.

The big idea, make adults feel like children again.

It's a philosophy that's still paying dividends for William Bean's great-granddaughter, Amanda Thompson.

What I want to really know is the whole story of your great-grandfather.

Well, originally, many, many moons ago his father was

a river pilot on the Thames, and he was from London and he went off to

explore and went off to New York,

went off to Coney Island, saw what they were doing there,

and was very excited about the prospects of bringing

something that was started and created in America back to England.

And so he brought back the Hodgkiss bicycle railway, and it was quite exciting

really for him because when he brought it back he had no place to put it, and eventually

decided upon Blackpool, so Blackpool was chosen as the spot to basically start the pleasure beach.

The fortunes of Blackpool as a resort were really down to him in many ways.

A Londoner, a good old Londoner brought Blackpool alive!

William George Bean's innovation and showmanship created a pleasure park

that's continued to entice people in over the years.

Blackpool's not been immune to the decline of our seaside resorts,

but it still has 70,000 holiday beds.

So what does make this town tower above the others?

Part of it is that Blackpool has a very, very strong brand, a very strong historic identity

as the world's first working class seaside resort, and that's something that's given it a unique heritage.

So what do you think the future for the British seaside resort town is?

The worst thing you can do is throw everything out,

get rid of your old visitors, try and start again from scratch.

What you need to do is actually work with what you've got and make the very best of it.

Maybe there are lessons to learn from the early pioneers of towns

like Blackpool, who gambled on innovation to bring in business.

Nearly 100 years ago, Blackpool found a novel way of extending

its season by a whole two months, and that brainwave still lights up the North West coast every year.

The illuminations stretch for almost six miles.

If other resorts can find their own inimitable way of drawing in

the crowds, then maybe the future of our seaside towns is bright.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media

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