One of these, the Central Pier, was one of the most beautiful and elaborate in Britain, with fabulous towers and domed roofs an Arabian palace afloat on Morecambe Bay.
It had over a thousand boardinghouses catering for the masses, but also classier diversions for those with more extravagant ambitions. The Old Vie and Sadler's Wells spent whole seasons there. Elgar conducted orchestras in the Winter Gardens and Nellie Melba sang. And it was the home of many hotels that were the equal of any in Europe, like the Grand and the Broadway, where in the early 1900s wellheeled patrons could choose between a dozentypes of hydro bath, including 'Needle, Brine, Foam, Plombiere and Scotch Douche'.
I know all this because I had been reading a book called Lost Resort: The Flow and Ebb of Morecambe, by a local vicar named Roger K. Bingham, which was not only exceptionally well written (and it is quite extraordinary, let me say here, how much good local history there is in this country) but full of photos of Morecambe from its heyday that were just staggeringly at variance with the scene I found before me now as I stepped from the train, one of only three passengers to alight, and ambled out into the sunny but breathtakingly faded charms of Marine Road.
It is hard to say when or why Morecambe's decline started. It remained popular well into the 1950s as late as 1956 it had 1,300 hotels and guesthouses, ten times the number it has today but its descent from greatness had begun long before. The famous Central Pier was extensively damaged by a fire in the 1930s, then gradually sank into an embarrassing wreck. By 1990 the town officials had removed it from the local map simply pretended that the derelict heap projecting into the sea, dominating the front, wasn't there. The West End Pier, meanwhile, was swept away by a winter storm in 1974. The magnificent Alhambra music hall burned down in 1970 and the Royally Theatre was razed to make way for a shopping centre two years later.
By the early 1970s Morecambe's decline was precipitate. One by one the local landmarks vanished the venerable swimmingpool in 1978, the Winter Gardens in 1982, the truly sumptuous Grand Hotel in 1989 as people abandoned Morecambe for Blackpool and the Spanish Costas. By the late 1980s, according to Bingham, you could buy a large, onceproud seafront hotel like the fivestorey Grosvenor for the same price as a semidetached house in London.
Today Morecambe's tattered front consists largely of littleused bingo halls and amusement arcades, everythingfor. l shops, and the kind of cutprice boutiques where the clothes are so cheap and undesirable that they can be safely put outside on racks and left unattended. Many of the shops are empty, and most of the rest look temporary. It has become once again irony of ironies BradfordbySea. So low had Morecambe's fortunes sunk that the previous summer the town couldn't even find someone to take on the deckchair concession. When a seaside resort can't find anyone willing to set up deckchairs, you know that business is bad.
And yet Morecambe has its charms. Its seafront promenade is handsome and well maintained and its vast bay (174 square miles, if you're taking notes) is easily one of the most beautiful in the world, with unforgettable views across to the green and blue Lakeland hills: Scafell, Coniston Old Man, the Langdale Pikes.
Today almost all that remains of Morecambe's golden age is the Midland Hotel, a jaunty, cheery, radiant white art deco edifice with a sweeping, streamlined frontage erected on the seafront in 1933. Concrete structures were all the rage in 1933, but concrete apparently was beyond the capabilities of local builders, so it was built of Accrington brick and rendered in plaster so that it looked like concrete, which I find very endearing. Today the hotel is gently crumbling around the edges and streaked here and there with rust stains. Most of the original interior fittings were lost during periodic and careless refurbishments over the years, and several large Eric Gill statues that once graced the entranceway and public rooms simply disappeared, but it still has an imperishable 1930s charm.
I couldn't begin to guess where the Midland gets its custom these days. There didn't seem to be any custom of any sort when I went in now and had a cup of coffee in an empty sun lounge overlooking the bay. One of the small endearments of modern Morecambe is that wherever you go they are grateful for your patronage. I enjoyed superb service and a nice view, two things wholly unobtainable in Blackpool as far as I can tell. As I was departing, my eye was caught by a large white plaster statue by Gill of a mermaid in the empty dining room. I went and had a look at it and found that the tail of the statue, which I presume is worth a small fortune, was held on with a mass of sticky tape. It seemed a not inappropriate symbol for the town.
I took a room in a seafront guesthouse, where I was received with a kind of startled gratitude, as if the owners had forgotten that all those empty rooms upstairs were to let, and spent the afternoon strolling around with Roger Bingham's book looking at the sights, trying to imagine the town in its heyday, and occasionally bestowing my patronage on pathetically grateful tearooms.
It was a mild day and there were a number of people, mostly elderly, walking along the promenade, but little sign of anyone spending money. With nothing better to do, I took a long walk along the front nearly to Carnforth and then walked back along the sands since the tide was out. The surprising thing aboutMorecambe, it occurred to me, isn't that it declined, but that it ever prospered. It would be hard to imagine a less likely place for a resort. Its beaches consist of horrible gooey mud and its vast bay spends large periods devoid of water thanks to the vagaries of the tides. You can walk six miles across the bay to Cumbria when the tide is out, but they say it is dangerous to do so without a guide, or sand pilot as they are known hereabouts. I once spent some time with one of these pilots, who told alarming stories about coaches and horses that tried to cross the bay at low tide and disappeared into the treacherous quicksands, never to be seen again. Even now people sometimes stroll out too far and then get cut off when the tide comes in, about as disagreeable a way to finish an afternoon as I could imagine.
Feeling daring, I walked a few hundred yards out on to the sands now, studying worm casts and the interesting corrugated imprints left by the receding waters, and keeping an eye out for quicksand which isn't really sand at all, but silty mud and it really does hoover you up if you blunder into it. The tides at Morecambe don't rush in and out like the Severn bore, but creep in from various angles, which is all the more menacing since you can easily find, if you are the sort to get lost in thought, that you are suddenly stranded on a large but insidiously shrinking sandbar in the middle of a great wet bay, so I kept my eyes out and didn't venture too far.
It was quite wonderful certainly better than anything Blackpool could offer. It is an odd sensation to be walking about on a seabed and to think that any time now this could be under thirty feet of water. I especially liked the solitude. One of the hardest things to adjust to, if you come from a large country, is that you are seldom really alone out of doors in England that there is scarcely an open space where you could, say, safely stand and have a pee without fear of appearing in some birdwatcher's binoculars or having some matronly rambler bound round the bend so the sense of aloneness on the open sands was rather luxurious.
From a few hundred yards out, Morecambe looked quite fetching in the late afternoon sun, and even up close, as I left the sands and clambered up some mossy concrete steps to the prom, it didn't look half bad away from the desolate bingo parlours and novelty shops. The line of guesthouses along the eastern length of Marine Road looked neat and trim and sweetly hopeful. I felt sorry for the owners who had invested their hopes and found themselves now in a dying resort. The decline that began in the Fifties and accelerated out of control in the Seventies must have seemed bewildering and inexplicable to these poor people as they watched Blackpool, just twenty miles to the south, going from strength to strength.