Blackpool has long divided opinion, but now one of Britain's most prestigious magazines has penned an unapologetic love letter to the town, declaring it holds "so much of the British soul on one bright, windswept drag".
Writing in The Spectator, journalist Tanya Gold describes Blackpool in swooping, romantic terms, a place of "ballroom dancers, suicide cases, charlatans" and boundless possibility.
Her piece, headlined An Ode to Blackpool, cuts against the grain of the town's often grim media portrayal, arguing that beneath the candy floss and illuminations lies something far more profound: a mirror to the British character itself.
"No place has so much possibility or holds so much of the British soul on one bright, windswept drag," she writes.
She takes aim at those who dismiss it as a poor man's Florida or Las Vegas, insisting such a comparison "denies how interesting it is"; a town raised in instalments throughout the 19th century for the factory workers of the north, where the railway arrived in 1846, the Tower in 1894, and the Pleasure Beach now boasts 10 rollercoasters.
It is in the quieter corners of Blackpool that Gold finds her most affecting material.
At the Imperial Hotel on the north shore, she observes guests she describes as "good sons and dying mothers" padding through the corridors "seeking pools of sunlight and holding hands", and draws her conclusion simply: "This is principally why I love Blackpool. It is filled with love."
She finds a similar tenderness in the Tower Ballroom, which she calls Lancashire's response to Paris, where elderly couples rise to dance on the famous sprung floor:
"Some of them are very good at dancing, some of them are dying, but in a nation of romantics, they are the most romantic I have found."
The Spectator is no tabloid. Founded in 1828, it is one of the oldest and most widely read political and cultural weekly magazines in the world, carrying the kind of intellectual weight that makes its endorsement of Blackpool all the more striking.
Who is Tanya Gold?
Tanya Gold is an award-winning freelance journalist born in 1973 in Merton, London.
She is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford, and has built a reputation as one of Fleet Street's most distinctive voices, writing across The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, the New Statesman, Harper's Magazine and The New York Times.
She is perhaps best known as The Spectator's restaurant critic, a role in which she has developed a sharp, wry and deeply personal prose style.
She won Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2010, one of the most coveted accolades in British journalism.
Blackpool in the spotlight
Gold's essay arrives at a moment when Blackpool is attracting an extraordinary amount of national media attention, and not all of it sympathetic.
The BBC has run an extensive series of reports focusing on the Revoe ward of the town, which ranks as the second most deprived locality out of 32,000 in England when measuring health, income, crime, employment and education.
The broadcaster has followed the work of community organisation Revoelution, which was set up to improve life in the area, and has reported extensively on a controversial £90 million council regeneration scheme to demolish around 400 homes in the neighbourhood, a plan that has left many residents fearing they will be made homeless.
Yet running alongside that bleaker narrative is a strikingly different story. In 2024, research by property experts housebuyers4u ranked Blackpool third in a list of the most desirable places to live in the UK , scoring an impressive 68.61 out of 100, some 34.7 per cent above the national average.
The town's culture score of 77.36 out of 100 was driven in part by its 27 concert and show attractions, 18 more than the national average.
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The BBC itself has highlighted the voices of Blackpool residents who push back against the town's negative image, with locals describing it as "genuinely a very friendly community" with something "magical" about life by the sea.
In November 2025, the BBC ran a feature headlined Stop knocking Blackpool, we love living here, in which residents and workers expressed frustration at how their town is perceived, and insisted there is far more to it than statistics about deprivation.
Tourism figures back them up: Blackpool welcomed 21.5 million visitors in 2023, a six per cent rise on the previous year.
Gold's Spectator piece, then, is part of a broader reappraisal, a growing sense that the resort so easily dismissed as a symbol of English decline may in fact be something more complicated, and more compelling, than that.
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