Giants of rock

Scarborough was the first seaside resort in Britain, but Blackpool is the most visited. Author Andrew Martin compares attractions on either side of the Pennines
Harbour, Scarborough
Scarborough fair ... the harbour and castle. Photo:

My novel The Blackpool Highflyer is about working people taking railway excursion holidays from Halifax in the hot summer of 1905, and sometimes dying violently in the process. The main destinations depicted are Blackpool and Scarborough, the leading seaside resorts in the north of England, then as now.

The difference between now and then is that in 1905 they were also the main overnight holidaying places for northerners. Blackpool Central Station (which was right under the Tower and is now, provokingly, a car park) had 23 excursion platforms, and was the busiest station in Europe during the summer months. Scarborough had fewer excursion platforms, but they were exceptionally long, and a bench adjoining one of them survives intact at the station, 150 yards from end to end.

The book is based on historical research mingled with my own memories of holidaying in the resorts as a child growing up in York. Scarborough was our home resort, whereas Blackpool, being over the Pennines - where things were almost, but not quite, exactly the same - had a touch of the exotic. But we visited both most years, and I have continued to go back to each one very regularly, my mind swinging like a pendulum between the two, constantly comparing.

Blackpool I think of as red: the red Accrington brick of the houses, the maroon girders of the Tower, which I'm always disappointed to see are not rusting; the redness of the sunburnt, sozzled faces. In Edwardian times, these would have belonged to the excursionists from the mills, perhaps dancing on the Central Pier until the music stopped at 5.30pm; today most likely to stag party members.

Scarborough I think of as green, what with the grassy hill on which the castle sits, the bowling and putting greens, the many public gardens. A single signpost on the esplanade, the elegant stucco street that overlooks the southernmost part of the South Bay, carries signs to "Italian Gardens", "Harbour Gardens", "Rose Garden". It was in Scarborough, mystified aged 10 by a notice in a flower bed, that I asked: "Dad, what's a herbaceous border?" The question would probably never come up in Blackpool where Stanley Park, the town's main bit of green, is a fairly marginal attraction.

Another elemental difference is that Scarborough is built on a more epic scale. A standard entertainment among the over 50s is to sit on one of the clifftop benches with a pair of binoculars, and just gaze about. A valley - traversed by the beautiful Spa Bridge - cuts through the South Bay, and the castle hill is so steep that a hot day presents the sight of many trippers contemplating the steep pathways up to the battlements and deciding: "We'll do the castle another day, shall we?" Double-decker buses - often, by way of a bonus, open topped - are required to ferry trippers from the North Bay to the South Bay, the distance being quite unwalkable to any family with toddlers.

Blackpool is more compressed, the houses seeming to huddle around the Tower for protection. But in any battle of numerical scale, Blackpool wins outright. It receives 12 million visitors a year, making it the most visited resort in the UK, and has 90,000 bed spaces. Scarborough is ambling along with 2.25m visitors and 50,000 bed spaces. Blackpool Pleasure Beach is Britain's most visited free-admission attraction, with 145 rides. The nearest equivalent in Scarborough is Lunar Park on the South Bay, with about 6 rides, mostly suitable for nervous nine year olds.

At the top of the first drop on the biggest roller coaster at the Pleasure Beach, the Pepsi Max Big One, you are directly alongside an aeroplane warning beacon, which is a bit worrying. The only equivalent thrill in Scarborough comes from the three venerable cliff trams that have been running between the town and the front for over a hundred years. For some idea of the experience, imagine stepping into a cricket pavilion that suddenly begins to descend quite rapidly at an angle of 60 degrees.

Blackpool Tower is 518ft high; for a good while after its completion in 1894, it was the tallest structure in Britain and still seems like it when you go to the top and step on to the transparent floor known as "the walk of faith", and then - the difficult part - look down. Scarborough riposted with its own Tower in 1897. It was only a 150ft high. OK, its top revolved . . . but it never caught on, and was demolished in 1907.

Blackpool has been pursuing superlatives for 150 years and Scarborough can't compete, except perhaps with this simple, striking fact: it was the first seaside resort in Britain. When Blackpool was still a village boasting one mucky pond (hence the name), Scarborough was capitalising on its health-giving waters that had been discovered flowing from a cliff-side spring in 1620. There have been various buildings close to the site and called the Spa; the latest is late Victorian, Italianate, accommodating two theatres, a cluster of cafes and an outdoor theatre called the Sun Court Lounge. Ironically, given the name, the people who gather here in the mornings for concerts of light music often have blankets draped over their knees.

It's not that Scarborough is overly genteel. It's just that it is, like everywhere else in Britain, more genteel than Blackpool. You can buy sticks of rock in the shape of erect penises in Scarborough; they're less in your face than in Blackpool. Risque comedians like Roy Chubby Brown - "If easily offended please stay away" - do play Scarborough (he's on at the Futurist Theatre on August 21), it's just that he's more associated with Blackpool (he plays the Opera House there on October 17).

Blackpool has many lap dancing bars. Someone in Scarborough who ought to know told me that the town "has one . . . but it's pretty hard to find". There's a bloodthirsty strain to the entertainments at Blackpool. Louis Tussaud's waxwork museum boasts "daily hangings" of "witches". The most violent entertainment in Scarborough is "Naval Warfare" which has been breaking out the boating lake at Peasholm Green on summer afternoons since 1927.

A ctually, this is a strange combination of violence and easy listening, being hosted by an organist situated in a pagoda in the centre of the lake. After playing jaunty tunes such as Any Dream Will Do, he invites the audience to sit back for "a jolly good battle". Coffin-sized model ships float into view propelled by council employees lying inside them. There is then a pyrotechnically impressive exchange of fire between "the enemy" and "the English", with a partisan commentary by the organist. The enemy used to be named: "the Germans", but political correctness, not to mention the quest for more continental visitors, put a stop to that, and the organist always ends by saying: "Remember, everyone lives to fight another day."

Blackpool, with its many cacophonous bars and clubs, boasts that it is "the town that never sleeps". Scarborough, frankly, does sleep, and the sound of the waves begins to assert itself shortly after 9pm, when the Peasholm Park fairylights are switched on.

Blackpool has always been wild. As the official history of the town says: "The temperance movement gained ground only slowly in Blackpool." But some people think it's been going too far lately, and this season a series of civic initiatives are in place to try and curb unruly behaviour. These go hand in hand with Blackpool's attempt, contingent upon a forthcoming reform of the gaming laws, to lure half a dozen big casinos to the town which will displace tackier current attractions.

Blackpool is also making an unaccustomed move into art, with the series of stark, modernist sculptures along the new South Promenade. Scarborough will match this with "The Wave", a monumental sculpture simulating wave motion that is to be placed on the Marine Drive between the North and South Bays. This is controversial but not symptomatic of the kind of identity crisis that Blackpool may be undergoing.

I would visit Scarborough to relax, Blackpool for the buzz. (I'd go up the Tower, have a blow on the piers, eat fish and chips in Harry Ramsden's, ride the Pepsi Max, get drunk and generally make myself sick.) Both have beaches of soft sand that at low tide seem to match the sea for expansiveness. Blackpool has three piers; Scarborough has the Stephen Joseph Theatre, cockpit for the genius of Alan Ayckbourn. Blackpool has the illuminations (visible, you know, from outer space), but Scarborough has Jimmy Savile, who lives on the Esplanade, and has had one of the town's benches inscribed "Sir Jimmy Savile. But Not Just Yet", the point being that he's still alive.

How to choose? Here's an idea: don't. Every two hours a train runs between the two towns. The journey takes about three and a half hours, and is quite scenic. Do Blackpool first, then recover in Scarborough.

· Andrew Martin's novel The Blackpool Highflyer is published on August 19 by Faber & Faber at £10.99.

Way to go


Getting there: Ryanair (0871 2460000, flies from Stansted and Dublin from £28 rtn inc taxes. National rail enquiries: 08457 484950.

Where to stay: The Big Blue Hotel (Pleasure Beach, 0845 3673333, has 116 rooms including 72 family suites for up to four; B&B from £92 double, family room £116. The 11-room Old Coach House (50 Dean Street, 01253 349195, is the oldest house in South Shore; B&B from £70. Next month, the former owners of The Old Coach House open Number One (1 St Lukes Road, 01253 343901) with three rooms; B&B from £100.

Further information: 01253 478222,


Getting there: National rail enquiries: 08457 484950.

Where to stay: The Royal Hotel (St Nicholas St, 01723 364333,, one of the oldest hotels in the town, overlooking South Bay; £64.50pp, D, B&B (valid until end Aug). The elegant 19th-century Crown (Esplanade, 01723 357424, also has views of the bay and an indoor swimming pool surrounded by statues; £72 per room midweek, £114 weekends. For something different, The Old Mill Hotel (Mill St, 01723 372735) has 11 rooms in an 18th-century windmill; £29-45pp B&B.

Further information: Yorkshire Tourist Board, 01904 707961, Scarborough, Whitby and Filey Tourism Bureau, 01723 383636,