Blackpool

Blackpool is a seaside town on the Irish Sea coast of the Fylde peninsula in Lancashire, England, about 27 miles north of Liverpool and 14 miles west of Preston. It began as a hamlet and grew from the middle of the eighteenth century as sea bathing for health became fashionable, with several hotels standing by 1781 and a railway station from 1846. The town became a borough in 1876 and grew rapidly in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, helped by the annual factory shutdowns of the Lancashire cotton mills, when many workers took their holidays at the seaside. Tourism still shapes its economy, with Blackpool Tower, the Illuminations, the Pleasure Beach and the Winter Gardens, and the 2021 census counted 141,000 residents.