Lancashire<\/a> town was first lit up by twinkling bulbs 146 years ago \u2013 12 months before Thomas Edison even patented the electric lightbulb.<\/p>\nThe seaside resort has not been without its struggles, but the enduring popularity of the lights, which are switched on at the end of August every year, has helped to keep its tourism industry afloat.<\/p>\n
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen: \u2018The British seaside does have an extraordinary place in everybody\u2019s holiday legacy.\u2019 Photograph: Channel 4<\/p>\n
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, perhaps best known for his work on BBC programme Changing Rooms, and famed for his love of maximalist design, is this year marking 20 years of involvement with the illuminations, and is the event\u2019s creative curator.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hilarious because people were very confused by it,\u201d he said, \u201cthey\u2019ve got this strange idea that somehow we\u2019re turning on Christmas decorations, because they\u2019ve got kind of no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
Actually, Llewelyn-Bowen said, the illuminations are \u201cthe first ever, ever, ever, ever light festival; there was no electric light festival before that.\u201d While globally there are now many more, including in Sydney, Lille and China, Blackpool is, he said, \u201cthe literal grande dame of all of that\u201d.<\/p>\n
This year his new installation is Guardians of the North, three seven-metre tall dragons, wrapped around turrets, which come alive with light, smoke and roving eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love the idea that we can make the illuminations into this absolutely giant, free, illuminated art experience,\u201d he said. \u201cBut not art that\u2019s scary, not art that\u2019s kind of turbulent, but just jolly art.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the special things about Blackpool Illuminations, he said, was its enduring intergenerational appeal. While British seaside resorts are struggling amid tough competition from cheap overseas holidays, the lights remain, he said, \u201can incredibly strong part of people\u2019s leisure heritage\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe British seaside does have an extraordinary place in everybody\u2019s holiday legacy,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd this is something that we really focus on with the Blackpool experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome here and remember what it was like when you were your children\u2019s age,\u201d he added. \u201cCome with your parents, come with your grandparents, use this as a way of coming together.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Blackpool Illuminations in 1954. Photograph: Mirrorpix\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
However, Llewelyn-Bowen said, while the illuminations have formed core memories for generations of children in the north-west in particular, the appeal of the lights has not spread widely beyond the Midlands; \u201cIt is a bit of a north-south divide,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get to a point where suddenly you just say \u2018Blackpool\u2019, and everyone starts getting rather misty-eyed,\u201d he said, \u201cand that carries on as far north as you can go, because it\u2019s always been incredibly popular with the Scots as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always feel rather sorry for the poor mealy mouthed, magnolia-shaded Farrow and Ball-obsessed south,\u201d he added. \u201cBecause they never really will get that, they will be kind of quite Brighton-centric, because somehow it\u2019s cool, but actually, there\u2019s nothing cooler than Blackpool, and nothing naughtier as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Growing up in London, Llewelyn-Bowen said he himself was a latecomer to the illuminations. \u201cI have no vestigial nostalgia for Blackpool,\u201d he said. \u201cBlackpool was never part of my childhood experience at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, he said, \u201cit very quickly became part of my children\u2019s childhood \u2026 and of course, a big thing now is that my grandchildren are obsessed by this whole thing. So I love the fact that it\u2019s a contagion, that I kind of started myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thanks to his involvement with the illuminations, Llewelyn-Bowen is one of Blackpool\u2019s fiercest advocates, but he was taken by the town even on his first visit, on a very wet November afternoon in the mid-1980s, when he was working for a flooring company, and sent up to the Winter Gardens.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just didn\u2019t know that somewhere like this existed in the United Kingdom, somewhere where everywhere you looked there was so much design,\u201d he said. \u201cTo me, it was like a jacked version of Portmeirion, but in such an incredibly kind of opulent, ornate way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, Brighton\u2019s got bits of embellishment, everywhere you go in Britain\u2019s seaside-scape, you\u2019ll find some curly, twirly piers, but Blackpool, literally you cannot spit without hitting a furbelow,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always just felt that it is in such an incredibly stiff-upper-lip, strait-laced architectural nation, Blackpool is literally the only place, I think, where design really gets to take its bra off in this country, and really just do it for the shits and giggles.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the pop star Olly Murs switches on Blackpool\u2019s famous Illuminations next weekend, it will continue a tradition…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-372359","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115089545782889209","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}