"Morecambe (and around)" a Lancashire Travel Page by Maxus

If someone had told me when I was a child that one day I would live in Morecambe I would have been delighted because in those days it was all fairgrounds, lights and candyfloss. However, both Morecambe and I have gone rather down hill since then.

As late the 1970s Morecambe was still a happening place, most Brits had yet to discover cheap package deals to Spain and people took their holidays at home and Morecambe with its Winter Gardens, piers and annual illuminations, could still pack em in.

The fairgrounds, pier and illuminations have all gone now, the Winter Gardens remains a shell and Morecambe a shadow of its former self. Run down and in bad weather desolate, Morecambe has very little left to attract the visitor apart from excellent views across the bay to the Furness Peninsular and Cumbrian Mountains. “Beauty surrounds and health abounds” goes the Morecambe motto, well beauty does still surround, on a clear day the view from the promenade is quite breathtaking, but don’t look inland, because it really isnt very nice.

While most British Seaside resorts suffered from the tourist exodus to the Mediterranean sunshine few can have taken it as badly as Morecambe. Numerous schemes and projects designed to reverse the decline have been tried but none of them have had any real success and some were simply expensive disasters. The boarding houses of the west-end, built to take the thousands of mill and factory workers who once flocked to Morecambe for their holidays were used by Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s to hide the unemployed and unemployable, no one could pretend this is any longer a nice place to visit.

One bright spot, renovation work on the Midland Hotel is almost finished and the hotel opened for business in June 2008. Some people say it will breath new life into Morecambe, others say it will be being used to house asylum seekers within two years. Whatever happens it's good to see what is one of the finest art deco buildings in the country back to it's former glory after being practically derelict for so long.

However, just across the road the site of Morecambe's last permanent fairground remains a boarded off pile of gravel and even during the summer the council is unable to run a string of lights along the promenade, leaving one of the towns best features virtually a no-go area after sundown.