Blackpool Illuminations

IT’S the end of an era for Blackpool’s famous lights as the Illuminations depot is set to move to a new £7m South Shore home.
The existing Illuminations depot site on Rigby Road was sold to Blackpool and The Fylde College to make way for an ambitious £10m campus.
Now the council is proposing to move the depot to a 87,000 square foot industrial unit

ADVERTISEMENT

off Squires Gate Lane ADVERTISEMENTbefore
December to allow for the Rigby Road site to be demolished and decontaminated to make way for the college campus.

Alan Cavill, assistant director of enterprise and business development, said the move should improve the efficiency of building the Illuminations.

He said: “There’s a bit of nostalgia but the buildings weren’t built for the Illuminations. The depot is effectively a factory.

“The buildings are past their sell by date and it would have been very difficult to refurbish them.

“The newest building there is more than 50 years old and it doesn’t operate as effectively as it should do.”

He said the new building would give the Illuminations department the opportunity to look at fitting the latest technologies and systems.

He added: “We are making history by building the world’s first ever Illuminations depot.

“It’s a brand new building – it’s a shell we are buying so we will be able to fit what we like.

“We will build the infrastructure to deliver a brand new state-of-the-art Illuminations depot which will enable us to look at new techniques and technologies.”

The Rigby Road depot has been home to the Lights since the 1950s, sparking some nostalgia among local historians.

Terry Regan, Blackpool historian and writer of From Lamp to Laser: The Story of the Blackpool Illuminations, said: “It’s a move which is long overdue but it will be a shame when the site is levelled because it is the last vestige of the industrial and commercial heart of Blackpool.

THE TRAFFORD CENTRE

The Trafford Centre is a large indoor shopping centre located in Trafford in Greater Manchester, England.

It has 118,766 square meters (1.2m square feet) of retail space and attracts 29 million visits annually. It is made up of 4 main areas: Peel Avenue, Regent Crescent, The Dome and The Orient. The centre is owned by the Peel Holdings. The centre was designed so that visitors enter on both of the two main shopping floors in equal numbers. This helps avoid the problem suffered by other centers, such as the Metro Centre, where visitors do not go to upper floors meaning that many big retailers avoid upper floor units.

The Dome
The Dome is in the middle of the centre and is home to more up market stores such as the first Selfridges outside of London.

Regent Crescent
Regent Crescent is the area where most of the high end designer stores are situated like Karen Millen, Jane Norman, Gap and Mexx, it is home to two bookshops as well as Water stones and Borders and it is also home to two department stores  and Debenhams which is at the end of Regent Crescent.