The bucket and spade list: 10 new reasons to visit the British seaside this summer

Blackpool’s Golden Mile, with its North and Central piers and the Tower. Photograph: Eric Latham/Getty Images

It’s Showtown: Blackpool’s new ‘museum of fun’

I love walking in Blackpool. The stroll along the prom takes time and a bit of effort – it’s almost three miles from the South Shore to the Grand Hotel – and takes me past three piers and more than a century of architecture including Victorian, art deco, modern and postwar municipal. In her 2023 novel Pleasure Beach, Helen Palmer pastiches Joyce’s Ulysses: her home town perfectly suits its promiscuous, genre-hopping, list-loving energy. The expanses of sand, big skies and far horizons of the Irish Sea always distract and calm the soul.