The Flamingo (Talbot Road) (closed)

Where it all started

Long before anyone talked about a Rainbow Quarter, there was the Flamingo. It sat on the top floor of a building on Talbot Road, facing Blackpool North station, and when Basil Newby took on the lease in 1979 it was a club with a seedy reputation. He kept the name, changed everything else, and reopened it as the town's first openly gay nightclub.

It was not an easy start. Newby has recalled being told to keep his sexuality quiet if he wanted a licence, because a gay man could be judged an "improper person" to hold one. He opened anyway.

Two thousand people and a few famous faces

The gamble paid off. The Flamingo grew to take in more of the building and could hold around 2,000 people on a big night. Gay and straight crowds mixed happily, and visitors came from all over the country. Over the years the stage saw Grace Jones, Divine, Lily Savage and an early Take That. On the ground floor, the old King's Arms pub became the Flying Handbag, with internal doors linking bar and club, so a night could start downstairs and end on the dancefloor upstairs.

The hard years left their mark too. During the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s, Newby has said, engineers refused to come and repair the club's boiler.

The last dance

The council bought the building for its Talbot Gateway regeneration scheme, and the Flamingo moved to Queen Street in January 2006 after more than a quarter of a century on Talbot Road. The old building came down in 2007. As it was demolished, Newby planned to sell its bricks to raise money for AIDS and children's charities.

A supermarket stands on the site now. Newby likes to joke that the old dancefloor lies somewhere beneath one of its aisles, and he has suggested a blue plaque to mark the spot. Until then, it is worth pausing on Talbot Road, opposite the station, to remember the room where it all began.