A history of gay Blackpool
From music-hall male impersonators to an officially backed LGBTQ+ quarter: how Blackpool became the gay capital of the north.
Variety, sideshows and the drag tradition (1870s–1950s)
Blackpool spent the late Victorian and Edwardian decades becoming Britain's home of variety. Performers worked every pier, theatre, ballroom and hotel lounge, and some of the biggest stars made a career out of playing with gender. The male impersonator Vesta Tilley (born Matilda Powles) appeared in Blackpool many times. A 1909 Palace Theatre Blackpool programme billed her as "The World's Favourite Artiste", and in the 1890s she was Britain's highest-paid woman. Her audiences were largely women, who loved watching her send up masculinity.
The Golden Mile sideshows of the 1930s had a darker side. In 1937 Colonel Victor Barker, who had been raised as a woman and had lived as a man since 1923, was put on show by the showman Luke Gannon in an attraction called "On a Strange Honeymoon". Barker had already appeared in national headlines and served a prison sentence. More than a million people are said to have visited that summer. The national press mocked Barker, while local coverage more often described "a man and his wife".
Later, the trans magician and ventriloquist Terri Rogers rebuilt her career after transitioning. She was one of the first people to have gender-affirming surgery on the NHS. She played the 1978 Blackpool Bonanza and appeared regularly at the Blackpool Magicians' Club convention gala shows until the late 1980s.
Before 1967: a hidden scene
Sex between men was illegal in England until the Sexual Offences Act 1967, and even that Act only partly decriminalised it. It applied to men over 21 in private, and police went on using public-order laws against gay men well into the 1990s. Beyond the stage and sideshow stories above, much of queer life in Blackpool before 1967 went unrecorded. That is one reason the We're Still Here! project is collecting oral histories (see Section 3), so that the stories of the people who lived it are not lost.
The 1970s: first organising and the Flamingo
- In November 1972 a Blackpool group of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) was set up as an offshoot of the Liverpool group.
- Basil Newby was born in Blackpool in 1951. His parents ran theatrical guest houses whose guests included visiting stars. He worked as a Pontins bluecoat and then opened a fancy-goods shop on Chapel Street that he named Gone Gay. He also fronted a short-lived drag act, Basil St James Plus Two.
- As Newby remembers it, Blackpool had only two gay venues at the time, the original Lucy's Bar and the Clifton bar.
- In 1979 Newby took the lease on the Flamingo, a top-floor club on Talbot Road opposite Blackpool North station, and reopened it as the town's first openly gay nightclub. He has described being told to hide his sexuality to get a licence, and has said that a gay man was then regarded as an "improper person" to hold one.
1980s–1990s: hotels, bars and the "gay capital of the north"
The Flamingo was a hit with gay and straight crowds alike, and it drew visitors from all over the UK. Newby later bought the ground floor of the same building and turned the King's Arms pub into The Flying Handbag. Over the years the Flamingo's stage hosted acts such as Grace Jones, Divine, Lily Savage and an early Take That.
Newby has said there were no gay hotels in Blackpool when the Flamingo opened, and that they followed in its wake. Over the next two decades, gay-run and gay-friendly guest houses grew up in the terraced streets north of the town centre: Lord Street, High Street and Dickson Road, a few minutes' walk from North station. Bars clustered around Queen Street, Talbot Road and Dickson Road. Some of those men-only hotels, such as Trades on Lord Street, still trade today.
These were also years of hostility. Newby recalls that during the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s, engineers would not repair the Flamingo's boiler, and that in the 1970s putting up a gay flag would have got your windows smashed. On 9 October 1987, at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, Margaret Thatcher complained that children were "being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay". The speech is widely seen as the run-up to Section 28. Newby has said that Section 28 was part of what drove him to create a show that welcomed everyone.
That show was Funny Girls. It opened in July 1994 in a small corner unit at the Promenade end of Queen Street and outgrew the space almost at once. Photos taken between 1991 and 1995 by Stuart Linden Rhodes, then a columnist for gay magazines, show a lively, mixed scene at the Flamingo and the Flying Handbag. Rhodes remembers it simply as "party time".
By the 2000s the town was widely known as the "gay capital of the north", a title Newby still uses with pride. In 2017 he said the resort had become "as big as Brighton".
The Odeon era (2002–2018)
In 2002 Newby bought the derelict Grade II-listed Odeon cinema on Dickson Road, which had opened in 1939 and closed as a cinema in 1998. He paid around £500,000, spent about £6m restoring it, and moved Funny Girls into the old stalls, with Joan Collins as guest of honour at the opening night. The original Talbot Road Flamingo was compulsorily purchased for the council's Talbot Gateway redevelopment and later demolished. A Sainsbury's now stands on the site. In January 2006 the Flamingo moved into the upper floors of the Odeon, and the Flying Handbag moved into a purpose-built pub on the corner of Queen Street and Lord Street. Newby's In The Pink (ITP) Leisure business ended up owning most of the gay venues in town. By the mid-2010s that included Funny Girls, the Flamingo, the Flying Handbag, Buzz, Roxy's and the Whippet Inn. Newby was made an MBE in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to business and the LGBT community.
Collapse, Thwaites and the comeback (2018–2020)
In 2018 everything went wrong at once. In July, after a police review, the Flamingo's licence was suspended over late serving and door-staff failures. In September 2018 the business went into administration with debts of more than £4m. A large tax bill linked to the Flamingo's compulsory purchase was part of the problem. Newby was also being treated for prostate cancer at the time. In January 2019 the Lancashire brewer Thwaites bought the Queen Street and Dickson Road estate. In August 2019 Newby bought back Funny Girls, the Flamingo and Buzz, while Thwaites kept the Flying Handbag. The Flying Handbag then had a £500k refit and reopened in February 2020.
Blackpool Pride
- First Pride, May 2006. The Lord and Lady Mayoress led a parade along the seafront. The Cheeky Girls and Hazell Dean headlined the main stage, and the weekend closed with a mass blessing on the Sunday.
- Early years. Pride ran as a seafront parade followed by a festival inside the Winter Gardens.
- 2013–14. Town-centre works led to a ban on vehicles in the 2013 parade. The ban was lifted in 2014. Also in 2013, the first exhibition of queer artists at Pride, We're Here..., was held at the Winter Gardens.
- 2018. Organisers moved Pride out of the Winter Gardens in protest after the venue was booked by an American preacher who opposes LGBT rights. Pride was held instead on Princess Parade and drew about 5,000 people.
- 2019. Pride moved to the Tower Festival Headland on the Comedy Carpet, with Claire Richards and CeCe Peniston headlining. Bad weather cut ticket sales, and the council lent the organisers £68,000.
- 2020–21. Covid cancelled the summer festival, and celebrations moved online. A one-off Winter Pride was planned for the Winter Gardens in November 2021.
- 2022. The outdoor festival returned.
- 2026, the 20th anniversary. Pride ran over three days, 5–7 June, under the community-chosen theme "One Love, One Pride". Heather Small, 911 and the Cheeky Girls headlined, and there was a street party in the Rainbow Quarter with more than 20 businesses taking part. The current chair is Sara Cheston.
HIV/AIDS and community support
Much of Blackpool's HIV history has yet to be written down. What we do know includes Newby's memory of tradesmen refusing to work at the Flamingo, and his account that Funny Girls was dreamt up during the AIDS years as a deliberately welcoming space. The town's main HIV and sexual-health charity is Renaissance UK, which has supported the local community for around three decades and leads local testing and awareness work. In December 2023 Blackpool signed the Fast-Track Cities declaration, which aims for zero new HIV transmissions by 2030. Blackpool Teaching Hospitals had already met the UNAIDS "95-95-95" targets in 2019. Today the W3 sauna hosts a monthly sexual-health testing clinic.
Recent changes (2019–2026)
- Sherlock's opened on Queen Street in November 2021, in the former Whippet Inn.
- In 2025, the 30th anniversary year of Funny Girls, Newby announced on 31 July that he would retire. The venue went on the market at £3.5m.
- In January 2026 the sale was confirmed, after the venue had been under contract for several weeks. The new owner is theatre and bar operator Kane Oliver. Under him the venue has a new stage and runway, and Miss Scarlett has returned.
- In June 2026 the owners of Lee & Chris' Belvedere Hotel on Dickson Road, long popular with LGBTQ+ guests, announced plans to sell. They said its Renaissance bar would close at the end of 2026.
- Kaos on Queen Street closed for a 12-week refurbishment in spring 2026 and reopened under new ownership on 11 July 2026. Drag Race UK's Zahirah Zapanta performed there on 25 July.
The "Be Who You Want To Be" quarter
In 2023 Blackpool Council started work on formally recognising the gay village in the north of the town centre, around parts of Queen Street and Dickson Road in Claremont ward. The idea was to celebrate its heritage without giving it a formal label, and the motto chosen was "Be who you want to be". The council's executive approved an action plan on 22 January 2024. It was drawn up with local businesses, the Renaissance charity, local hoteliers, Blackpool Pride and members of the community, and its aims are inclusion, regeneration, and making the area safe from homophobic abuse. The area is now promoted as the Rainbow Quarter.
Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1890s–1912 | Male impersonator Vesta Tilley plays Blackpool repeatedly; billed at the Palace Theatre in 1909 |
| 1937 | Colonel Victor Barker appears in the Golden Mile sideshow "On a Strange Honeymoon" |
| 1939 | Odeon cinema on Dickson Road opens (6 May); it later becomes the home of Funny Girls |
| 1967 | Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalises sex between men |
| 1972 | Blackpool CHE group founded (November) |
| 1979 | Basil Newby opens the Flamingo on Talbot Road as Blackpool's first gay nightclub |
| 1980s–90s | The King's Arms, below the Flamingo, becomes the Flying Handbag |
| 1987 | Thatcher's "inalienable right to be gay" speech at the Blackpool party conference (9 October) |
| 1991–95 | Stuart Linden Rhodes photographs the Flamingo and the Flying Handbag |
| 1994 | Funny Girls opens on Queen Street (July) |
| 1998 | The Odeon closes as a cinema (5 December) |
| 2002 | Funny Girls moves into the restored Odeon; Joan Collins attends the opening |
| 2006 | Flying Handbag moves to a purpose-built pub at Queen St/Lord St (January); Flamingo moves to the Odeon (January); first Blackpool Pride (May) |
| 2007 | The original Talbot Road Flamingo building is demolished |
| 2013 | We're Here..., the first exhibition of queer artists at Pride, at the Winter Gardens |
| 2014 | Newby made an MBE |
| 2018 | Flamingo licence suspended; ITP Leisure enters administration (September); Pride leaves the Winter Gardens |
| 2019 | Thwaites buys the estate (January); Newby buys back Funny Girls, the Flamingo and Buzz (August); Pride moves to the Tower Headland |
| 2020 | Flying Handbag reopens after a £500k refit (February); Pride cancelled because of Covid |
| 2021 | Sherlock's opens in the former Whippet Inn (November); Winter Pride at the Winter Gardens |
| 2022 | We're Still Here! heritage pilot and Grundy exhibition; Pride returns outdoors |
| 2023 | Blackpool joins Fast-Track Cities (December) |
| 2024 | Council approves the Be Who You Want To Be action plan (22 January) |
| 2025 | Queering Blackpool premieres at the Backlot Cinema (6 June); Newby announces his retirement (31 July) |
| 2026 | Funny Girls sale confirmed (January); new owners' first season (May); Pride's 20th anniversary (5–7 June); Kaos reopens (11 July) |