The Flying Handbag and Funny Girls Story
For more than four decades one group of venues, from the Flamingo to Funny Girls, built, lost and rebuilt the places that made Blackpool the gay capital of the north. This is their story.
Two bars and a seaside town
In the late 1970s Blackpool had just two places where gay people could reliably go for a drink: Lucy's Bar and the Clifton. The town was full of theatrical guest houses and summer-season stars, and seaside shops had cheerful names like Gone Gay without anyone batting an eyelid, but there was nowhere to dance.
The Flamingo, 1979
That changed in 1979, when the Flamingo, a top-floor club on Talbot Road opposite Blackpool North station, reopened as Blackpool's first openly gay nightclub. It had a seedy reputation, and some of its old regulars assumed the new arrivals must be running a brothel. The name stayed, partly because changing it was said to be bad luck.
It was not easy. A brewery approached for investment turned the idea down flat. At the time a gay man could be judged an "improper person" to hold a licence, so the club's sexuality was kept quiet in front of the magistrates. Within a couple of years, though, the queues were four deep. Gay and straight locals mixed with visitors from all over the UK, and the stage hosted big names of the 1980s and 1990s, including Grace Jones, Divine, Lily Savage and an early Take That. Read more in the Flamingo.
Building the group
The Flamingo's success paid for growth. The ground floor of the same building, a pub called the King's Arms, became the Flying Handbag. Over the following years the group added bar after bar: at different times it ran Funny Girls, the Flamingo, the Flying Handbag, Buzz, Roxy's and the Whippet Inn, and leased out at least one other bar. By the mid-2010s it employed around 150 people all year round, and the Flamingo opened seven nights a week, Christmas Day included.
Hard years
There were fights along the way. Around the time of Section 28 a licence for another club was refused, a decision overturned on appeal at the Crown Court. During the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s, engineers refused to repair the Flamingo's boiler for fear of catching the virus. Those years shaped a determination to create somewhere where everyone was welcome.
Funny Girls
That somewhere was Funny Girls, which opened in July 1994 in a small corner unit at the Promenade end of Queen Street. It was all-male drag cabaret aimed at everyone: gay and straight, hen parties and pensioners, and inside the club everyone was equal, whatever their sexuality, creed or colour. It was an instant hit, spread into neighbouring shops and helped turn Queen Street into a nightlife hotspot.
When the bar chain Walkabout showed interest in the Queen Street site, the council suggested the derelict Odeon cinema on Dickson Road. It was bought for around £500,000, millions were spent restoring it, and Joan Collins opened the new Funny Girls in July 2002. See Funny Girls history.
Compulsory purchase
The Talbot Road building that housed the Flamingo and the Flying Handbag stood in the way of the council's Talbot Gateway regeneration scheme, and it was compulsorily purchased. In January 2006 the Flamingo moved into the upper floors of the Odeon, with its entrance on Queen Street, and the Flying Handbag moved into a new building on the corner of Queen Street and Lord Street. The original building was demolished in 2007, and a supermarket now stands on the site. Many still see it as the day the heart of the quarter was knocked down, and there have been calls for a blue plaque.
Administration and return
In 2018 everything went wrong at once. In July the Flamingo's licence was suspended after a police review, an old tax bill from the compulsory purchase resurfaced, and in September 2018 the group went into administration. In January 2019 the Lancashire brewer Thwaites bought the estate, including Funny Girls, the Flamingo, Buzz and the Flying Handbag.
The break did not last. In August 2019 Funny Girls, the Flamingo and Buzz were bought back, while Thwaites kept the Flying Handbag, which it refitted and still runs. Funny Girls marked its 25th birthday that summer, and the cast, led by Betty Legs Diamond, planned its first national tour in a quarter of a century.
A new chapter
In July 2025, Funny Girls' thirtieth anniversary year, the venue went on the market at £3.5 million. It changed hands in 2026, and a new team opened its first season that spring, Hot Girl Summer, with a bigger stage and a new runway.
The legacy
It is hard to overstate what this group of venues did for Blackpool. It opened the first openly gay nightclub in a town where gay applicants could be refused a licence, grew to run most of the scene, and created the drag show that made Blackpool famous far beyond the north. The gay hotels followed the Flamingo, not the other way round. When Blackpool Council set out its plan to celebrate the quarter in 2023, the people who had built the scene welcomed it, pointing out that the town had always had an LGBTQ+ village.