wildest winter storms, which indeed it did for forty four years. But the violent tempest of 1917 which ravaged Hallsands also took its toll at Blackpool. The eastern end of the wall was breached, and the sea surged through to flood the land behind. This was the beginning of the end for Blackpool’s sea defences. There is no evidence of any serious attempt being made to repair the damage. The fact that much of England’s male work force was bogged down in the trenches of Belgium and France at the time could have been at least a partial reason for this.
Once breached the foundations of the wall were vulnerable to erosion from both the seaward and landward sides and over the next decade it progressively collapsed. The western end held out the longest, but this section finally succumbed during a fierce storm at the end of 1929. The Western Morning News on the 11th
January of that year described the scene:
“Huge pieces of masonry, together with other debris, have been scattered over the beach, while the encroaching sea has
washed its way to a distance of perhaps thirty feet into the adjoining field.
A boathouse which stood in the centre of the field is now
perched precariously on the edge of a crumbling slope of earth twenty feet high, which at each high tide moves slowly towards the building, which will, after perhaps another storm, fall in ruins mingled with the remains of the sea wall.” Remnants of the old wall can still be seen on the western side of the beach.
So for nearly a hundred years Blackpool has once more
been virtually unprotected from the sea. As tourism grew after the second World War a more modest wall was built in 1952, mainly to protect the car park and the amenities that were beginning to be established at the centre of the beach. Major repairs in this wall were carried out in 1964. The occasional flooding of the lower lying areas around
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Blackpool during winter storms is a problem, but erosion of the cliffs is an even greater one. Twice in the last sixty years sections of the coastal road have collapsed. In 1946 part of the road at Matt’s Point slipped into the sea. This was a fairly minor breach which was remedied quite quickly with a new stretch of road built a little further inland. But more recently , a much greater disaster struck. A particularly violent storm not only caused extensive flooding and the demolition of the beach cafe, but also resulted in a massive cliff fall at the eastern end of the bay. The coast road once more became unusable, and this time the repairs were a much more difficult and expensive operation. It was necessary to cut back the cliff substantially so that the coast road could be realigned and re-built on solid foundations and it was several months before traffic flowed once more up Blackpool Hill. This huge engineering project did however provide one side benefit. The vast quantities of waste material excavated from the cliff were used to enhance the bank protecting the beach car park.u
Dartmouth TRAVEL
Reproduced by kind permission of The Dartmouth History Group from the booklet “Blackpool Sands” by David Stranack. Copies can be purchased from the Dart- mouth TIC, The Harbour Book- shop, Dartmouth Museum (see
www.dartmouth-history.org.uk)
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