| At The Top of Blackpool Tower, 1998 |
 |
"Move right into the lift, please!"
Up we go and remarkably quickly in the modern lifts that reach the 380 ft level in a fraction of
the time of the original lifts. Halfway up we pass a chap outside who is welding one of the
broken legs back together... Well he was welding something ok???
Here we are at the top of the Tower and looking south along the Promenade. As I mentioned
earlier it was a little hazy and the horizon sort of disappeared and went all fuzzy. A bit like
one or two people getting out the lift... |
| Looking inland. I was trying to poke the camera lens through the small holes in
the netting that is draped around the Tower top. A sign warns that the last person to throw
anything off the top was jailed for 28 days. He was lucky. Even a coin, thrown from this
height, will be travelling fast enough to kill when it reaches ground level. A carelessly
dropped mother-in-law would make a terrible mess...
The Winter Gardens can be seen easily here and it can be seen how the wonderful exterior of
the Horseshoe Pavilion is totally masked by the white-tiled Olympia building. |
 |
| Looking north, we see the North Pier and the War Memorial in its small garden.
Butlins' Metropole Hotel is the only major building and certainly the only hotel on the
western side of the coastal roadway. The cars parked to the right of the photograph are on
the roof of a multi-storey car park and the young lady standing a few feet away is begging
her boyfriend to take her back down... |
 |
 |
A corner of one of the upper landings. The lift brings you to an enclosed
viewing platform with glass windows and a series of narrow staircases lead up to another
three or so platforms, each successively just that little bit higher! The final spiral
staircase has a padlocked gate across it...
The Tower is illuminated at night with 10,000 bulbs, which are added to by another 3,000
during the Illuminations. These at the moment have been painted yellow. A close view of the
bulbs reveals they were simply dipped in paint rather than brushed!
The use of colour anyway, in my opinion, does not improve the illuminated Tower... |
 |
Brace yourself...
Looking straight down.......
If this looks bad enough, try looking at the photos upside down! Much more effective! |
 |
 |
It's a fairly rare sight in Summer 1998 is the sun... Here the shadow of the
Tower is making it clear where this was taken from. People were going mad 400 feet down,
trying to see how lobster red they could go in one day.
It's a bit like a competition with some people... "I've come out in blisters, me..."
"That's nothing! You should see my legs..." Er... no thank you... |
| The latest feature at the top of the Tower is the "Walk of Faith".
A section of flooring has been replaced with a glass plate. Grown people were physically
quaking and breakfast was being swallowed yet again... I was pushed forcibly by a man who
was determined to walk across but who did so as fast as he could and nothing was going to
stop him from getting off again! He didn't look down...
I'm not bothered by heights unless I'm in the process of falling from them so I had Fran
take a photo and then took the two below. Fran said "I went on it for a bit - you just didn't
see me..." |
 |
 |
I recently saw a photograph that someone had taken on
a similar floor at the far taller CN Tower in Toronto Canada.
Use this one to practise... |
 |
|
