New Brighton is determined to be the last resort standing

'Everyone's done their best to kill the place'

By David Lloyd

New Brighton isn’t a real town. It’s a concoction. A magic lantern show of dreams and flights of fancy. Two hundred years ago they were watercolours of handsome villas and winter gardens; bathing huts wheeled out onto the golden sands that fringed Wirral’s Irish Sea coast.

Today, as Wirral Council’s new masterplan illuminates, the dreams are artists' impressions and 3D renderings of sleek new apartment blocks cupping the waters of a new lido, 300-room hotels and (for reasons seemingly unclear) zeppelins. 

Against the odds, those early dreams came true. One hundred and seventy acres of no-mans-land and ne’er do wells, snapped up by Liverpool merchant, James Atherton. His audacious plan to turn shifting sands and smugglers’ dens into a refined waterfront resort for the gentry — a new Brighton — worked. For a while. 

Liverpool’s new money took to New Brighton’s beaches and its elevated views of Liverpool Bay, erecting the turreted mansions of Wellington Road and Warren Drive, their gardens sweeping down to the red and yellow-nosed sandstone bluffs where the Wirral met the water. 

It didn’t take too long before New Brighton was discovered by the rest of us – the buckos from Birkenhead and the factory workers from Lancashire, who turned the town into a fleshpot of bawdy boarding houses, donkey rides and penny arcades.

New Brighton beach. Photo: James Speakman/The Post.

With barely a backward glance, the town threw off its finery, hoiked up its petticoats and reinvented itself. No problem. Change was always baked into the New Brighton blueprint.

Now the prospect of change hangs heavily in the sultry summer air once more. Only, this time, no one is really sure what change looks like.

For Cathy Roberts, who, together with owner David Wilkie, is overseeing the restoration — and, yes, reinvention — of the New Palace entertainment complex, New Brighton’s ability to roll with the punches is the reason the resort is still on the map.

“Everyone's done their best to kill this place, and nothing’s worked,” she says, as we chat between twirling teacups and runaway trains in the sensory overload of New Palace’s fairground.

“Merseyside Development Corporation tore down half of Victoria Road,” Roberts says. “They wanted to cut off the artery to the town. They said no one would ever want to visit New Brighton again.”

Like James Atherton’s schemes before them, MDC’s dream came true. The 90s saw the town slowly silt up and shut down. The summer crowds thinned out and the game was almost up. But the lights of the New Palace never quite went out. 

Now, with a new masterplan pointing, somewhat vaguely, to the town’s future, the talk is big on realising New Brighton’s ‘true potential’, but light on where the money’s coming from. The proposal reads less like a spades-in-the-ground action plan, and more like a slip of paper spat out from the Great Zoltan fortune-telling machine. 

“I remember the presentation by BDP (consultants Building Design Partnership), and of them ending it by saying ‘...but there’s no money,” Roberts says.“The plan’s just not fit for purpose. Without some kind of incentive from the council there’s no way anyone can do anything, so where do we go from here?”

Old clippings of the New Palace in New Brighton, Wirral. Photo: James Speakman/The Post.

For Cathy, the direction is clear — it’s back to the future. A traditional seaside town that embraces new technology. Like New Brighton always did. 

“It took Covid to make people appreciate the fresh air and feelgood factor of a seaside resort,” she says. “Now people are realising that we have something to offer, despite everything you read in the press.”

Roberts is talking, of course, about the recent Which? article naming New Brighton’s beach as one of the worst in the country. I suggest that it might be good news after all. At the very least, it’ll mean we’ll never have to share the town’s clean sands, and its (officially) excellent water quality with the kind of people who choose beaches based on the results of a consumer survey.  

There’s a temptation, when you write about New Brighton, to focus on the past. Because the past is where the real magic lies; a magic, like all good fairy tales, sprinkled with shifting sands and salutary tales. The tallest tower – demolished, the grandest ballroom – burned down, the biggest lido, in some hideous reverse alchemy, transformed into a Morrisons.

But this town isn’t easily defeated. Mere geography couldn’t hold it back (when its ambitions grew too big to contain, it simply made more land, pushing the prom further out into the waves to make the Kings Parade) nor the unfortunate matter of a raging world war (during which the new palace’s network of subterranean tunnels became a munitions factory with 200 women making bullets and assembling US trucks).

But what the Luftwaffe couldn’t manage, short-sighted council custodians, convinced that New Brighton was old news, almost did. Almost. Now, Roberts believes the tide is turning. It’s time to embrace the new.

She’s planning to reopen the tunnels as an event space and interactive digital archive with, above, a mind-bending sensory installation — Sound Pit — fresh from the South Bank Centre. It’s a bit of a coup, and an abrupt about-turn for a building that was, last year, earmarked for demolition — the council felt the site should become apartments.

“We do need more accommodation,” Roberts says. “But we need a reason to bring people in.” One reason, and another possible future, emerges if you head a little inland. Slice through streets bookended with the bright explosions of street art and you’ll reach what remains of Victoria Road. Cauterised though it may be, it’s never felt more alive. 

Local boy made good, Dan Davies has ploughed millions into giving his hometown much more than a lick of paint, buying up properties to reanimate New Brighton’s former high street. Now the street art forms a trail that weaves past new coffee shops, microbreweries and art galleries.

Dan Davies has been instrumental in the town’s development. Photo: James Speakman/The Post.

For Davies, New Brighton represents the sharp edge of Wirral. A natural muster station for creatives, start-ups and free thinkers: the way that seaside towns have always tended to be. We meet in his latest intervention, the coolly confident deli-art-bar, District House, immaculately orchestrated by Liverpool cultural catalyst (and Wallasey-born) Jayne Casey.

Half an hour into my chat with Davies, Casey bounds ominously towards us. “Don’t you two be going on and on about the past,” she says. “That’s done. This has to focus on the future.”

Casey’s right. She usually is. But Davies is a man who has more right than most to show us his battle scars. 

When Davies started commissioning leading street artists to reanimate the town’s gable ends, the council’s first response was to say ‘stop, you need a licence’. Which, as Davies points out, they didn’t. It’s a small detail, but it’s one that Davies believes says so much.“I’m on my seventh regeneration officer in six years,” Davies says, “how are you supposed to get anything moving under these conditions?”

Davies is adamant that the town needs accommodation and a campervan park (“How can the Floral Pavilion ever host conferences if there’s nowhere for people to stay?) but crucially, the town also needs to attract more of us to settle down here, permanently, he says.

“The mixture is right,” Davies says. “Living by the sea, close to a city, with beautiful, affordable houses. Everybody’s upped their game here. We want to attract young families and creatives. We don’t want to be another sunset place, like Meols or Hoylake…” 

“The council has money,” Davies says. “They just deploy it in the wrong places. How many of their schemes in Birkenhead have been cancelled after spending millions on consultants and feasibility studies?” he asks (the answer is this: most of them). “Imagine what we could have done with just a slice of that.”

His key point is this: “regeneration doesn’t have to mean developers sweeping in to make millions and disappear.” That’s a one-way ticket to a boarded-up high street in 20 years time. But whatever his frustrations with the pace of change, he’s here to stay. “When I was younger I couldn’t wait to get out of here. Now it’s a hill I know I will die on.”

Jayne Casey in New Brighton. Photo: James Speakman/The Post.

“The best things happen organically, and everything is in place here,” says Casey, who saw Cream grow from an impromptu out-of-town rave to a global phenomenon.

“Who really cares about a masterplans? We don’t need loads of new buildings. We need to be smarter with what we have. Why can’t Cream classical happen at Fort Perch Rock,” Casey says, pointing out the direction where she believes the future lies – events. 

“We have space here to produce huge, amazing things, in a way that you can’t in Birkenhead or Liverpool. If we do that right, hotels will come,” Casey says. “We need to show people what we’re made of. Look at Margate. It’s not the big developments that make the difference. It never is. It’s the art and the culture. The rest will follow.”

Above District House, newly-arrived tech consultancy Focal Point, is settling into a new ten-year residency. Their first commission is to help with Cathy Roberts’ plans to turn the New Palace into a future-proof attraction complete with immersive digital archives and strange, otherworldly new tech.

“New Brighton is the best-placed area in the whole city region for a cultural revolution,” believes Managing Director Dennis Outten, who hopes his colleagues will be the first settlers of a thriving creative technology hub.

“People are choosing to live and work where they feel happy and comfortable,“ he says. “Who wouldn't want to work in a seaside town with everything they need, rather than commuting into a busy city centre? Dan’s shown how commercial buy-in and community-driven regeneration can polish a rough stone into a gem.”

The town needs, says Outten, a completely new master plan designed by the people of the town, people who have 'skin in the game'.

As I walk from Victoria Road to the far end of the promenade (Britain’s longest, of course), fretting about all these possible futures,  I’m reminded that the sea is the only real constant here. 

Behind the great prom wall that does its best to block our view, you can still see the future from New Brighton. Climb up on that curious back-to-front rampart, where the benches turn their back against the approaching tide, and you’re looking at 200 miles of open water and oncoming storm fronts. 

These days, the scudding clouds and constant westerlies don’t just bring the weather with them, but the town’s latest converts too – the kite surfers and wing foilers who see, perhaps, what James Atherton saw two centuries ago: this really is a naturally wondrous place. 

Adam Crouch runs the Northern Kites watersports school, and its HQ at West Cheshire Sailing Club’s shantytown of huts, hunkered at the edge of the dunes. 

Adam Crouch sits outside the sailing club. Photo: James Speakman/The Post.

Part social space, part watersports hub, the club’s never been busier in its 100 year-plus history. “We’re building a real community here,” Crouch says, “and they’re coming from all corners of northern England. People will drive for three hours or more to come to these beaches and catch the wind.” He’s right of course: the coast remains our greatest asset.

“But we need more outdoor activities along the prom,” Crouch says, “we need skate parks, food trucks, camping sites and beach clubs. In the Netherlands this stretch of coast would be alive all summer long. It would have wooden beach clubs on stilts to take advantage of the amazing sunsets we get here.”

He has a point. Embark on the long slog from Marine Point to the clinking masts of the Sailing Club, past the clown statue made from Home Bargains baking trays, and it feels like you’re entering interstellar space. 

“Friends wanted to stay and surf last weekend, but the Travelodge was £350. How can independent businesses succeed against that?” Crouch says.

The masterplan doesn’t reach this far. Out here, the future is even less certain. Talk of a neighbourhood framework has petered out. The only council incursion has been the ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’ introduction of an overnight parking ban, brought in to clear the prom of West Wallasey Van Hire’s fleet of unwanted transits. 

“No one knows what the plan is for our end of town,” says Crouch.  “So many people want to get back to the water, or find a social space like ours where they can meet new friends,” he says. “Why are we making it so difficult for them?”

View from the beach across the Mersey. Photo: James Speakman/The Post.

And yet, against a backdrop of dithering and delay, the great sweep of Leasowe Bay is bustling with happy chilly dippers and kettlebell-swinging keep fitters. It’s as if the beach yoga classes, the paddle boarders and the swimmers have tapped into a deeper truth. That, whatever the future brings, the tides are the only calendar they can believe in. 

I return to town to enjoy fish and chips at the prom with 200 of my closest seagull friends and Jayne. Kids are screaming on the fairground, throwing their hands in the air Just like they’ve always done. In New Brighton, the past can perfectly illuminate a path to the future, I think. 

We all have our own New Brighton, stored away in our family vaults. My mum catching the ferry over from Liverpool every Friday to be spun half to death on the Waltzers. The family night out that turned into a weekender, watching Ken Dodd in the old Floral Pavilion, slipping out for provisions (gin, crisps, sleeping bags) halfway through. Me, trying to look cool, dancing to OMD at the Chelsea Reach, and failing. 

Stories that make you think the past is all that New Brighton has. All it can ever be.

But Jayne Casey’s right. This has to be about the future. “My favourite word is regardless,” she says, pinching a chip. “Yes, there’s no money, and the masterplan’s useless, and New Brighton needs this thing and that thing. But I promise you, this is a place that’s heading to the future, regardless.”

A huge thanks to James Speakman for taking the photographs for today’s feature