Southport's decline has been stark. Labour are licking their lips
'We keep getting the same message from them. In plain terms, that the town has gone to shit'
By Jack Walton
The story goes that Napoleon III found inspiration for the Champs Élysées during his political exile in England in the 1830s, on a trip to the seaside. So impressed was the young prince at Southport’s tree-lined Lord Street, the town’s main shopping road, he committed it to memory. Years later, as Emperor, his building of Paris’s grand boulevards contributed heavily to his popularity. His success, few would surely doubt, is owed almost entirely to Southport.
Some 200 years have passed since Louis Napoleon's seaside sojourn, but the power Lord Street yields in the political sphere shows little sign of waning. Next month, as the country heads to the polls, Southport is expected to elect a Labour MP for the first time in its history. On Lord Street, an elderly woman clutching a Mr Whippy has some insight into why that might be. “Well,” she says, eyeing the once-grand boulevard up and down like a schoolmaster inspecting a schoolboy’s scruffy uniform. “Look at it”.
Well, I’m looking. The knees on Lord Street’s trousers are scuffed. Its tie is fastened as you might imagine Wayne Rooney to have done it during his schooldays. It’s got a pair of black Converse masquerading as dress shoes. Nothing is quite how it should be, or, as the woman says, “was”. Department stores feature Everything Must Go window displays (the latest: Beale’s, once Broadbents and Boothroyds, soon to be an empty lot guarded off by roller shutters). Grand Victorian hotels recall old episodes of The Hotel Inspector. Septuagenarians lick soft-scoop ice cream and lament. Over by the sea, the town’s famous pier has been closed since 2022, when a survey found it was “rotting from within”.
It’s not easy being a British town on the back of austerity, but it's even harder being a British seaside town. The most deprived town in the entire country, according to government data, is Blackpool, just 30-odd miles up the coast from Southport. Throw in a council stripped to its bare bones and the fact your average Briton would rather lay on a sunlounger in Tenerife than ride a swan-shaped pedalo around the Pleasure Beach, and you find yourself with an unpleasant equation.
As such, the word being used by almost everyone here is “crossroads”. The seaside shtick isn’t enough; young people have been leaving in droves; the population is ageing. Local Lib Dem councillor Gareth Lloyd-Johnson believes the current MP, Tory Damien Moore, has been sitting on his hands, while Southport desperately needs renewal — a new identity, even. “You just can’t run a local economy based only on being a Victorian seaside town,” Lloyd-Johnson tells me. Baby steps have been taken in moving the town away from the candy floss economy that made it prosperous in the first place. Proposals for a £73 million art deco-inspired convention centre are perhaps the greatest hope on this front, as well as the work being done to attract digital businesses to Eastbank Street’s Enterprise Arcade.
Not everyone is fully behind a total change in direction. Tourism consultant Norman Wallis, who has spent the last decade and a bit regenerating Southport Pleasureland, a previously burnt-out site on the seafront which according to Sefton Council now pulls in more than 500,000 visitors during its 12-week annual season, tells me the convention centre and hub are all well and good, but these things could be anywhere. He believes that if Southport is to thrive again, it needs to lean into its existing assets. “We have something unique in this town,” he says. “We should push on those unique things that we have.”
These are the forked paths that present themselves to the town, then, but as of yet, there’s no consensus over which to take. As John Pugh, who served as the area’s Lib Dem MP between 2001 and 2017, says: “Southport as an entity is struggling.”
So is it this quasi-metaphysical crisis of self that Labour’s Patrick Hurley is hoping to seize upon? Sitting in his campaign office on Lord Street, Hurley himself is keen to stress that you can in fact have your stick of rock and eat it too. “We can have the seasonal heritage-based seaside economy, where people come and they admire Lord Street and they admire the verandas once again and the arcades,” he says. “But we can also say to people who want to work in more modern industry and more modern economies: there’s a place for you in Southport.”
For the former, he has a plan. He wants to see Southport town centre designated as what he’s calling a “refurbishment zone”, meaning a rejigging of tax arrangements to make the “refurbishment and renovation of old new buildings preferential against the building of new build retail outlets out of town”. He tells me the current system “incentivises the building of big box out of town retail parks”. That’s why Sainsbury’s are planning to shut down their Lord Street store, but have recently set up shop two miles outside of town. That benefitsSainsbury’s, but it doesn’t Southport. It seems that if anything will convince the town to go red for the first time ever, it’ll be some kind of plan to reverse the unmistakable municipal decline.
Because for the longest time the very concept of a Southport Labour MP would have been absurd. In a red-dominated county, Southport’s rejection of Labour was a means of setting itself out from the pack (perhaps on some level a means of rejecting its Merseyside denomination altogether). Even in 1997, when the national Labour Party under Tony Blair won a landslide 418 seats, Southport Labour won only 12.8% of the vote.
Labour have only really become a credible force in Southport in the past five to ten years. Their electoral foothold was established at council level in the less well off area around High Park — the Southport “behind the golf courses”, I’m told. But where they’re having a lot of joy at the moment, if local party sources are to be believed, is near the golf courses themselves — specifically the grand houses near the prestigious Royal Birkdale. Here lies traditional Tory-voting Southport; true Blues who would never have dreamed of voting Labour until recently. It’s these houses, the ones in the danger zone in terms of taking a golf ball to the upstairs window, that could carry them over the line. Why? Because Tory Southport is fed up. In the words of one Labour canvasser: “We keep getting the same message from them. In plain terms, that the town has gone to shit.”
Of course, it would be remiss to ignore the impact of the national picture on this shift. A massive reason Hurley is expected to win here is obviously because the Tories have fallen apart across three separate leaders. Moore is fighting against a very strong tide. There are demographic shifts coming into play too. Wealthier Manchester and Liverpool families moving to the town for a large house with a garden contribute to the sense that Southport is becoming a dormitory for these cities, chipping away at the town’s sense of pride in its differences, and thus making it more likely to vote with the grain.
Perhaps this is reflected in the main candidates this time. The two MPs that preceded the current incumbent Damien Moore were Lib Dems and long-term Southport residents. This gave the town a sense that its representatives were reflective of its own idiosyncrasies; outsiders in Westminster, with Southport in their blood. Moore, on the other hand, was born in Cumbria and served previously on Preston Council, whereas his rival Hurley was a Liverpool City Council representative between 2011 and 2023.
In the past, this might have been more of a hurdle. A Scouse Labour representative winning is “really quite something”, a woman in her sixties called Jean tells me in Birkdale Village, a wealthy area full of large Edwardian and Victorian near the golf course. “It would go to show the area has really changed,” she says.
Jean usually votes Tory, but she and her husband will be voting Labour next month. She doesn’t think Moore has done enough to fight for the town, and is fed up with the decline she sees around her. “When you see all of these lovely old buildings falling apart, and that state the town’s gotten into, you think: We can’t just keep doing what we’re doing. It’s a stark decline.” I get the sense that she’s more reconciled to Labour than giddy with excitement about them, but either way, she’s far from the only one shifting allegiance. Hurley is very well poised.
But the ex-Lib Dem MP John Pugh has his doubts over Hurley’s commitment to the town. Southport is crying out for “a genuine independent voice”, he says. I ask if that’s a subtle reference to a non-local, being parachuted in from elsewhere. “I think most career MPs don’t go out of their way to displease their party,” he replies somewhat diplomatically, adding that both the Labour and Tory candidates “came here because they wanted a parliamentary seat”.
Hurley himself disputes this, naturally. He tells me he’s lived within a 20-mile radius of the town all his life. “I know Southport like the back of my hand,” he says, citing childhood trips to the funfair. “I’d love going there, you’d come away with bruises and bumps and scrapes from the rides that you fell off but it was great because you’d just go back.” And he’s adamant, despite the fact the town now looks “tired”, that Southport’s “best days lie ahead of it”.
Not everyone I speak to is so sure. Despite planning to vote Labour, Jean tells me she “really isn’t that hopeful at all”, and that walking down Lord Street makes her “feel a little depressed”. Regardless, it’s still time “we tried something new”, she says. The likes of Wallis are more upbeat. He believes Southport talks itself down too much, that it already has an offer to be proud of (he says it’s “easy to complain” and cites the beaches, the bowls, the model railway and the amusements as enviable assets).
This conflict is common in seaside towns. During his days as MP, Pugh was part of a government select committee report on coastal towns and travelled to numerous such communities around the country, including Margate in Kent. Margate, once beloved by Southerners heading on their holidays in the 50s, 60s and 70s, had since become the archetype of a seaside town flat out on its arse. Deprivation was high, the high street was an embarrassment, the funfair shut down. I would know: I grew up ten minutes from Margate. It wasn’t something to shout about.
Nowadays everyone is falling over themselves to declare Margate the best spot on the map (somewhat ridiculously, Time Out recently named nearby Cliftonville the eighth coolest neighbourhood in the entire world). Londoners are flocking there, much to the chagrin of the locals who have developed the derogatory ‘DFL’ label (Down From London). They’re setting up record shops and artisan coffee houses and places that have unusual light fixtures built from discarded scrap materials — or combinations of the three. Pints are no longer pints, but 2/3s schooners at 11.6% ABV. It boasts Sargasso, one of the country’s “coolest” eateries; Jay Rayner says its whipped cod’s roe demonstrates “serious attention to detail”.
Margate, Pugh tells me, managed to walk both roads. “They basically have recovered a sense of their own identity not by choosing a unified solution,” he says. It rebuilt the decaying amusement park, Dreamland, as a self-consciously retro-style offering (indeed, most of the conventionally seaside-y stuff in Margate now has a somewhat ironic veneer), while also managing to shape a new identity as a trendy arts hub (the patronage of Margate-born Tracey Emin, who helped draw funding for a massive Turner Contemporary art gallery, was obviously handy on this front).
Of course, my reductive telling of The Margate Story: ASBOs to SargASBOs, hides a somewhat more complicated reality. Lurking beneath Margate, land of whipped cod’s roe, is another Margate: one that’s still very deprived in parts, and where Nigel Farage attempted to become an MP for the seventh time in 2015 (Clacton-on-Sea has the pleasure in 2024). Most towns have these overlays and conflicting identities, of course, and any Southport revival will be equally complex, but eschewing a “unified solution” has moved Margate forward. So maybe there’s hope in that.
Many things have kicked Southport in the teeth; austerity, shoddy transport links, inertia over which path to take forward. Voters like Jean are hoping (without being all that hopeful) that a shift in the governing party might send some of these into reverse. But more so perhaps than all the above, Southport’s real enemy has been time. Does Hurley, or indeed any of the other candidates, have the power to bend that to their will?
..and big name multiples. The repurposed Southport Market offers a great model - an attractive Edwardian space but modern food offer. Likewise the revival of smaller centres like Birkdale and Ainsdale villages demonstrates an appetite among locals to get behind local businesses
Another great read, Jack. I find Southport a really interesting place and I think the Labour candidate’s idea of. “Refurbishment Zone” is spot on. Lord Street has retained enough of its original cache and grandeur to provide the platform for revival and if an investment zone were established to attract independent retailers and services, it has more than a sporting chance. The Ocean City development of retail sheds and cinemas no doubt serves a purpose but also undermines Lord Street’s efforts to attract more people who want to spend time and money in bespoke surroundings. The alternative is a race to the bottom as the town is surrounded by retail parks offering easy free parking and