Why Blackpool Matters in Fractured Echoes and Original Echoes

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Blackpool has always felt to me like a place with two faces. There is the version people think they know: the Tower, the piers, the lights, the front, the noise, the chips, the rain, the stag parties, the childhood trips. Then there is the other Blackpool: the side streets behind the front, the empty hotels in the off-season, the theatres after the audience has gone, the damp pavements, and the sense that the town has kept more than it has ever explained.

That second Blackpool is the one that drew me in when I started writing Fractured Echoes.

I did not choose Blackpool because I needed a backdrop. I chose it because the story would not work in the same way anywhere else. That sounds like the sort of thing writers say after the event, when they are trying to look as though every decision was planned from the start. It was not quite like that. At first, Blackpool was simply there. The more I wrote, the more I realised I was not using it as scenery. I was writing about a town that already seemed to hold traces of other lives, other versions, and other times.

Blackpool remembers things in layers. It remembers the holiday town, the boarding houses, the theatres, the ballrooms, the trams, the arcades, the illuminations, the wet pavements, the off-season quiet, and the people who come and go. It is a town built on arrivals and departures. People visit, perform, dance, drink, laugh, vanish back home, and leave traces. That made it the right place for a story about memory, disappearance, and the fear that reality may not be as fixed as we need it to be.

I also think Blackpool stays with people because almost everyone arrives there with a story already attached. A family trip. A wet day. A night out. A theatre visit. A walk along the front when the wind is doing its best to remove your face. People rarely feel neutral about the town. They bring memory to it, and they take memory away from it.

In Fractured Echoes, Blackpool is where Mick Holden and Alice Whittaker begin to see that something is wrong. Streets do not behave. Places shift. The town seems to have gaps in it. The strange thing is not that Blackpool becomes unreal. The strange thing is that Blackpool already carries enough contrast to make the unreal feel possible. One street can feel full of noise and light, and the next can feel as though everyone has just left. That change in mood is useful when you are writing about a town where memory is starting to fail.

The Winter Gardens became central for that reason. It is a place of stages, corridors, rooms, performance, and hidden spaces. It carries the idea of public life and private work at the same time. Audiences see the show. Other people move in the corridors, check doors, work in the back rooms, and know routes that most visitors never notice. In Fractured Echoes, that mattered. In Original Echoes, it matters even more.

Original Echoes goes back to the source. It asks what happened before the fractures in Fractured Echoes. It moves through 1895, 1896, and 1962, and it lets Blackpool show a different face. Not only the town people remember from holidays, but a town being built, sold, shaped, and used. A town of ambition as well as entertainment. A town where people could believe they were making something grand, while also making something dangerous.

That is one reason I keep returning to Blackpool in these books. It lets the story hold two thoughts at once. It can be funny and bleak. Open and secretive. Full of people and lonely. Built for pleasure, but full of rooms where other things can happen. I do not have to force those contrasts onto the town. They are already there.

There is also a more personal reason. Blackpool has a particular hold on the imagination if you grew up knowing it as both place and idea. It is somewhere people talk about with affection, judgement, nostalgia, and sometimes a bit of snobbery. Everyone seems to have a version of it. The Tower seen from the road. The front in the rain. Chips in paper. A hotel corridor that smells faintly of damp carpet and breakfast. The sense that it has seen better days, followed by the suspicion that it has also survived more than people give it credit for.

That tension suits Alice Whittaker. She is not looking at Blackpool as a tourist. She knows the town is not one thing. She sees the show and the damage, the charm and the fatigue, the public face and the private cost. She is a journalist, so she is trained to look twice. That matters in Fractured Echoes, and it will matter in the books that follow.

Fred Langley has a different relationship with the town. For him, Blackpool is less stable. He moves through periods where the town keeps changing around him. In Original Echoes, that becomes part of the pressure. He is trying to understand where he is, when he is, and what has been done. Blackpool becomes a kind of witness. It is not just where events happen. It holds the evidence, even when people do not.

That will matter in the future books as well. I do not want Blackpool to become a box of tricks where every street hides the same secret. The later stories will move in different ways. Some will sit closer to crime. Some will follow Alice as she uncovers what people chose not to record. Some will follow Langley through older cases and older damage. But Blackpool will remain the place where the past is never quite finished. It may be buried, renamed, sold, painted over, or left behind a locked door, but it has not gone.

That is what draws me back. Blackpool is not neat. It is not one mood. It does not sit still. It has glamour and tired paint, laughter and silence, theatres and back alleys, crowds and empty rooms. As a writer, that gives me a lot to work with.

In Fractured Echoes, Blackpool is the place where reality starts to come apart. In Original Echoes, it is the place where the damage begins. In the books still to come, it will remain the place where the past has not quite finished speaking.

Blackpool does not just give the books a setting. It gives them their memory.