Festoons of lights go up, down and across the street and 2 huge banners, top and bottom, proclaim ‘Welcome to Charnley Road’ in brilliant white lights. The posts, used to support the lights and the welcome banners, also provided us with a place to hang lots of flowering baskets and brightly coloured vertical banners, some sponsored by local businesses and, as a special gesture, we have also managed to include 54 different national flags on parallel banners to welcome all our international guests as well.
These flags have now become the centre piece of a competition we are running here until the end of the season. Not that Blackpool’s season ever seems to end nowadays, so we will use the day the ‘lights’ switch off, which is Sunday November 8th 2009.
Any child under 16 years old and in full time education, whether Blackpool resident or visitor, is invited to try to identify all the flags and put in one of our special entry forms, available from all participating hotels in Charnley Rd. The younger ones may get help from their parents if the parents will sign to say they are no smarter than the average 10 year old. There will be some good prizes too, including IPOD’s, and we will announce the winners on the Sunday 8th November 2009.

At our official Switch On party the Council Leader, Cllr Peter Callow and Cllr Mrs Maxine Callow came along to pull the switch. They were assisted by Cllr Ron Bell and Barry McQueen, our famous Town Crier.
Many others from the Illuminations Dept and Tourism staff came along and it was great to see so many people having a good time.
We asked for and were allowed to use the elaborate Illuminations Switch On box that is used for the official ceremony and it was good to see it at such close quarters. You can’t usually get near it for celebrities hogging the limelight. Far too much food and drink appeared from nearly everyone on the street, background music played and a troop of Morris Dancers from Fleetwood gave a show as well. It was probably the coldest night in July, but you can’t have everything, can you?
A great party followed and we all know that there are many people who worked very hard to bring all this together. They know who they are and huge thanks go to them all. For a community of business rivals to get together to achieve this is brilliant.

Pat Francioni