Blackpool Audio Tour: The People Behind the Pleasure

Explore Blackpool at your own pace

Blackpool's towers and illuminations belong to the visitors. The streets and promenade between them belong to a different town - the tram drivers who ran Britain's first electric street tramway from 1885, the steeplejacks who fixed five million Accrington bricks into the sky, the ballroom organist who played for forty years without missing a Whit Sunday, the pier keepers who handed out deckchairs at dawn, the landladies on Charnley Road who took in mill workers by the dozen, the electricians who strung up eight arc lamps before Edison had patented the bulb. This is the Blackpool that the Blackpool Gazette and the boardinghouse registers remembered - the workers whose names rarely made it onto the illuminations.

Photo: Luke Ellis-Craven, Unsplash

Tour details

• Duration: 48 minutes, entirely at your own pace
• Distance: around 1.9 km (1.2 miles)
• Stops: 9 landmarks, including Blackpool North railway station, Winter Gardens, Church Street, Blackpool, Grand Theatre, Church Street, Blackpool
• Audio: up to 23 minutes of narration
• Starts at: Blackpool North railway station

Map data by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap contributors

How it works

• Book here and a redemption code arrives by email within minutes.
• Download the free AudaTours app on your phone and enter the code.
• Download the tour once and the whole thing works offline.
• Walk to the first stop and press play. The audio for each landmark starts automatically as you approach it, so your phone can stay in your pocket.

There is no fixed date and no start time. The date you pick at checkout does not matter, and the tour stays on your phone permanently, so you can use it whenever you next visit and walk it again as often as you like.

What is included

• Professionally narrated audio that plays automatically at each stop
• An interactive map showing the walking route between landmarks
• Full offline access once downloaded, so you need no data or signal
• Freedom to start, pause and resume whenever you like
• Lifetime access - your code never expires

Where you will stop

• Blackpool North railway station
• Winter Gardens, Church Street, Blackpool
• Grand Theatre, Church Street, Blackpool
• Tower Ballroom, Blackpool Tower
• Blackpool Tower
• Comedy Carpet, Blackpool Tower, Central Promenade
• Blackpool Illuminations, Central Promenade
• Blackpool Promenade Tram Stop, North Promenade
• North Pier, Blackpool

Image: AudaTours

What is AudaTours?

AudaTours turns a walk through a city into a story. Our guides bring landmarks to life with the history, the scandals and the detail you would never get from a plaque.

• Immersive: real stories about the places in front of you, not a dry commentary
• Offline: download once and use it with no data, anywhere
• At your own pace: start, pause and resume whenever you want
• Accurate: every story is built from verified historical sources and checked before release

Good to know

• This is a self-guided audio tour on your own phone. There is no in-person guide.
• It does not include entry to any building or site along the route.
• The landmarks on the tour are not affiliated with AudaTours.
• You need a smartphone with Android 7.0 or later, or iOS 16 or later.
• Bring headphones and start with a charged phone.

Who it suits

Solo travellers, couples, families and small groups who would rather explore on their own schedule than follow a guide and a fixed departure time. It suits a first visit, and it suits anyone who has already seen the famous sights and wants to know what actually happened in them.

Image credits

Photos: Francis Heathcote, Luke Ellis-Craven, Mark mc neill (Unsplash).