Southport Audio Tour: Hands to the Sea

Explore Southport at your own pace

Southport's grand hotels and gilded arcades belong to the visitors. The streets, the seafront, the pier and the railways behind them belong to a different town - the pleasure-boat crews who worked the Marine Lake before the tourists arrived, the bath-chair men who pushed invalids along the Promenade in all weathers, the pier workers who hauled the cable tram and kept its tramway running, the fourteen men of the Eliza Fernley who rowed into a Force 9 hurricane on 9 December 1886 and were almost all swallowed by it, the hotel landlord John Halfrey who kept the Bold Arms for over forty years, the Victorian entrepreneur John Humphrey Plummer who gambled his Lord Street shops on an indoor arcade lit by electricity in 1898, the cotton manufacturer William Atkinson who gave his town a library and never asked for his name on the door. Heritage Open Days 2026 theme is Everyday Histories - the unsung working lives missing from the picture. This tour finds them at the water's edge and the end of the line.

Photo: BEN ELLIOTT, Unsplash

Tour details

• Duration: 1 hour 8 minutes, entirely at your own pace
• Distance: around 3.1 km (1.9 miles)
• Stops: 10 landmarks, including Southport railway station, Chapel Street, The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport, Lord Street Southport, Napoleon III lodgings site
• Audio: up to 25 minutes of narration
• Starts at: Southport railway station, Chapel Street

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

• Southport railway station, Chapel Street
• The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport
• Lord Street Southport, Napoleon III lodgings site
• Wayfarers Arcade, Lord Street, Southport
• War Memorial Fountains, Lord Street, Southport
• The Bold Hotel, Lord Street, Southport
• Victoria Baths Southport, Promenade
• Southport Pier
• Marine Lake, Southport
• Southport Lifeboat Station, Marine Drive

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: BEN ELLIOTT (Unsplash); AudaTours.