The world we left behind

Dougie Wallace’s first photobook, Stags, Hens & Bunnies, featured packs of tipsy brides and drunken grooms marauding through the streets of an English seaside resort in a cavalcade of laughter, booze and vomit. Seven years later, we return to the time before Covid with some of the photos that didn’t get into the book …

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Uptight citizens of the English seaside resort of Blackpool weren’t amused when Dougie Wallace’s first photobook, Stags, Hens & Bunnies: A Blackpool Story, was published back in 2014. Wallace’s images showcased the unrestrained antics of soon-to-be-weds in the working class resort six years before Covid-19 plunged Britain’s towns and cities into a year-long (so far) clampdown on pubs, parties, shopping – and fun.

Parts of the country’s tabloid media didn’t approve of those bridal festivities, either: the Daily Mail claimed the “once family-friendly resort has plunged downmarket”, and traditional stag and hen parties had “degenerated into something rather less innocent”. No matter; the newspaper balanced its outrage by giving readers a spread of eight of Wallace’s pictures!

In claiming that the “riotous stag and hen parties are tarnishing Blackpool’s family image”, the Mail had forgotten, as the text that accompanied Wallace’s book’s vibrant photos, pointed out, that it was “a snapshot of our times – a graphic nightmare. Tony Blair’s dream of a continental style Britain, sipping wine with impunity, has mutated into Cameron’s binge-blighted Britain, with cheap alcohol available around the clock and a mainline railway transporting carriages of escapees from the realities of social decline.

“Although the smutty uncle of all seaside towns is still attracting some thirteen-million visitors a year, some of the town’s businessmen are un-

settled by its source of revenue. But as long as the night-time economy brings millions of pounds to the town, the stag and hen parties will still be welcome. These ‘celebratory rites of passage’ create employment and have kept Blackpool afloat”.

Seven years on, the town’s people will probably look back at this carefree, unrestrained hedonism in a more tolerant light. Blackpool’s drink-fueled celebrations may have soiled the streets and shocked some of the citizens, but the present-day climate of lockdown, Covid-fear, and bankrupt business is much more damaging to the community – and its economy – than the sight of exuberant brides and their soon-tobe partners enjoying a final night of singledom.

The photographs on these pages are out-takes from Dougie Wallace’s book, Stags, Hens and Bunnies: A Blackpool Story, published in 2017 by Dewi Lewis Publishing – www.dewilewis.com Price £28

l Dougie Wallace’s latest book is Bus Response (see details on Page 27)