“To go to Blackpool and not visit the Royal Palace Gardens is to visit London and not visit the Crystal Palace or Westminster Abbey, or go to Rome and not visit the Vatican or the Coliseum!”
London Weekly News – 1891
The Royal Palace Gardens was a world famous destination for variety and music hall stars and touring exhibitions and battle re-enactments like ‘Savage South Africa’ and the ‘Afghan War’. With its lavish Grand Opera House, Indian Pavilion and famous botanical gardens, conservatories and menageries, it covered an area of over 40 acres. It was the first of Blackpool entertainment complexes to be lit using the new electric light in 1891 – a precursor to the famous illuminations eventually developed on the promenade.
Through three centuries the Raikes Hall has remained something of an enigma – this has only added to its fascination for some. Consistently local rumour has been entwined with fact and woven with a kaleidoscope of that alluring ingredient, intrigue! Yet for almost three decades in late Victorian England, Blackpool’s much neglected Raikes Hall Estate captured the hearts and memories of Blackpool’s residents and visitors; a brief moment in its history where its potential fully exploded like one of those rare tropical flowers that bursts into bloom, dazzles, but then is passed into legend and whispered about reverentially like a lost world. This a place that was so popular in that far off time that it became comparable to the World famous Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. These were the days when mostly nobody but the well off travelled the world, but at the Royal Palace Gardens the world was brought to life for them in ever spectacular enactments of famous battles and struggles of Empire – and the famous personalities given life in ever more elaborate shows and appearances. It truly was a place that seemed magical to those working class northern Victorians.
Indeed, ironically, that popularity was in part responsible for its eventual decline and demise – the famous gardens that bore a royal title slipped into ruin, not entirely by accident, some would say by design, and the land eventually sold off and replaced with residential housing and streets that remain to this day. But why you may ask? Why was this preeminent visitor attraction that predated the Tower, the Winter Gardens, and two of the famous piers, allowed to vanish as if it never existed. The man with the Midas touch so capable of building success, John Bickerstaffe, the man behind the construction and success of the Tower, Winter Gardens, Palace Complex and Piers. He seemed to lose his touch when it came to the Royal Palace Gardens and Raikes Hall. Or did he? Perhaps, once he established himself as a director on the board at Raikes Hall, he slowly undermined the attraction that took visitors away from spending their money at the Tower Company and its attractions alongside the promenade. He wanted visitors to go towards the sea front when they disembarked from North Station rather than go inland to the Royal Palace Gardens; Central Station had no such problem as it emptied the multitudes coming from Mill Towns more or less directly onto the promenade next to the Tower.
Whatever the truth behind this, the Royal Palace Gardens were closed down by 1901. All that survived was the original Georgian Hall, that is now still popular as the Raikes Public House. Many of those who live in the houses and streets that surround it know little of the history or the spectacle that were enacted in the gardens. The ghosts of that past still vibrant and strong today – if you allow them to come alive in your imagination. It is a strange, exciting and often turbulent history that formed these unique and grand Victorian pleasure gardens, now largely forgotten in Blackpool’s official recorded history that only seems to focus on the development of the resort from the time the Tower was built in 1894. It would be a real surprise for local people today to learn of what once existed in what has now become the new Raikes Hall Conservation Area.
Some years ago, when going through the old paper deeds for the house I live in on Whitegate Drive [once called Whitegate Lane], I was intrigued by the map reference to the Royal Palace Gardens that the house overlooked when it was built in Victorian Villa style in 1893. Further investigation uncovered that this lost Victorian pleasure garden and its scope and scale was incredible and a total revelation to me. It was then I decided to create a book to at least acknowledge and preserve for posterity these incredible gardens and the part they played in establishing Blackpool as a holiday resort. To this day this part of the town’s history is sadly air brushed out of the official historical narrative.
For more on David Slattery-Christy, please see our other post here.
This post has been written by David Slattery-Christy. You can but his Book on Amazon. You will be amazed what you discover!
‘The Royal Palace Gardens – Blackpool’s Lost Victorian Pleasure Gardens & History of Raikes Hall’ available from all good book stores and Amazon UK [ISBN 9781530154913]
“Excellent history of a forgotten Blackpool attraction. A great little book packed with interesting details about a lost piece of Blackpool‘s history. Should be on every local armchair historian’s bookshelf.”
5 Star Amazon Review
Check out the terrific Facebook page above for more amazing content about the Raikes Hall. A small selection of images and illustrations from David’s book are featured below:
Lost Archive – glass plate negative. Panoramic backdrop at Raikes Hall Gardens, Blackpool.
Featured Image © Tom Marshall - colourising the inset image
Text source: written byDavid Slattery-Christy
