An enterprising investor is bringing Blackpool’s grand hotels back from the dead, with a very modern business model that could offer hope for other moribund seaside towns
A savvy entrepreneur tired of inflated property prices around the UK has snapped up a whopping 18-bedroomed hotel for just over £60,000.
Duncan Ridgley said that as Blackpool’s grand holiday hotels have fallen into disuse, they’re ripe for a reinvention.
He told YouTuber Wandering Turnip: “I was living in the Sahara Desert, and had a certain amount of money and so I spent quite a bit of time researching the whole of the UK on where’s the best place to set up a hotel for digital nomads.”
He said the massive property he’s looking at, right on Blackpool Beach, is ideal. He continued: “There’s a pub up the road you can get a pint for £1.80, my neighbour runs a burger bar across the street, and he charges a quid for a burger, so you can have a night out for a fiver.”
The growing number of digital nomads – remote workers who can live anywhere with a decent internet connection – means that Duncan’s business is booming. He selected Blackpool as a base because of its unique combination of low cost of living, and “wow factor.”
He explained: “Blackpool massively came up on the radar as it was the most cost-effective place in the UK. You have everything you need within a 15-minute walk from here – but this is the cheapest cost of living town in the UK.”
Blackpool became a holiday powerhouse in the first half of the 20th Century, with massive groups of factory workers from Lancashire and beyond descending on what was at the time the UK’s leading seaside resort. In the early 1950s, as many as 17million holidaymakers arrived to buy Kiss-Me-Quick Hats and marvel at the town’ famed illuminations.
But as cheap foreign travel lured more and more holidaymakers to destination such as Benidorm and Faliraki, the huge hotels built in Blackpool’s heyday lost their appeal. Duncan is one of a number of investors looking to reinvent them for a new generation.
He told how he launched his “digital nomad” business in one of Blackpool’s hotels. He continued: “I had a budget of about £100,000. There was a shed in the middle of nowhere that was a scout hut – but like my guests were going to say ‘What’s there to do?’
“Then this place came up came up an auction and I thought it was too good to be true. It was it was advertised as £45k at auction. It was an 18–bedroom hotel. I thought ‘There’s got to be a catch,’ but I ended up paying £61,000 for it.”
With some modernisation – and the all-important fast broadband connection – the former holiday hotel is now a live-work space for people from as far away as Japan. They come for an extended stay, lofting into their offices remotely while enjoying glorious sea views from their balcony windows.
With hundreds of stories about the decline of Britain’s cities, and high streets being hollowed-out by out-of-town superstores and online retailers, it’s a rare and welcome example of successful regeneration.
Duncan said the £450,000 Grand Hotel right on the seafront, with its 62 bedrooms, could be his next step. After all, he points out “That’s he price of a bungalow in the Lake District.”
