Showtown, Blackpool
Showtown is Blackpool’s first ever museum, telling the extraordinary stories of the UK’s first mass seaside resort and its unrivaled role in the development of British popular entertainment. Celebrating the town, its social history and the performers who make it sparkle, it offers visitors an immersive experience, using a superb collection of objects, ephemera and stories from the Blackpool Council collections, 27 loaned objects from the V&A and rarely shown items from the performers themselves.
The Challenge
The design team saw in the collection’s lack of 3D objects and surplus of 2D objects a unique opportunity to reinterpret Blackpool’s rich visual and cultural history for new audiences. They devised the idea of using these assets to help set the scene visually for the museum’s stories and interactive exhibits.
Project Vision
Divided into six gallery spaces over 1000 sq m, Showtown explores the elements that make Blackpool so special: Seaside, Magic, Circus, Illuminations, Shows and Dance. The museum is full of fun, taking visitors behind the scenes and offering them the opportunity to have a go: taking their place on the promenade or performing a Punch and Judy show, magic tricks, circus skills, dressing up, producing a show, lighting the Illuminations, or dancing the Blackpool Way. This is a museum not just to be seen, but to be experienced close up.
Beside the Seaside includes a wall-length digital projection showing a day at Blackpool beach.
Hufton and Crow, Showtown
Roll Up! Roll Up! goes behind-the-scenes at the circus with a visit backstage to meet the performers.
Hufton and Crow, Showtown
Design + Execution
Two-dimensional assets have been brought to life to create an immersive, graphically vivacious environment. Blackpool’s cultural heritage is reflected in the Heritage Collections archives – wonderful collections of printed ephemera like old posters, postcards and photography that capture the town and its people through different eras in a way that is visually rich and often chaotic.
Casson Mann worked with Why Not Associates to approach the graphics of Showtown in a truly unique way, giving each space in the museum its own graphic identity. The rich archive of typefaces taken from Blackpool’s historic 2D collection is used to inflect emphasis and create picturesque captions that encourage the viewer to read on. Photographs and postcards of theatre venues were enlarged and transformed into a town of stage flats that visitors can walk amongst. The large poster collection allowed us to create a printed poster wall that showcased the extensive history of the circus in Blackpool. We worked closely with collage-based illustrator Alex Williamson to develop these large artworks. He helped unify the huge variety of 2D assets into one design language, which serves to knit the museum spaces together and give a unique identity to Showtown. These artworks are intended to creatively capture and represent the ‘curated chaos’ of Blackpool – the invention, wit, spirit, culture and history of a unique place with a unique visual and social history.
Showtown is filled to the brim with original, innovative and playful interactives that set visitors up to s쳮d, achieve and have fun. Fun manual interactives include: a whoopee cushion which visitors can tune, adjusting for pitch, volume and length of a fart; a pressure monitor, which visitors squeeze to test their grip against that of a circus acrobat; a ‘test your nerve’ exhibit where visitors stand blindfolded in front of a target as the thump of a circus knife thrower thuds into the target around them. Digital media adds a touch of magic to interactives. Magic mirrors give visitors face-to-face encounters with stars of the circus in digital form, who teach them ventriloquism or how to pull a funny face. One interactive highlight explores Blackpool Council’s famous ‘lightworks’: through a series of monitors, visitors meet lightworks designers, then design their own illumination, and finally see their creation ‘light up the town’, as part of a floor-to-ceiling projection of the Blackpool promenade.
How’s Tricks? looks at the weird and wonderful ways people made their fortunes on the Golden Mile, telling the personal stories of palm-readers, performers, and phrenologists from a contemporary perspective.
Hufton and Crow, Showtown
A gallery area inspired by the iconic House of Secrets magic shop features paraphernalia including Tommy Cooper’s fez, a whoopee cushion that visitors can tune.
Hufton and Crow, Showtown
Everybody Dance Now explores Blackpool’s ballroom legacy and other aspects of music and performance.
Hufton and Crow, Showtown
A ‘test your nerve’ exhibit where visitors stand blindfolded in front of a target as the thump of a circus knife thrower thuds into the target around them.
Hufton and Crow, Showtown
A display showing the costumes of legendary drag artist Danny la Rue and Music Hall icon Vesta Tilley.
Hufton and Crow, Showtown
Project Details
A perfect evocation of the subject, with design touches that somehow combine over-the-top with thoughtfully-done at the same time. I have to visit this one.”
Deliberately bonkers, this installation lets the exhibition form follow the narrative with fun, irreverent, and carnivalesque responses. The texts are written by comedy writers which make it a wonderful deviation from the usual museum fare.”
Design Team
Roger Mann (founder, creative director)
Gary Shelley (project lead, director)
Kirsty Kelso (storyline, conceptual planning)
Ellie Stocks (designer)
Collaborators
Buttress (architecture)
Beck Interiors (exhibition construction)
Aviaf Ltd (interactive production)
Squint/Opera (av production)
Sysco Productions (av integration, hardware)
Why Not Associates (graphic design)
Andy Altmann (graphic design)
Chris Winter (graphic design)
DHA (lighting design)
Alex Williamson (illustration)
Jayne Kirkham (script writing)
True North (branding, wayfinding)
Placemarque (wayfinding)
Colon Construction Ltd (basebuild construction)
Photo Credits
Hufton+Crow (photography), James Green (interview filming and video editing), Copyright: Casson Mann & Showtown
Open Date
March 2024