Re-run of the mill

There is something strangely compelling about Blackpool's Tower Ballroom. I've been struggling to capture the essence of Blackpool and have convinced myself that it is to be found here, in this ornate, gilded cathedral to ballroom dancing, where a roster of organists play hour after hour of foxtrots, gavottes, tangos, quicksteps, cha-chas and waltzes beneath the motto, picked out in huge gold letters above the stage, "Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear", a Shakespearian invocation to the dance.

It's 11 on a Saturday morning and there are a dozen or so couples, mostly middle-aged, some not entirely steady on their feet, dancing, while Japanese tourists take photographs from the balconies. The lighting is low, the atmosphere serene; it could be 11am or 11pm. The participants are lost in their own world, slaves to the dance.

Catering to all

The council recently bought the Tower Ballroom, a 158-metre wrought-iron structure opened in 1894, from a company called Leisure Parcs. Unlike its Parisian inspiration, the tower sits atop a large building that houses a circus, an aquarium, a children's play area and several bars and restaurants, along with the famous ballroom. Every age is catered to — from 9 to above 90. The council has also bought the magnificent folly that is the Winter Gardens, home to many a party conference, and several other local attractions. The purchase is part of a plan to regenerate Blackpool, by far the largest resort in Britain, and to underline its resolve, the council is engaged in an initiative that has tickled some commentators — an application for Unesco World Heritage Site status.

The council resents the condescending tone of the coverage. "We've got fantastic buildings and amazing collections," says Polly Hamilton, Blackpool's assistant director of cultural services. "But we're not just about the buildings. It's very much about the living traditions and how those developed over the years." She cites a lyric by local musician Little Boots which, she says, sums up the ethos of Blackpool: "I'm gonna take you out tonight/ I'm gonna make you feel alright/ I don't have a lot of money but I'll be fine/ I don't have a penny but I'll show you a good time."

Tough job

The heritage at the heart of the bid is a century and a half of predominantly working-class holidaymaking. Blackpool was the first mass leisure resort, attracting the mill workers of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the council is embarking on the tricky task of celebrating that heritage without turning the town into a vast museum, memorialising a type of family seaside holiday that is dying.

"This is a tourist resort — what we are doing is transforming it in a way that's in keeping with its heritage without preserving it in aspic," Hamilton says. The seafront is being rebuilt, in part because the sea defences need strengthening but also to create a series of headlands — large, open spaces that will be used for artworks, festivals, a granite "comedy carpet" celebrating Blackpool's comedy heritage, an open-air arena and a wedding chapel.

Two historians and heritage experts, John Walton and Jason Wood, have been advising the council on the bid. In 2006, at the beginning of the lengthy process which recently saw the town make it on to the UK's 38-strong preliminary list of potential World Heritage Sites, they wrote an article in British Archaeology magazine spelling out why it should be possible for a seaside resort to be recognised by Unesco as an international treasure. "Blackpool has no credible challenger for the title of the world's first working-class seaside resort," they argued.

The council is attempting to reverse the long-term decline in visitor numbers and bring in visitors who will both stay longer — the holidaymakers who used to stay for a week or a fortnight have largely been replaced by day-trippers.

Reliance on the past

The new reliance on heritage to galvanise the resort should also be seen in the context of the failed attempt to turn the town into a UK version of Las Vegas by building a "super-casino" in the centre of the town, on prime land near the tower which is now occupied by amusement arcades, a car park and a state-of-the-art toilet block. The super-casino idea was born at the height of Blairite greed-is-good thinking and died when Gordon Brown took over. Some had seen the casino as the panacea for Blackpool's ills; others believed it would exacerbate them. But the experiment was never attempted, leaving Blackpool to seek another source of salvation.

The team charged with regenerating Blackpool has had an unexpected windfall with the promotion of the town's football team to the giddy heights of the premiership. This brings financial benefits in the form of thousands of visiting fans but also a much-needed psychological boost. Blackpool has little to celebrate otherwise: Annual income is well below the UK average, life expectancy is among the lowest in the country and the number of residents living chaotic lives is high. For many, this is the last resort.

Change of image

The task of those charged with regenerating the town is to turn a battered relic of the great seaside holiday, now best known for parties tearing up the town on a Saturday night, into a resort able to attract a more mobile, more middle-class Britain. Somehow the detritus of the past 30 years has to be junked, the positive aspects of the working-class holidays of the pre-charter flight era celebrated and the town's entire infrastructure reconfigured — all at a time when everyone else is talking about cuts.

As you stroll down the promenade, it's easy to join the ranks of those who are condescending about Blackpool's bid for World Heritage Site status. You pass boarded-up shops and horrible bars; garish rock and candy-floss stores (even the candyfloss comes pre-made in plastic bags these days); pound shops, burger bars and tanning centres; and the Eden Club, with its sign declaring that it was "near this spot that Harry Corbett discovered Sooty on July 19, 1948".

Blackpool remains what it has always been — the resort of the working class, from Lancashire, Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Resolute stand for fun

There are teenage parents everywhere. This place devoted to the pursuit of fun attracts many people for whom life is no fun at all. "Is everybody happy?" a man close to me one evening in the Ocean Palace Chinese restaurant suddenly asks his two companions. They murmur assent. "Good!" he says loudly. It is a sin to be unhappy in Blackpool. The song I hear in every bar I go to is Black Eyed Peas' I've Got a Feeling: "I've got a feeling that tonight's gonna be a good night/ That tonight's gonna be a good night/ That tonight's gonna be a good, good night." Simple, repetitive, resolutely optimistic.

For most of the time I'm in Blackpool, the weather is terrible. But one afternoon it stops raining and the Sun appears. The wind is still raging and the tide is in but it's a pleasure to sit on the recently constructed steps that form part of the new sea defences and commune with my fellow visitors: a grandmother and grandson gazing out to sea, young lads playing chicken with the waves, a woman waddling down to dip a toe in the sea.

That evening, I go to see Ken Dodd, the patron saint of Blackpool, performing at the Grand Theatre. Dodd is 82 and a bit wheezy and some of his jokes are older than he is. But he is still intelligent, wrapping one joke within another. Many of them concern the length of the show — he likes to guarantee audiences it will finish in daylight. Longevity is being fetishised — the act of being alive and able to remember this amount of material, at 82. But there is one sublime moment, when he sings When I Grow Too Old to Dream and his audience joins in. An act of communion.

Once a proud resort ...

Dodd, communality, Irishness, Scottishness, Catholicism, Methodism, the odd touch of madness, the celebration of camp — all these influences produce a heady mix, which appeals to my more lachrymose side.

In the century leading up to the mid-1960s, this was a proud resort where working people took holidays that combined family fun with high-class entertainment. Now it is a travesty, with just the occasional shaft of light hinting at the beauty and simplicity of what was. The heritage answer will have to allow scope for more than just celebrating the past; there needs to be a reaffirmation of what gave Blackpool life in the first place.

In the unlikely setting of the town's Grundy art gallery, where I am meeting curator Stuart Tulloch, I get what might be a clue to both the past and the future of the town. One of the present exhibitions highlights the link between sculptor Jacob Epstein and Blackpool. "It has always been said that when the works were shown in Blackpool, they were shown as if they were in a fairground," Tulloch says. "That they were sensationalised and not appreciated. But when I researched it, I discovered the town treated them like serious artworks. I was interested in how brave that was and how pioneering in mixing high art with popular culture."

On one poster of the time, Epstein's Adam appeared alongside music-hall star Frank Randle. "High art was being shown among popular culture," Tulloch says, "Blackpool was very canny in getting a large audience to pay to see Modernist art that galleries wouldn't have been able to do at that time."

Art of living

That, surely, should be the essence both of Blackpool and of working-class life: Lack of money should not mean lack of ambition; the poor should not be defined by amusement arcades and rock shops; Art is many-sided and classless.

I warm to this vision of Blackpool: challenging, surprising, value-free in its judgment of art, attempting to revive the pride and independence of working-class life, refusing to accept second best, still dreaming.