Why Blackpool is a town that rides on fun

Blackpool gets a lot of snootiness and stick but I would place it as the No 1 place in the UK to go if you like watching people enjoying themselves. Fun has been the town's main purpose for more than 200 years and it knows exactly how to provide it.

No lack of sights

Saunter along the Prom and you'll see this in spades (and buckets), once the present £179-million (Dh1,043-million) reconstruction is finished and the trams are back. Check out the Winter Gardens for interior decor that leaves words such as Rococo and Baroque floundering. Or just whizz around the rides at Pleasure Beach.

You won't see much that way, though, at least not if you are like me. Eyes tight shut is the only way I can cope with Wild Mouse, Bling and the Pepsi Max Big One. And this can be a problem with the grand old resort's podium for one of Britain's best views, the famous and fantastical 158 metres of Blackpool Tower.

Towering history

"I've had Yorkshire miners refuse to get out of this lift up here," says Tom Kellet, the works manager of the Grade-I listed building, which itself provides the first of four different components that make up the view. It is impossible not to be distracted by the structure and its history.

Inspired by Mayor John Bickerstaffe's visit to the Eiffel Tower in 1889, it survived a fire at the top eight years later and was rebuilt in 1921-24. Mistaken for a lighthouse, it lured the Norwegian barque Abana ashore in 1894. With good binoculars, her remains at low tide off Little Bispham form part of the middle-distance view.

Blackpool is one of the world's most popular tourist attractions. There's the coach park, here's the queue for the South Pier. People and traffic creep about and an excavator pecks like a praying mantis at the new sea defences on the beach. Rooftops are weird, with plastic dolphins and glowing pirates while the skull-and-crossbones on top of Coral Island is aligned so you see it through the viewing platform's glass floor.

It's time to check out the third part of this view: the far horizons. In good weather, the Isle of Man floats under its cap of cloud, Manchester glints away to the south and the hills of the Lake District, Scotland and the Pennines girdle the north.

In January, their replacement is unforgettable: an opalescent world of white, grey and mother-of-pearl, where the sea meets the sky but the eye cannot detect where.

And then there is the fourth and the best view: the people — your companions up the tower and the merrymakers down on the Prom on whom you can spy through a telescope.