Southport Audio Tour: Hands to the Sea

Name: Southport Audio Tour: Hands to the Sea
Brand: AudaTours
Price: 4.99 USD
Availability: InStock

오디오 가이드11 정류장

Southport's grand hotels and gilded arcades belong to the visitors. The streets, the seafront, the pier and the railways behind them belong to a different town — the pleasure-boat crews who worked the Marine Lake before the tourists arrived, the bath-chair men who pushed invalids along the Promenade in all weathers, the pier workers who hauled the cable tram and kept its tramway running, the fourteen men of the Eliza Fernley who rowed into a Force 9 hurricane on 9 December 1886 and were almost all swallowed by it, the hotel landlord John Halfrey who kept the Bold Arms for over forty years, the Victorian entrepreneur John Humphrey Plummer who gambled his Lord Street shops on an indoor arcade lit by electricity in 1898, the cotton manufacturer William Atkinson who gave his town a library and never asked for his name on the door, and the Cheshire Lines clerks and porters who kept a Lord Street terminus running until the bus company inherited it in 1952. Heritage Open Days 2026 theme is Everyday Histories — the unsung working lives missing from the picture. This tour finds them at the water's edge and the end of the line.

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소요 시간 30–50 mins나만의 속도로 이동
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3.6 km 도보 경로안내 경로 따라가기
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위치Southport, 영국
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오프라인 작동한 번 다운로드, 어디서든 사용
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평생 이용언제든지 다시 재생 가능
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Marine Lake, Southport에서 시작

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Marine Lake, SouthportThe UK's largest man-made pleasure lake, created in 1887 when Southport Corporation purchased 2,197 acres of foreshore from the Scarisbrick Trustees. The original Victorian boathouse still stands. Before the first holidaymakers arrived, a small crew of pleasure-boat hands launched, hired out and recovered rowing boats, steam launches and later motor boats at dawn and at dusk every day of the season.

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Victoria BathsA Grade II listed building on the Promenade, opened on 5 July 1871 at a cost of £40,000. Designed by architects Horton and Bridgford of Manchester, it held first and second class swimming pools, Turkish baths, slipper baths and showers, with separate provision for men and women. Six pools required 250,000 gallons of sea water. The Turkish baths closed in 1978; the building survives.

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RNLI Southport Lifeguard StationThe current RNLI station on Marine Drive, opened January 2022 on or near the site of the previous station. On 9 December 1886, the Southport lifeboat Eliza Fernley was hauled three and a half miles by horse-drawn carriage before launching under Coxswain Charles Hodge into a Force 9 hurricane to save the crew of the stricken German barque Mexico. Fourteen of the sixteen crew drowned. Only Henry Robinson and John Jackson survived.

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Promenade & Southport PierThe entrance to England's second-longest iron pier, designed by engineer James Brunlees and opened on 2 August 1860 at 3,600 feet. A cable-operated tramway was installed by 1865 for passengers and freight. Extended to 4,380 feet in 1868. Tolls started at sixpence — deliberately priced to exclude the working class — and fell to twopence as visitor numbers grew.

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Lord Street ApartmentsThe broad, canopied Victorian boulevard at the heart of Southport, laid out in the early 19th century and featuring 1 mile of covered walkways and garden centre strips. In 1846, the future Napoleon III — Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, then in English exile — lived for a period in lodgings just off Lord Street. Historians have documented that he was later friends with the Gerard family of Southport; the claim that his Parisian reconstruction (1854-70) was inspired by Lord Street's covered walkways is supported by documentary evidence reviewed in 2023.

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The Bold HotelA late Georgian hotel on Lord Street, built in 1832 by Thomas Mawdsley in late Georgian style as 'The Bold Arms.' It was opened and run by John Halfrey, who 'continued to hold the licence for over forty years.' One of Southport's first substantial hotels. Now a Best Western Signature Collection hotel.