What Heritage is It is how and where ordinary people lived worked and played – its not just about old castles and palaces Its also about change and reinvention – living history – specially in Blackpool’s case. What Blackpool's heritage is Blackpool was a unique pioneer and is a unique survivor… nowhere else comes close to matching it in terms of sheet visitor numbers, sturdiness, vitality, adaptability, survival capacity, and cultural links with an industrial hinterland The seaside holiday is a British, indeed English, invention. Blackpool wasn’t the first (Whitby) or the biggest (Argentina or Australia’s Gold Coast) Blackpool’s status as the world’s first working-class seaside resort and its position as part of the broader popular culture of the world’s first industrial society, which grew up in Lancashire on the basis of an Industrial Revolution that combined towns, factories, fossil fuels and steam-powered transport to create a new kind of society of world historical importance Blackpool shows us that society at play, but working at its play: an industrial town of the pleasure and accommodation industries, constructed on a distinctive nineteenth-century model, with characteristic surviving architecture and an ambience of its own as seaside, pleasure and entertainment capital of the first industrial region, and later on a much wider stage.