Days Out In Lytham In The Forties And Fifties

A Memory of Lytham.

We lived in Preston, Lancashire from 1944 to 1956 and often came here for the day on the bus. My mother preferred Lytham to Blackpool and we spent happy hours on the sands. This picture, taken before the 1st World War, is a view which my father would have seen when he came here as a child - I have a couple of photos of him on the sands with his mother and sister. I can't remember a pier - I think it had gone by the time I started coming to Lytham, and the windmill has since been rebuilt. However, the sands have now gone for ever - all there is between the promenade and the sea is a mass of weeds and not a trace of sand. I asked a couple of elderly ladies in the lifeboat house why this was so - I hadn't been to Lytham for fifty years - and they said that since the docks at Preston are no longer dredged, all the silt and stuff comes down the River Ribble and is deposited on what was formerly the beach at Lytham. We also went to Lowther Gardens, which are still as lovely as I remember them.