A joint venture between the Winter Gardens Blackpool, Visit Blackpool, and Blackpool Council is encouraging event organisers to the seaside resort.
A well-known seaside resort looking over the Irish sea, Blackpool has been a popular tourist hub for centuries, with its iconic tower having been built as far back as 1894. From its expansive events spaces, generous hotel selection, and fabulous entertainment offering, Blackpool has much to draw event professionals to its shore.
A new joint initiative named Meet Blackpool has brought together key stakeholders in Blackpool’s event industry to advertise and expand upon Blackpool’s conference and exhibition offering.
Central to the initiative is the newly launched £30 million Winter Gardens Blackpool Conference & Exhibition Centre, which opened its doors for the first time earlier this year. Its inaugural event, the Conservative Party Spring Conference, was the first major political conference to be held in the town for over 15 years.
Now the largest venue of its kind in the north of England, the Winter Gardens Blackpool Conference & Exhibition Centre provides 2,400 sq. metres of event space to accommodate 2,000 visitors over two floors which, when integrated with the wider Winter Gardens complex, creates an overall delegate capacity of 7,000.
The venue has been designed to offer complete flexibility, available to book as a standalone venue offering a range of connected spaces. The main meeting space on the first floor can be used as a single venue or split into four rooms using fully acoustic sound-blocking sliding walls to keep noise separated. The smaller convention area on the ground floor can be similarly divided, whilst an upper break- out room offers a glazed outlook.
The hyper-modern venue also features exceptional broadband fibre connectivity, state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment, and environment management technology.
With the addition of the new Conference & Exhibition Centre, the full Winter Gardens complex provides 12 distinct venues, all under one roof, offering a total of 4.9 acres of connected conference, meeting, event, and exhibition space.
Over the last five years, Blackpool has benefitted from £500 million investment into the resort. It has seen three brand new purpose-built hotels built, with more under construction or in planning, offering over 400 bedrooms of 4-star standard and above.
Just months ago, the start of a massive rejuvenation project kicked off aiming to build a brand new £300 million redevelopment on the seafront. The space, known as Blackpool Central, will be a gargantuan indoor entertainment space containing a new major public square for live events and an innovative flying theatre, new hotels, restaurants, a food market and a multi-storey car park. The new development is expected to bring an estimated 600,000 additional visitors each year.
The seafront tramway has also seen significant investment in new tracks and European commuter-style trams that run alongside the resort’s world-famous heritage trams.
The next phase will see the tramway extended to Blackpool’s central rail station, ensuring a seamless transition from arrival to hotel check-in. The national rail network has also gone through a significant investment programme, meaning there are now direct trains from most major towns and cities.
Visitblackpool.com