Fleetwood Highstreet is almost topped and tailed by the changing faces of Fleetwood’s Post Office. See how many post boxes you see and what monarch they represent.
We start at the corner of North Albert Street and Pharos Street with Pharos Lighthouse with an empty shop that used to be Lighthouse Post Office and Stationary that was here for 30 years. We are going to turn inland and walk to the Library.
Across from the Library, there is a red brick building, it has 1902 marked above the door. This was Fleetwood Post Office built to help deliver the post to all the houses as the town kept growing, and was finished 8 years before Blackpool Central Post Office. At the park area, it may be a good place to stop and sketch this old post office.
Eventually, it became too small for the service and it had to move to the other end of the town, which is where we are headed now.
As we walk down the high street there are a lot of empty shops, shops change purpose that is just the nature of things. For instance, there is a shop called Indulge and where that shop stands there used to be a cinema in the same spot, but cinemas became less popular as television became more popular. Once upon a time, a cinema was where you went to see the news, or a cartoon and now you can do all that on your phone. The same with shopping were can do it all now from our phones, times change and so does the high street.
Or Across the road where we see LaLuna and Scrivens used to be the fire station and once again eventually it wasn’t big enough so it moved to Radcliffe Road where they had room for the larger fire engines and space to train.
For instance, as we get to the end of Lord Street on the left side of the road there is the Royal Mail depot on the right there is a WH Smith Post Office. Both businesses used to be combined, you could go up the now defunct ramp into the Post Office, pick up any post that was on hold send letters, and pay bills. Post Offices were once more of a community hub where people would pick up their pensions, pay for their TV licence and have a chat with other people they knew, now that can all be done online.
How would you use some of these empty shops? choose one, sketch it what would you do with it? Would it be a shop or a community space like a repair cafe, or something else entirely? What does Fleetwood need and what do you want?
