Rhyl Regeneration: The Promenade

Like most seaside resorts, Rhyl has found the regeneration journey a difficult one in the last decades.

For many years, much was talked abut and little achieved. In recent years, a number of initiatives are at last coming together and the pace of change has turned decisively, I hope.

These pictures show the Promenade of Rhyl at night. This was a scene once dominated by the massive ice cream white dome of the Pavilion Theatre, with coloured lights  playing on it as selected for the cover of the Beyond the Reso book.

 

 

 

 

Now the Promenade is looking spectacular again with coloured lights highlighting all the features from the Foryd Harbour, with the Dragon Bridge all the way through to the Garden of Remembrance in the East End.

 

The lights are more sophisticated than the illuminations on the characters from Disney that used to stand no more than four foot high on the grassy area near the road in the East End!

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A century of Rhyl on screen

 

Thank you to Rhyl historian Stuart Jones for the heads up about this little gem about a century of Rhyl History.

There are some wonderful contributions from Rhyl residents. Great to see Colin Jones of the Rhyl Blogspot and Dafydd Timothy who was so supportive when the original Reso books were published.

See the film here by clicking on the link below…

Rhyl Your Century

Colin Jones’ Blog Spot on Rhyl

 

Photo from Colin’s blog of a pre war Birmingham family enjoying themselves on Rhyl Beach

 

I’m not the first to have a lasting affection for my home town that has turned online.

One of my inspirations has been Colin Jones’ blog, which has been a constant source of amusement, memories and enjoyment.

I feature in one of the posts together with the Rhyl Junior High School Rugby team of 1969. My abiding memory of that team was playing on a frozen pitch at Glyndwr (then the Junior High School) and performing what others described as a ‘brave’ blockage of a long kicked ball with a rather sensitive part of my anatomy. I knew I had dome some serious damage, but it was thirty seconds, due to the cold, before the agony kicked in.

The blog is a compendium of  key places, events and people that makes up the historical fabric of the town. Strange to think that so much of what was our daily lives as children now forms historical records, of which, without people like Colin, would be lost in faded memories.

I send Colin my thanks and best wishes as he scales down the blog and concentrates on new challenges. Thank you for your research and insights into our great town.

Visit Colin Jones’ Rhyl BlogSpot

 

The sounds of my Rhyl home town.

Following on from my earlier post on the persistence of smell in memories, made me think of some distinctive sounds from my youth in Rhyl.

Possibly the most distinctive sound was the boom of the Lifeboat maroons calling the crew in for a launch. These were launched from the Coastguard station near the Marine Lake and scared to death a friend from Belfast when he was visiting in the seventies.

Another sound was that of the donkeys clip clopping along Grange Road in the evening, their day’s work on the beach done. This was always accompanied by the relaxed shouts of encouragement from the donkey wrangler lads on their bikes carrying branches to give the animals a little encouragement if they strayed off the line home.

Summer Sunday mornings produced the humming sound of the Kazoo bands leading the parade of dancing troupes from the Derbyshire Miners’ Camp on Marsh Road. It was a bizarre parade to enliven a quiet Sunday morning. We used to try and distract the girls who always looked determinedly eyes front to avoid us on the side of the road pulling faces and calling names.

The railway station and roundabouts was always a favourite venue and the screech and bang of unfitted coal wagons being marshalled in the yard by the shunter was always a favourite.

The summer sound of the tune that signalled the start and end of rides at the fair was always full of illicit promise.

Finally the cough into life and revving of the diesel engines of the Crosville buses in the Bus Station on the High Street. They were going to such exotic locations, Gronant, Talacre, Meliden, Denbigh and even Ruthin!

Smells like Rhyl teen spirit…

 

Copyright: British Railways publicity department.

I had a conversation with a friend this week and we were talking about the evocative nature of smells which linger on the memory. It got me thinking about the smells associated with growing up in Rhyl…

My first is a general one which most of us shared up until August 1968 and that was the smell of sulphurous, hot oil and coal associated with steam trains stopped in the station at Rhyl. It was the smell of adventures as everyone in those maroon carriages was off somewhere, whilst I was stuck with a 1d platform ticket on the up line of the station. Luckily you can still re-live this in Rhyl by simply popping down to the Rhyl Marine Lake Railway and standing next to the engine before it sets off. Steam engines smell slightly differently today because they no longer have access to the Welsh steam coal which once powered ships across the globe. 

The second is a more distinctly Rhyl smell, that of donkey poo on the beach or on the journey from the beach to their overnight quarters. It was a distinctly fragrant and sweet smell, not, of itself, at all horrible. It whiffed of summer, sun, jelly sandals and ice creams.

 

My third is the smell of fresh baking at Reeds on Vale Road. I well remember popping in regularly for a 1d Hovis mini loaf which had both novelty value and a rich malty texture and smell. It was the essence of the smell of baking for me. I never minded queueing up in Reeds as you got to snort in the baking smell which quickly had you salivating like a dog in a butcher’s shop!  I later graduated to a regular habit of pineapple tarts which were sweet and tangy. I’ve never found any which came close to those from my youth.

You couldn’t think of Rhyl without smelling that concoction of caramelised onions, and candy floss that permeated the length of the west end. It smelt of summer adventures and fun. Possibly if you chose your ride badly at the fair,  the Rotor or the Mad Mouse for example, you might get a second chance to drink in this heady aroma later in the evening.

At the Foryd end of the town on a damp day, the smell of the wet seaweed and the incoming tide with a foamy head was very evocative. I’ve dreamed of that smell and woken up feeling homesick. I missed it greatly when I lived away from Rhyl.

Whenever we had relatives come to stay, which was often, we always ended up walking up the promenade and visiting the Lifeboat House. When the boat and tractor were in and the mechanic was working on them, the smell of the heavy deep blue lubricating oil was a rich smell I’ve only smelt in other Lifeboat stations.

One of the least pleasant smells I associate with the town comes from the small beach next to the Foryd Bridge. I was drawn there one day, whilst playing along the river (and in the bushes between the river and the Marine Lake, from where my mother had warned me to stay away)  by a horrendous smell. It was the smell of rot and decay, yet I was drawn to it. I found a large tope, a type of shark, some eight foot long with the colour drained away from it so that it was almost indistinguishable from the sand and line of seaweed. It had been caught as a fishing trophy and dumped there once a photograph of the proud fisherman had been taken. What a waste of the life of an awesome fish I thought. It  was both scary and fascinating to be so close to this, by now eyeless, sea monster, the focus for millions of flies.

 

I spent an hour just looking at it and poking it with a stick to ensure it was indeed dead. The tope had probably been there for several days judging by the way the flies were entering a cavity opened up in the gut. There was little chance now that it was  simply sunbathing. Eventually the angry flies and overpowering dank odour drove me away, but I remained fascinated that such a beast had been swimming off the beach of Rhyl.

Dank odours bring me to another distinctive Rhyl smell… the grotto that was the changing room at the open air pool on the promenade. The smell of wet mortar impregnated with almost fluorescent saturated moss was never forgotten. Those changing rooms were washed down by a firefighter grade hose pipe on a daily basis. The regular soaking the walls received only encouraged the tropical rainforest of moss and wet rot that climbed from the floor to every wall in each of the putrid cubicles. How I now miss that smell and the excitement it heralded.