Sparkles Hotel

What happened after

Former children's-themed hotel (Sue Ryan); converted to residential housing by Blackpool Housing Company (council-owned regeneration company).

Closure date on record: 2018

What happened on the show

Sparkles was one of the show's true one-offs. Sue Ryan, a former teacher who styled herself Mrs Sparkle, had spent seven years and more than a million pounds turning a rundown Blackpool terrace into a fantasy children's hotel, complete with themed rooms including a Narnia suite, a 101 Dalmatians one and an Atlantis-styled breakfast room. For all that investment and imagination, and a prime spot near the Pleasure Beach, the place was strikingly short of guests. Ruth Watson had to weigh the obvious passion against the commercial reality that a hyper-themed hotel narrows its own market to families with young children and little else. Her challenge was to keep what made Sparkles distinctive while dragging it toward something that could actually fill its themed rooms and cover the vast sums Ryan had sunk into her vision.

After the cameras left

The fantasy did not last. By 2018 the former Sparkles hotel, on the Station Road side of Blackpool, was among a group of properties granted planning permission for conversion to residential housing by the council-owned Blackpool Housing Company, part of a wider regeneration push. Reporting from the Blackpool Gazette that year confirmed the change of use. The themed suites are gone, the building repurposed as homes. Sue Ryan's costly dream turned out to be exactly the sort of narrow concept that struggles to sustain itself once the novelty fades.