American who’s visited 40 countries says Blackpool is the ‘weirdest place’ he’s been

An American author has revealed that Blackpool is the weirdest place he has ever visited in his lifetime.

In a tweet that may not surprise many, Jeff VanderMeer explained that out of all forty countries he has travelled to in his life, Lancashire’s Blackpool ‘absolutely and unnervingly’ stands out as the strangest. 

VanderMeer wrote: “Weirdest place I’ve ever been, btw, since it’s coming up in the news… is Blackpool, England. That includes over 40 countries I’ve been to. Absolutely and unnervingly at the top of the list.”

He followed up his tweet with a brief explanation as to why Blackpool is at the top of his list, crediting mainly the combination of sleaze, donkeys and ‘effed up’ architecture. 

VanderMeer wrote: “Look, take too many tweets to explain why. Maybe the combo of sleazy and family-friendly, the weird night vibe of jubilation and violence.

“The donkeys on the beach. The effed [sic] up types of architecture shoved together in the same buildings. The slapping thing at the end of alley.”

In response, many locals jumped to their hometown’s defence, with one person even going as far as to describe it as ‘the English Venice’.

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They wrote: “Blackpool is the English Venice:it’s not surprising they give off a similar Don’t Look Now vibe – glitz and decay, carnival and despair, cultural overdetermination set against the wild otherness of the sea, a sense of being on the sheerest edge of civilisation. I love the place.”

Questionable but you’ve got to appreciate their commitment to the cause.

Others, however, agreed wholeheartedly that Blackpool is one of the strangest places on this Earth, with some even providing evidence to back up the argument.

Someone shared a photo of a Spongebob-emblazoned sign for a gun shop, while another Twitter user posted a photo of the disabled toilet on the pier, which appears to have a cartoon of a pirate with a peg leg on it.

One person recalled their visit to Blackpool, writing: “I went there with 300 people for a conference in Feb 2018 – someone put a welcome banner up on a motorway bridge (???), we were the only people in town and I truly thought we were going to be hunted and eaten by locals.”

And another simply wrote: “I once got chatting to a ride operator one the Central Pier a few years back, turns out he was one of the original Gene Wilder Oompa Loompas.”