BLACKPOOL, Britain’s original working-class resort, is to use its bid for a supercasino to inject a flavour of Dubai, the 21st-century playground of the newly rich.

Architects have drawn up plans for the complex that include a 30-storey hotel modelled on the billowing sail design of Dubai’s Burj Al Arab hotel.

The town has decided that it has the ideal opportunity to tackle its image as a tawdry venue for hen parties, political conferences and down-at-heel entertainers.

While the Gulf state is spending its oil revenues on a £140 billion spree, the Victorian seaside resort is gambling on the regenerative effects of winning Britain’s first licence for a regional casino.

The sleek styling of the £350m casino complex, designed by Gensler, the American architects, is intended to lure a class of visitor who have for decades taken their main holidays overseas.

The town’s faith in the lure of foreign glamour harks back to one of its greatest triumphs. The Blackpool tower, built in 1894, was a 518ft 9in version of the Eiffel tower, which had been completed five years earlier in Paris.

It still boasts seven miles of beach, three piers and a scattering of promenades, pavilions and winter gardens, but its fortunes have declined in line with the manufacturing industries and the rise of low-cost flights.

The average visitor is now a daytripper, and, according to official figures, spends only £41.33 on arcades, burger stalls and donkey rides. Cannon and Ball, the variety performers, were forced to cancel their show at the Blackpool Grand this summer because of the town’s “economic climate”.

Blackpool’s tourism officials claim the casino complex could draw an extra 5m visitors every year. Visitor numbers have stagnated at 11m a year, down from 17m 20 years ago.

The proposed casino is to have 1,250 slot machines, hundreds of gaming tables and restaurants and bars to cater for the 60% of visitors who are not expected to place bets. An 800-room hotel and a 3,000-seat auditorium and exhibition centre will be built for business visitors and tourists.

A previous proposal to model the complex on a Las Vegas-style pharaoh’s palace was abandoned. “We wanted something that is defiantly Blackpool,” said Doug Garrett, chief executive of ReBlackpool, the urban regeneration company promoting the scheme.

But Blackpool veterans fear it may be an over-ambitious attempt to disown a past populated by domineering landladies, smutty jokes and funfairs.

Frank Carson, 79, the Blackpool-based comedian, who goes on annual golfing trips to Dubai, said: “I’d like to see the high rollers coming into Blackpool but I can’t see many staying in our bed-and-breakfasts. At some of them, you have to clean your feet when you come out.”

Guests at the 20-acre complex are promised a much more sophisticated experience. The five-star hotel will have access to an open-air swimming pool on the roof of the tower while spa baths and saunas on the 15th floor will have views across Morecambe Bay.

Across the tram tracks a series of public artworks are planned, overlooking the Irish Sea. Proposals include a stone circle inspired by Stonehenge and coloured wind turbines.

The plan has been submitted to the government for assessment against rival bids from Sheffield, Newcastle, Brent, Cardiff, Glasgow and Manchester. The winner is due to be announced early next year.

Blackpool already has three small casinos and one, the Grosvenor, would be demolished to make way for the new complex.

Early on Friday evening there were few high rollers. The most expensive vehicle in the car park was a Ford Focus and at Paris, a rival casino, there were just six people playing slot machines. The bid comes at a low point in Blackpool’s fortunes. Earlier this year the Labour party announced it would abandon the resort’s Winter Gardens as the venue for its autumn conferences in favour of Manchester.

Other parties, too, have sometimes struggled to cope with its rough-and-ready hospitality. Peter Lilley, the former Conservative cabinet minister, once remarked that when he asked if he could have a bath, his Blackpool landlady said: “Didn’t you have one before you came, dear?”

The decline of Blackpool as a family holiday destination has coincided with a rise in the town’s problems with binge drinkers.

According to ALTN8, a campaign group, 25,000 people in Blackpool regularly drink to excess. “It’s awful on a Friday and Saturday night — like the Wild West,” said one fairground worker last week. “On most weekends you will see gangs of drunken yobs roaming about at turning out time.”

In the area next to the 20-acre site where the casino complex will be built, £10 will buy either a night’s bed and breakfast or a three-piece suit in a charity shop.

“We aren’t upset by our kiss-me-quick image,” said Jane Seddon, Blackpool’s director of tourism. “But we need to move on, just as our visitors have by experiencing holidays abroad, different food and culture. This process will be hugely stimulated if we win the casino licence.”

Additional reporting: George Dearsley

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