The lucky visitors to Birkdale this week will get a glimpse of one of the nicest and most underused stretches of coastline in Britain. Even the locals do not fully appreciate it. They would rather, in these days of cheap and easy travel, leave the country to holiday in resorts with weird, unpronounceable names, where even stranger languages are spoken. Yes, Liverpudlians frequently breeze off to Rhyl, Prestatyn and Llandudno, forgetting that there is a Scouse Riviera on their doorstep.

The beaches start in the shadow of Seaforth Docks and run for 15 or so miles of increasing gentility until they reach Southport, the St Tropez of Sefton. Well, not quite.

Southport is not exactly the liveliest place on the planet. One of the three great Lancashire resorts, it looks on like a middle-aged spinster at its sluttish sisters, Blackpool and Morecambe. You go to Blackpool and Morecambe to get laid. You go to Southport to lie down.

About 40 per cent of the town’s population are over 55. This is a place you go when you retire, although Kenny Dalglish and Alan Hansen took this to extremes when they packed in playing football in their 30s. Back in the days when a footballer invited you to a roast and you got meat and two veg, this was where the superstars came to live. They are still there, so Southport cannot be all bad, can it?

And it’s not. Southport is nice. The shopping arcades on Lord Street are delightfully twee, Art Deco masterpieces such as the Round House — overlooking Royal Birkdale’s stylish clubhouse — pop up to add an eccentric touch to its well-fed suburbia and it has the second-longest pier in Britain. The second-longest. From the end of that pier, on fine days, you can see Blackpool Tower, ten miles or so away. What you can’t see is the water.

Red Rum, the three-time Grand National winner and Southport’s most famous son, used to train on the beach. We know Rummy — incidentally, should a town worry when its most famous son is a gelding? — got the four-mile, four-furlong trip at Aintree, but whether he would have had the legs to reach the sea is another question. If you want a dip, the Gobi Desert is a better option.

The place only really comes alive once a year — and, no, it is not during the Flower Festival at the Floral Pavillion each August. Last Saturday, July 12, Liverpool’s Orange Lodges and their allies from Glasgow and Northern Ireland descended on Southport to celebrate the 302nd anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. Each year the lodges parade through the town with their Lambeg drums and banners before enjoying a day of alcohol-fuelled naked sectarianism. Southport breathes a sigh of relief when they board the trains back to Liverpool and it begins to sweep the debris under the carpet. The Orangemen swear that it is a great occasion, but the town is a little uncomfortable that it is the bigots who are banging the drum for the resort. But few others do.

It sounds as if Southport has little to recommend it. Yet that is its charm. It feels like a stepping into the past. Its pretensions are old-fashioned, its ambience evocative of another time. To be there brings to mind Morrissey’s line from Everyday Is Like Sunday, “in the seaside town, that they forgot to bomb . . .”

And long may it stay that way. Because there are not enough lazy Sundays. As long as Southport remains unbombed by the heavy ordnance of modern life, it will retain its attraction - even for us non-retiring types.

Tony Evans is Football Editor of The Times