Tees for two

Is this the best that Madam Zasha, fortune-teller to the Lancashire coast, can do? All she tells me is that someone is waiting impatiently to hear from me, by letter or by phone. Hold destiny’s front page.

Maybe her lacklustre performance with the crystal ball is something to do with the way I’ve crossed her palm, not with silver, but with copper – one heavy old penny, George VI vintage, big with Britannia.

The head-scarfed Madam Zasha – I can’t deceive you any longer – is actually a slightly alarming mannequin, one of the 100-or-so exhibits in the wonderful National Museum of Penny Slot Machines. Out at the end – the very end, and that’s a long way – of Southport pier, it features everything from one-armed bandits to What the Butler Didn’t See peep-shows in which lissom Edwardian lovelies prance around naked (“Bedtime Beauties: A Peep into the Boudoir”).

Buy a handful of old pennies, shovel them in the slots and tremble as skeletons lurk behind curtains in a haunted house. Sing along to Sooty’s TV Concert (with Sweep on sax and Sue on keyboard). Keep your eye on Jolly Jack, the manic laughing sailor, because he’s keeping his menacing eye on you.

The nostalgia-tinged museum is housed in an angular new pavilion, a combination of old and new that neatly encapsulates Southport. It’s really two places, one still rooted in “traditional” seaside holidays, the other moving on.

Here and there are small pockets of what marketing men might call “heritage holidaymaking” and cynics would call honky-tonk. They centre on Nevill Street, a garish parade of fish and chip cafés, ice-cream parlours, joke shops and places to buy Full Southport breakfasts recreated in seaside rock. It takes you back... to somewhere you might not want to go.

And it’s not typical. Southport has been busily shifting itself up-market in recent years, pushing its appeal to golfers (Royal Birkdale is here) and opening three new four-star hotels to add to the traditional guest-house array of Conistons, Braemars and Balmorals.

We’re staying in one of these new hotels, the Ramada Plaza, a great ocean liner of a place with smart, comfortable rooms and a good restaurant. From our window, we can see exactly what the Huddersfield-born journalist, Sydney Moorhouse, meant in his 1955 book, Holiday Lancashire. He wrote about the sea getting “up to its pranks” here for more than 150 years, “withdrawing ever so slightly at first, but continuing until at length there was a vast expanse of sand between the promenade and the highest tide”.

Over the years, gardens, a Marine Lake and a miniature railway were built to fill the gap and distract attention from one inescapable fact: that for most of the time, the sea hovers on the horizon like a mirage.

We set off down the pier – at two-thirds of a mile, Britain’s second-longest (after Southend). Eventually, after seven minutes’ walking – you can take a tram, incidentally – we reach the shoreline. Another eight minutes and we’re at the end and feeling nearer Blackpool Tower, looming 10 miles up the coast, than Southport.

Actually, the sea seems almost incidental here. The crowds are all on broad, tree-lined Lord Street, one of Britain’s classiest shopping streets. It’s the Champs-Elysses of the North-West, with its arcades and wrought-iron-and-glass canopies and tea rooms where old buffers wearing paisley cravats work their way through toasted teacakes as Kathy Kirby’s Secret Love wafts from the loudspeakers.

Just along the street, an arresting sign – “Not Just Any Old Bookshop” – points you up a covered passageway to Parkinson’s, one of Southport’s three superb second-hand bookshops (the others are Broadhursts and Kernaghans).

Inside, Tony and Joan Parkinson preside over a fine selection of uncommon books and a perhaps unique array of fossils, crystals and minerals.

Tony’s grandfather used to run a mobile lending library around the Lancashire towns from the back of his car.

“There were different charges for different streets,” he says. “People in wealthier streets tended to get charged more.” As for the crystals: “An awful lot of people bought them for the ‘healing’ aspect,” says Joan. “That seems to be fading now.”

Southport has plenty of other charming corners. There’s the Botanic Gardens (interesting Victorian fernery; unnecessary aviary) in the delightful half-timbered-and-thatched village-suburb of Churchtown.

There’s the Floral Hall, its superb Art Deco interior lovingly restored, though you wouldn’t guess that from its box-like new frontage.

And there’s the National Lawnmower Museum – 300 or so machines, including the Qualcast Panther once owned by Jean Alexander, Coronation Street’s Hilda Ogden.

Next day, we return to the penny-in-the-slot museum and try out a palm-reading machine. It does a lot better than Madam Zasha.

“Your hand denotes a well-balanced type of character,” it tells me.

As for my wife: “You know how to make and spend money; you are fond of the good things of life.”

I quote this without comment.

GETTING THERE

* Ramada Plaza Hotel (01704 516220; www.ramadaplazasouthport.co.uk) has doubles from £60, room only.

* Southport tourist information: 01704 533333; www.visitsouthport.com