Trades Hotel

The Trades is one of the last of a great British institution: the cheap-and-cheerful men-only gay hotel, run with a wink and a full cooked breakfast. Around sixty rooms spread across adjoining townhouses on Lord Street, one road back from the North Shore promenade and a three-minute walk from the Dickson Road gay village — Funny Girls, Flamingo and the rest are practically on the doorstep, and Blackpool North station is five minutes away. Booking a room automatically makes you a member for your stay, which is the device that keeps it exclusively for gay and bisexual men over 18. The residents' bar is the heart of the place — effectively open around the clock, famously cheap, and sociable in a way big hotels never manage. Downstairs there are play facilities that guests will either seek out or politely ignore; the hotel is openly sex-positive and makes no apology for it. As one reviewer put it: it's a gay hotel, it's a fun hotel, and it knows exactly what it is. Be honest with yourself about the trade-off: rooms are dated and the walls are thin, and nobody books the Trades for the decor. You book it for the bar, the breakfast, the crowd — older-skewing, friendly, unpretentious — and prices that make a weekend in Blackpool cost less than a night out in Soho. Busiest at Pride and through Illuminations season; book ahead for both.