Big Dipper
— — a hundred years of wood still climbing the hill.
Not only on a wall.
“The wooden coaster that has run at Blackpool Pleasure Beach since 1923, an out-and-back John A. Miller design on the Lancashire coast. Three thousand three hundred feet of track, two lift hills, and a queue that wraps around the spinning teacups. The beams are repainted every winter. The brakemen still ride at the back. The lift chain has carried more than two million riders a year through the gulls and the sea wind.
Big Dipper, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Big Dipper opened on 23 August 1923 at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, on the Fylde coast of Lancashire, about an hour by train northwest of Manchester and a tram ride south of Blackpool Tower. The park sits between the South Promenade and the Irish Sea. The original 1923 station was relocated to its present site in 1936 when the queue lines were rerouted; the track footprint has run largely unchanged since. Three thousand three hundred feet of wooden out-and-back, with a top speed near 40 mph and a 65-foot first drop.
The coaster was designed by John A. Miller, the Detroit engineer behind dozens of golden-age wooden coasters including the Cyclone at Coney Island. It survived a 1932 fire that destroyed the loading platform, the Second World War with the park half-closed, and the steel-coaster boom of the 1980s that pulled most British seaside coasters down for replacement. Blackpool Pleasure Beach keeps the wooden structure under near-constant rebuild, and the trains were replaced by Gerstlauer in 2010. The ride is now among the oldest continuously operating wooden coasters in the world.
Blackpool Pleasure Beach is open most days from March through early November, with a winter closure for inspection and the annual repaint of the wooden beams. A single wristband covers the Big Dipper alongside the 1935 Grand National and the 1994 Big One. The minimum rider height is 1.2 metres. Queues are shortest in the first hour after opening and the last hour before close, and longest on August Saturdays when the Blackpool Illuminations begin lighting the Promenade. Trains run with a brakeman in the back car.