Designer's 'tremendous affinity' with Blackpool

Llewelyn-Bowen has been designing for the Illuminations since 2007 and switched them on in 2022

Ahead of this year's Blackpool Illuminations switch-on, creative curator Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, is feeling the pressure.

"Once a year my work is visible from space, so it's something you can't get wrong," he told BBC Breakfast.

Llewelyn-Bowen has been designing for the Illuminations since 2007 and switched them on in 2022.

"Blackpool's culture of design fun is so unusual and so special," he said. "It took Walt Disney coming to Blackpool to be inspired to then create Disneyworld, so we should be much prouder of that."

The lights extend the entire six miles of Promenade

"It's such a ridiculously extraordinarily British institution," he said. "It's bananas that somehow everywhere else in the country lights are being turned off because the holiday season is coming to an end, but Blackpool came up with this brilliant idea of actually turning the lights on and extending the season."

The celebrity designer said he has "a tremendous affinity" with the resort.

Growing up in London, he never went to Blackpool for a holiday, but when he visited early on in his career, he was "astonished by a town that invested so heavily in design, but in design that was allowed to have a bit of fun".

Fun he has carried through to the tableau he has designed this year - 12 donkeys dressed in 1970s-inspired swimwear parading on a 16ft high platform, beneath a giant ice cream topped with a disco ball.

The tableau Llewelyn-Bowen designed this year

The Illuminations are "an incredibly important part of the local economy", Llewelyn-Bowen said

"For some reason I thought this year Northern Soul, donkeys and what has now turned out to be, we believe, the largest ice cream cone in the world," he said.

"I love the idea of the donkeys, they have such wonderful resignation as they clip clop up and down the beach.

"Hundreds of years of supporting holidaymakers' bottoms."

But the Illuminations are also "an incredibly important part of the local economy", Llewelyn-Bowen said.

"£300m made from this period til the lights go off, so it's a real dynamic powerhouse for the economy.

"That traditional way of enjoying the illuminations was always to be in dad's car and drive underneath them.

"Now it's about trying to get people out of their cars - ecologically that makes a lot of sense - but also economically to get people to engage with the local facilities."

Blackpool Illuminations will shine from 30 August until 5 January 2025 and will be switched on later by Spice Girls singer, Mel B.