A SEASIDE town in the north of England could be set to benefit from two huge investment projects.

Morecambe in Lancashire was named one of the worst coastal towns in the UK by the Telegraph.

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The report, which was published last year, ranked Morecambe as the 5th worst seaside town in the country, saying it could be “so much more than it is”.

And that could very much be the case, with two huge development projects potentially on the horizon.

The Lancashire-based seaside town was already set to benefit from the arrival of the second incarnation of the Eden Project, which is due to open by 2028.

Developers hope Eden Project Morecambe will be able to replicate the success of the Eden Project in Cornwall.

The huge £100million attraction will feature a “hyper-real forest” with large installations and immersive theatre.

It will have three huge shell-shaped pavilions that will overlook Morecambe Bay and a “Bay Glade” with a well-being landscape and a Natural Observatory for research and education.

There will also be an exhibition area and meeting point for guests named the Bay Hall as well as play areas, restaurants, cafes and a gift shop.

Talks are also underway to regenerate Frontierland – an abandoned theme park in Morecambe that closed in 2000.

The site where Frontierland sits has been left bare for the last 24 years but the local council are hoping to bring it back to its former glory.

According to the BBC, the Frontierland site was discussed at the latest Eden community conversation event, which was hosted by the local authority.

City council officer, Jonathan Noad revealed that around “35 regional and national developers” were coming to the town to discuss the abandoned theme park.

However, Jonathan added that the developers would “need to up-their-gears and put their ideas to us” as they look to start the procurement process.

Lancaster City Council acquired the land in 2021 and invited interested parties to submit development plans for it.

The city council official added: “We’ve also got the rest of central Morecambe to look at.

“Work will also look at Morecambe environments and what the public realm needs to look like to attract visitors.”

The authority hopes a developer will propose an “exciting idea” which can transform the site in the next 18 months.

The Eden Project and the possible redevelopment of Frontierland isn’t the only thing that’s drawing tourists to Morecambe.

Last year, one of the town’s most famous residents, heavyweight boxing champ Tyson Fury, increased the number of visitors to the town, with his Netflix series At Home With the Furys.

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In episode one of the series, Fury explains why he has never moved away from the town, saying the view of the bay, where he can often be seen running, is one of the main attractions.

He said: “I’ve often tampered with the idea of living abroad and living in Monaco and America, but there’s always something that keeps me here in Morecambe Bay.

“I believe it’s probably the sea air calling to me, ‘don’t go! Stay!’

“Every time I jog down the front, I look at the bay and the view and I think, ‘Wow, no matter where I go in the world, I will never get that anywhere else’.”

Before the regeneration takes place, visitors have plenty to see, with places like Happy Mount Park, the Eric Morecambe Statue and The Smugglers Den pub all rated highly on TripAdvisor.

The beach itself receives a lot of praise too, with one reviewer writing: “This bay is beautiful and very extensive so there is plenty of coastline to walk along.

“There were lots of people swimming out into the sea. The beach had large rocks then sand and was full of character. Well worth a visit on a nice day.”

Meanwhile, this seaside town in England – with sandy beaches, donkey rides & the best B&B in the world.

And this other holiday location is getting a huge new tourist attraction.

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Hiring in the US surged unexpectedly last month, in a rebuttal to those worried that the economy might be headed for a sudden, sharp downturn.

Employers in the US added 254,000 jobs in September, much more than expected, while the jobless rate dipped from 4.2% to 4.1%%, the Labor Department said.

That was the strongest gain since March, and was far higher than the roughly 150,000 many analysts had forecast.

The closely watched report comes a few weeks before Americans will head to the polls in an election in which the state of the economy has been cited as a top concern.

Jobs growth has slowed significantly since last year and the unemployment rate has been ticking higher, though it remains a historically low levels.

Last month, the US central bank cut interest rates by a bigger than usual 0.5 percentage points, saying it wanted to avoid any further weakening in the labour market.

But the strength in this month’s report could raise flags for those hoping for the Federal Reserve to continue to rapidly lower rates.

Bars and restaurants led the hiring in September.

While realising I am probably in the minority in this industry, I fear the Financial Conduct Authority is about to score a major own goal that will have dire consequences.

Changing the advice guidance boundary will cause a huge dilution of consumer protection.

It will make it easier for manufacturers and others to sell products without advice, avoiding the inconvenience of being responsible for the consequences of their actions.

This risks setting consumer protection back decades.

I passionately believe the advice guidance boundary is in the right place. Now is exactly the wrong time to change it.

We will see widespread misselling, covered up as guidance, with thousands of consumers facing significant losses at a time in their lives when they have no opportunity to earn back the money they have lost.

This risks setting consumer protection back decades

This – entirely avoidable – misselling scandal could lead to compensation payouts of a similar scale to PPI, probably, again, on a non-contestable basis.

The FCA should think long and hard before it makes a serious error that could damage the wealth of millions of people.

Guidance should carry a health/wealth warning. I would suggest a statement along the following lines: “This service is only provided as financial guidance. You do not benefit from the same protection as you would if you take financial advice”.

I anticipate the comments section below will be full of objections to this but, if the consumer is going to receive less protection, this should be made very clear to them.

As we have seen time after time, when the regulator gets it wrong, the industry pays the price

Without such a warning, consumers won’t be able to recognise the difference between advice and guidance.

We are already seeing a growing number of guidance propositions dressing themselves up to look like advice but with none of the consumer protection.

As we have seen time after time, when the regulator gets it wrong, the industry pays the price.

Ironically, the boundary changes are being proposed at a time when technology is making it possible for firms to take a fresh approach to delivering regulated advice at far lower cost and in greater scale.

Hub Financial Solutions, for example, is now able to support as many as 1,000 clients per single highly qualified adviser by combining its bespoke automated advice technology and, in some cases, non-level 4 qualified staff.

The UK can (jointly with Australia) claim a world-leading standard of consumer protection for long-term savers

This enables it to market a service to consumers who would usually be uneconomic to support through traditional advice. The firm is even going as far as collaborating with other established advice firms to buy non-economic clients from them and even agreeing to return these clients should their needs require more sophisticated advice.

This is by no means an isolated example. I am seeing more and more innovative advice firms building high-tech services to make fully regulated advice accessible, with all the consumer protection that provides, for a fraction of traditional costs.

In my work internationally, I see how consumers in other countries suffer from a lack of adequate protection due to limited regulation.

The UK can (jointly with Australia) claim a world-leading standard of consumer protection for long-term savers.

This has been achieved through hard work by advisers, regulators and broader industry players over several decades. Now is not the time to throw this away – especially when technology is beginning to deliver better solutions with the same high standard of consumer protection.

Ian McKenna is founder of FTRC

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OCTOBER marks the start of the ‘golden quarter’ where the majority of sales are made across the UK.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, the run-up to Christmas sees both overall sales – and commission levels – leap.

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Discover thousands of UK job vacancies now on The Sun Job Board

Have you ever wondered just how much you could make in a sales job? Click the links to find out your potential pay packet.

Sold on a sales job? Here’s your five-minute ‘need to know’ from Sun Jobs to break into the industry.

What is a sales job? 

All jobs in sales involve selling a company’s products or services to customers.

Salespeople play a key role in almost every industry as they are responsible for identifying potential customers, building trust and convincing them to make a purchase. 

There are lots of different responsibilities, including selling face-to-face, over the phone, generating leads, negotiating sales contracts and demonstrating products.

You may also be called on to provide after-sales service in some sectors.

Savvy sales people also keep an eye on the market, tracking trends and what competitor companies are doing.

How much do salespeople earn? 

Most sales jobs offer a small basic salary with the chance to earn much more in commission.

This means the salary you earn will vary according to how successful you are.

Estimates for sales salaries range from £16,000 for a first job up to £125,000 for a top salesperson in an industry such as estate agency or high-value iT systems.

On average, expect to pocket between £40,000 to £50,000.

What qualifications do you need to get a job in sales? 

Sales isn’t about qualifications, it’s about people. The saying ‘people buy from people not companies’ explains why personality is so essential to be a good salesperson.

You need to be tenacious, have the ability to form connections and trust, and be highly organised to keep track of your sales inventory.

That said, most jobs will expect you to have GCSE passes in Maths and English as a minimum and certain professional sectors such as pharmaceutical sales will seek candidates with related degrees.

You can find out more at professionalsalesassociation.co.uk and the-isp.org.

What career progress is there for salespeople? 

Plenty. Being a successful salesperson proves you have commercial acumen which can take you into the boardroom or even to become MD or CEO.

Once you have experience and a solid track record in sales, pathways include moving up to be an area or regional manager, where you support an entire sales team.

You could also choose to work in marketing, product or account management.

Discover thousands of open vacancies for jobs all across the UK now on The Sun Job Board

The artist Sir Howard Hodgkin had his studio in an old dairy close to the British Museum in London. Instead of the rattling of milk bottles, there was a contemplative silence in which his unfinished canvases faced the wall, some of them for years on end. They were that rare commodity, works of modern art that the public actually liked.

Lucian Freud planted his easel on bare floorboards, surrounded by piles of soiled rags and with gouts of paint splashed up the skirting board. For him, “working from home” was like being in a field hospital at the Battle of Trafalgar. By contrast, I remember the atelier of Gilbert & George, the odd couple of contemporary British art, in Whitechapel as a spotless gun-metal tank, jet-washed by an assistant in trawlerman’s waders. It was like a cross between a quality-assured abattoir and a Berlin techno club.

As a journalist, I’ve been fortunate enough to pop my head around the door of a few studios, trying to answer the big question about artists: how does the magic happen? Like a Sunday painter, I was merely dabbling with my researches.

By contrast, Martin Gayford, long-serving critic and art historian, is a trusted insider and a favoured guest of the most celebrated talents in the UK and beyond. If anyone knows what makes them tick, it ought to be this latter-day Vasari. Freud painted his portrait, “Man with a Blue Scarf”, which was also the title of a very good book that Gayford wrote about the experience. He has also collaborated in print with David Hockney. Now he has distilled a lifetime of studying pictures and talking to painters into a “How to” book.

Van Gogh wrote to his brother in 1884 about the ‘paralysing stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything’

On second thoughts, “distilled” might not be quite the right word, with its suggestion of long-trickled perfectibility. All that patient looking and listening only gets you so far, it turns out. True, Gayford can tell us plenty about the origins of painting and pigments. In How Painting Happens, he devotes pages to synaesthesia, the syndrome of experiencing colour in terms of sound, and vice versa. We learn about the influence of photography on painters, and of painters on other painters.

But the author is honest enough to admit that the real alchemy remains tantalisingly out of reach. Professional gallery-goers think they can tell at a glance which paintings are worth their consideration, he says, but “critics and curators . . . including me, everybody, regularly get these judgments completely wrong.”

So how does painting happen? For Freud, the spur to creativity was settling his terrifying gambling debts. That is, until his prices became so astronomical that he simply couldn’t lose enough on the horses to make a new picture a financial necessity. Hodgkin was trying to capture his fleeting emotions in paint, though he would rather have been doing almost anything else. “I hate the act of painting,” he claimed. “People have said so often, ‘Aren’t you lucky to be able to do this for a living!’ And I say, ‘No, thank you, I’m not lucky.’ Having to go through the horrors of painting a picture is not something I look forward to, ever.”

At times, Gayford’s account reads more like a “How not to” handbook. Tracey Emin began work on what she imagined would be a “love scene”, only to find a Turneresque seascape demanding to escape from her brushstrokes instead (“The Ship”, 2019). Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1884 about the “paralysing stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything”. Even Titian propped his half-finished pictures against the walls. Like Hodgkin, he was wondering what to do with them.

This is not the book for cynics and readers who suspect that how painting happens is that dealers, artists and collectors get together in a cosy relationship — one where multiple shares are sometimes sold in a single artwork and the goods are “flipped” for quick and profitable resale. In truth, that sort of thing has always gone on, one way or another. Without hard-faced but loaded patrons, we might never have had masterpieces by Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt. 

Stimulating and sumptuously illustrated, How Painting Happens is really two books in one, a double-sided canvas. The “recto”, as art world types would dub the “front” side, depicts humankind’s steady upward progress, from scratches on a cave wall to the glorious, inexhaustible possibilities of paint and beyond.

Painting matters, Gayford argues, because it “communicates directly across time, without using words”. A successful picture creates its own world, he says. Mark Rothko’s colour field paintings made people burst into tears. The artist himself was unfazed; in fact, he would have been disappointed if they didn’t. They were having a religious experience, he said. For Rothko, a painting had to have meaning: “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.”

The other side of Gayford’s study, the “verso”, is a less flattering but sympathetic portrait of artists failing, then failing better; of the sublime and the ridiculous; of blood, sweat and turpentine.

The influential New York critic Clement Greenberg took a more prosaic view than Rothko. “Mark was a decent guy . . . but he was so pompous! . . . All that ‘sublime’ crap! . . . People who talk about meaning! I don’t give a damn about meaning,” he told Gayford. “When it comes to about-ness, if you are painting from nature, you are not making it about a tree or clouds, you are making it as good as you can.”

How Painting Happens (and why it matters) by Martin Gayford Thames & Hudson £35/$45, 384 pages

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