Modular seating for a high street finding its feet again

The project

King Street sits in the heart of Blackpool’s town centre, close to the Winter Gardens and the main retail district. For years, it served primarily as a through-route for vehicles. The regeneration scheme, led by Muse Development with re-form landscape architecture, closed the street to traffic and set about turning it into a pedestrian space that could draw people back into this part of town.

The ambition went well beyond resurfacing and the addition of planters. re-form designed a green infrastructure scheme with rain gardens to manage surface water naturally, alongside coastal planting selected to thrive in Blackpool’s salt air and Lancashire weather. The result is a street that feels cared for, with enough green cover and comfortable seating to make people stop and stay, in a part of town that has historically struggled to hold footfall.

This is what RailRoad’s modularity is designed for.

The same family of components, the same 700mm depth, the same material language, but configured differently from one part of the scheme to the next. A coherent look across the whole street, with each seating arrangement responding to what that particular spot needed.

All metalwork is Triple Process powder-coated in RAL 7021, a dark anthracite grey that sits well against both the new paving and the green planting. The powder-coating specification is worth noting in a coastal town. Blackpool’s proximity to the Irish Sea means salt-laden air is a constant, and the finish needs to hold up over years of exposure. Our triple-process coating system that combines shot blasting, protective primer, and polyester powder coat finish is independently tested to 2,000 hours for resistance to weathering, UV, and corrosion.

The seating sits within a broader furniture palette that includes granite cube seats and steel café-style tables and chairs, giving the street a range of ways to sit, eat, meet, or simply pause. The RailRoad benches carry the main weight of the public seating provision, with the supplementary pieces adding variety in specific locations.

The RailRoad Delta range proved a good fit for this kind of scheme. It’s a single product family that, configured in multiple ways, responds to the different qualities and dimensions of each space along the street. Backed benches give comfort where dwell time matters, while open modules suit areas where the architects wanted a lighter touch. Railroad also excels at modular runs where the seating needed to follow the line of the street. All of these components of the infinitely modular system come from the same kit of parts, are all in the same finish, and all made from recycled steel at our factory in Kent.

Town centre regeneration projects often need furniture that can adapt to a varied brief without looking like a catalogue of different products, and that’s where our modular system earns its place.