Location: King Street, Blackpool

Client: Muse Development

Architects: re-form landscape architecture

Partners: Vinci Contractors

Sector: Town centre regeneration / public realm

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.

How we helped

re-form specified 27 RailRoad units with Delta supports across the scheme, in seven distinct configurations. The variety mattered because rather than being a single, uniform space, King Street has wider sections suited to lingering and narrower stretches where seating needs to tuck closer to the building line.

Ten independent straight benches with central timber backrests and timber-topped armrests provide the primary seating. This is the sort of bench where someone will happily sit for twenty minutes with a coffee. Alongside these, modular start-, mid-, and end-pieces create longer runs of seating where the architects needed to follow the geometry of the street. Some modules have backrests and armrests, while others are left open, giving a lighter feel and allowing people to sit facing either direction.

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 powder-coated in RAL 7021, a dark anthracite grey that sits well against both the new paving and the green planting. The powder-coat 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 outcome

King Street won two Blackpool Civic Trust Awards in January 2026: Open Spaces, for re-form's landscape work, and Best New Build, for the wider development. It’s a working example of what considered public realm investment can do for a town centre. The pedestrianisation changed the spatial character of the street entirely, and the combination of green infrastructure, rain gardens, and well-placed seating has created somewhere that feels like it belongs to the people who use it.

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.

Interested in creating public realm spaces that strengthen local identity whilst serving practical community needs? Our design team would welcome a conversation about how thoughtful furniture choices can support both people and place. Get in touch.

Products used

RailRoad Delta — independent straight bench (×10), start straight module (×4), mid straight module (×9), end straight module (×4). Powder coated steel and FSC Iroko timber, powder-coated RAL 7021. Central timber backrests and timber-topped armrests on select units.