Growing up in Southport, the feeling that you might have been forgotten by the rest of the world was palpable. As soon as you told someone where you were from, the questions began.

“Southport.”

“Stockport?”

“No, Southport! By the sea.”

“Oh, Southend.”

Now, Southport is the name on everyone’s lips, as a result of the most disturbing killing of children this country has endured since the Dunblane shootings. And, like Dunblane, the Merseyside coastal resort is due to become a metonym used by people who need Google Maps to find it. But a metonym for what? Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox and those driving the riots across the nation want Southport to become a stand-in for “the failure of multiculturalism”. This isn’t the kind of place Pleasureland was built to be.

Even though it felt like a living time capsule to us as teenagers, we knew that Southport still carried the old razzle-dazzle, like an ageing star from golden age cinema. Glass-domed arcades and scenic, botanic gardens remind you that in its Victorian heyday, Southport offered families a temporary escape from a life of toil. A pocket of clear sky amid the smoke and smog of the Industrial Revolution, it was the envy of the world. Every local person knows that the grandeur of Southport’s Lord Street inspired Napoleon III’s redesign of the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Have I dug through the archives to verify this tale? No. It is obviously true. And if it isn’t, it should be.

But by the time I started at King George V sixth-form college on Scarisbrick New Road, students from the cooler corners of Merseyside – Bootle, Toxteth, Aintree – told stories of the footballers, pop stars, artists or models who made their areas famous. That was until a friend stumbled across an old interview with 80s pop sensation Soft Cell, in which frontman Marc Almond talked about how he was born and raised in Southport. Soft Cell’s cover of Gloria Jones’s 60s Black American classic Tainted Love was pure Southport. “Sometimes I feel I’ve got to (dum dum)........

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