This town deserves better

Southport is a town that has been told it is doing fine for twenty years while the evidence to the contrary has been piling up in plain sight.

Vacancy rates that would embarrass most market towns. A pier closed for three years. A £73 million events centre that is currently a hole in the ground. A Business Improvement District levying businesses through the same period, accredited for its governance by a body that, it turns out, it quietly co-owns via a £2.5 billion property company.

Nobody commissioned a press release about any of that.

The Sandgrounder exists because those things deserve to be said out loud, by people who live here, without the usual softening.

We are not a guide. We are not a promotional platform. We are not a press release with a masthead. We are not funded by a council, a BID, a property company, or a regeneration partnership.

We are a Southport publication, in the tradition of every local newspaper that ever told its readers something the council would have preferred they did not know. The difference is we are starting in 2026, with no printer's bill to pay and no advertising relationships to protect.

What that means in practice: we will say when something is wrong. We will name who is responsible. We will apply the same scrutiny to public bodies that those bodies claim to apply to themselves. And we will do it in plain English, without the kind of careful hedging that renders most accountability journalism harmless before it is published.

We will also, occasionally, find things that are worth celebrating. Southport is not a lost cause. It is a town with good bones, full of people who care about it and have no platform to say so.

This is that platform.

The Sandgrounder. For Sandgrounders. By Sandgrounders.