STEPHEN McCLARENCE heads to Lancashire and samples a timeless resort that evokes the golden era of the great British seaside holiday

VETERAN journalist Paul Johnson once met Sir Winston Churchill on the steps of the Clifton Arms Hotel in Lytham St Annes. Churchill had just finished breakfast and was smoking a cigar before setting off to address the Tory party conference a few miles up the coast in Blackpool.

Johnson asked him to explain his success in life. Churchill gave an interesting answer (which we'll come to) but what's even more interesting is that he chose to stay in Lytham St Annes rather than Blackpool.

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Perhaps he saw it as a retreat. It may be only six miles from Blackpool but it feels a million miles away. Where one is big and brash and proud of it, the other is small and "select", a place to wear your Panama with pride. Listen carefully and you might catch the odd shriek from a Pleasure Beach rollercoaster or a hen-party cackle from the Golden Mile but they're like sounds from a distant jungle.

I say Lytham St Annes but it's really two distinct places: Lytham and St Annes-on-Sea, lumped bureaucratically together as Lancashire's answer to Buda and Pest. St Annes is a small but popular resort with a pier, a paddling pool and a bandstand. Lytham is an even smaller residential town that bristles with prosperity.

My wife and I are staying at the Clifton Arms, one floor up from the Churchill Suite, which commemorates the great man's visit. Dating from 300 years ago, it's a gloriously traditional hotel, comfortable and unpretentious, with waiters who remember how long you like your eggs boiled.

We sit at our bedroom window, sipping tea brewed in a white Wedgwood teapot and watch old ladies with pompom perms walking their poodles along the broad green that lines the prom.

Beyond is the estuary of the River Ribble (not the sea) and on the far side is Southport, whose street lights twinkle comfortingly at night. Lytham is best known for its golf, the white windmill on its prom and its upmarket feel.

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Flashy cars deliver young women with a high bling factor to wine and tapas bars and to the café-lined "piazza" (the old market square). A fashion shop called Cudworths Of Lytham flags up its cosmopolitanism: "London - New York - Paris - Milan."

Some older residents may shake their heads at the recent influx of footballers, pushing up the prices of the spick and span Victorian houses with their wrought-iron porches and ornamental pebble pavements but a feeling of wellbeing infuses every corner. It's a delightful town, a sort of Northern answer to Suffolk's Southwold. Northwold, in fact.

We stroll past beds of pink and mauve petunias and the Lowther Pavilion with its summer "family theatre" (Secret Garden, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland). Further on we find a bowls match, then a church where a £10 concert ticket "includes a glass of wine and ice cream sundae". These are quiet, genteel pleasures, much as the Clifton family envisaged when they developed the town 150 years ago.

Their handsome 18th-century home, Lytham Hall, is at the top of a long, beech-lined drive through grounds where herons stalk ponds of waterlilies. Last lived in more than 40 years ago, it's now run by a trust, with weddings and conferences a speciality. Office manager Jane Oliver takes us on a tour. Shelves of leather-bound estate books are stuffed with tissue-thin invoices for dinner napkins, bottles of sherry and repairs to the pond. "This we've never been able to open, " says Jane, gently prodding a door near the dining room. "We don't know what's on the other side."

IHERE'S not much of a beach at Lytham (it's more of a salt marsh) but there's a vast one at St Annes.

There is also a lively shopping centre, a statue of former resident Les Dawson, a stubby Victorian pier with ornamental turrets and plenty of Tuppenny Nudger slot machines and all the rest of the striped-deckchair paraphernalia of the English seaside.

It also has the award-winning Greens Bistro, which lurks in a cosy basement down a side street and offers cooking of terrific finesse (superb sea trout with asparagus and hollandaise sauce).

We also eat well in Lytham at Whelan's Fish Restaurant, recommended by Rick Stein, and at Artisan, enterprisingly set up in Booths supermarket, a foodie experience in its own right.

The big surprise is the pretty countryside. High-hawthorned lanes, farms serving afternoon teas, villages with duck ponds.

Back in Lytham, we bear in mind Churchill's reply to Paul Johnson. To what did he attribute his success? "Conservation of energy, " he said. "Never stand up when you can sit down and never sit down when you can lie down."

What wisdom. We lie down and doze until dinner.

GETTING THERE:
Virgin Trains (0871 977 4222/ www.virgintrains.co.uk) offers return train travel from London Euston to Lytham from £71.

Clifton Arms Hotel (01253 739 898/www.cliftonarmslytham.com) offers doubles from £150 per night (two sharing), B&B.

Visit England's Northwest: 01253 725610/www.visitenglandsnorthwest.com