Danny, Wikipedia agrees with you re Paris being inspired by Southport. (Napoleon II I stayed there before he became Emperor and allegedly copied the layout).
I have a few historical pics of Southport cribbed from Facebook sites and so on that you might like to look at, probably off topic so will send you a pm with the link when I get a spare min to upload then to imgur.com.
Last edited by andytug; 5th Oct 2016 at 17:15.