Fleetwood

Fleetwood is a coastal town in the Borough of Wyre in Lancashire, England, at the northwest corner of the Fylde. It had a population of 26,232 at the 2021 census.

Fleetwood acquired its modern character in the 1830s, when the principal landowner Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood, High Sheriff and MP, conceived an ambitious plan to re-develop the town to make it a busy seaport and railway spur. He commissioned the Victorian architect Decimus Burton to design a number of substantial civic buildings, including two lighthouses. Hesketh-Fleetwood's transport terminus schemes failed to materialise. The town expanded greatly in the first half of the 20th century with the growth of the fishing industry, and passenger ferries to the Isle of Man, to become a deep-sea fishing port.

Decline of the fishing industry began in the 1960s, hastened by the Cod Wars with Iceland, though fish processing is still a major economic activity in Fleetwood. The town's most significant employer today is Lofthouse of Fleetwood, manufacturer of the lozenge Fisherman's Friend which is exported around the world.

Ptolemy's Geographia in the 2nd century AD records a tribe known as the Setantii living in what is believed to be present-day West Lancashire, and a seaport built by the Romans called PORTVS SETANTIORVM ('the port of the Setantii') abutting Moricambe Aestuarium (presumably Morecambe Bay). There is also evidence of a Roman road running from Ribchester to Kirkham (12 miles (19 km) southeast of Fleetwood) which then makes a sharp turn to the northwest. Together, these suggest that Fleetwood may well have been the location of this Roman port. No direct evidence of the port has been found, but in 2007, an Iron Age settlement was discovered at Bourne Hill, just south of present-day Fleetwood, suggesting the area was populated in pre-Roman times.

There is evidence that the eastern side of the River Wyre was occupied during the Danish invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, the land on which Fleetwood now stands was part of the Hundred of Amounderness.

A manor house at present-day Rossall, in the southwest of the town, was in the possession of the Allen family by the time of Henry VIII. The Allens were prominent Roman Catholics, and Henry VIII repossessed the land. Cardinal William Allen was born at the manor house in 1532. It was ultimately sold to Thomas Fleetwood, comptroller of the Royal Mint, whose son Edmund, expanded the house into Rossall Hall. The land remained in the Fleetwood family for 300 years.

By the 1830s, the house and estate was in the ownership of Edmund's descendant Peter Hesketh, High Sheriff of Lancashire and MP for Preston. A man of somewhat liberal views for his time, Hesketh believed that the sheltered harbour and views over Morecambe Bay gave the area the makings of a busy seaport and popular resort for the less-affluent. With no rail link between London and Scotland, he envisaged Fleetwood as the transfer point between the railway and the steamers to Scotland, and set about encouraging a railway link from Preston. With a new career in parliament to prepare for, he engaged Frederick Kemp as his agent. He originally considered naming the new town Wyreton or New Liverpool, but after changing his name to Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood in 1831, he settled on the name Fleetwood. After some delays, he recruited the prominent architect Decimus Burton, whose work in St Leonard's-on-Sea he had admired, to lay out what would be the first planned town of the Victorian era. The plans were complete by 1835, and construction of the first buildings and the railway line began in 1836.

Burton's plan was to use the largest of the sand-dunes on the north-facing shore as the focus of a half-wheel street layout. This was landscaped, and became known as the Mount. It served as the hub of Burton's half-wheel design, the main residential streets acted as the spokes, and the main commerce area of Dock Street was the rim of the wheel. The oldest surviving building in the town, once the custom house, later the town hall and latterly Fleetwood Museum, dates from 1836 and housing from as early as 1838 still exists in the town. The crown jewel was the North Euston Hotel, built in 1841, a fine semi-circular building overlooking the bay and the river's estuary. The hotel was built to serve overnight guests making the railway journey from Euston, and was close to the point of departure for the steamers to Scotland. This journey was made by Queen Victoria in 1847, but by the mid-1850s the completion of the western railway link between London and Scotland over Shap Fell rendered Fleetwood's role as a transport terminus obsolete.