Fleetwood

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. 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.

Photo credit: Nick Harrison

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.

The Mount Pavilion was built in 1902 to a design by Decimus Burton, the structure has been Grade II listed by English Heritage since 1989. The building, which stands atop a large sand dune originally known as Tup’s Hill overlooking the Irish Sea, replaced a pagoda, also designed by Burton, around which he planned the layout of Fleetwood.

The pavilion is constructed of roughcast brick with tile roofs. It has an octagonal dome with a copper roof. Part of a 7-acre (2.8 ha) site, it is located between The Esplanade to the north and Mount Road to the south.

The original construction played an important part in allowing 19th-century Fleetwood to operate as a 24-hour port. Its flagstaff was used to send flag signals out to sea, while the building was used as a coastguard lookout. In 1886, the Met Office installed an anemometer on the building to record wind speed and rainfall. Information was dispatched daily to Greenwich via telegraph. In 1919, a World War I memorial in the form of a clock was installed at the Mount. It contains two bells.

Decimus Burton designed two lighthouses for the town: The Upper Lighthouse, usually referred to as the Pharos (after the Pharos of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), can be seen for 13 miles (21 km) and Beach Lighthouse is visible for 9 miles (14 km). Both opened in 1840.

A third lighthouse, Wyre Light, built in 1839–40 by blind engineer Alexander Mitchell, offshore on the northeast corner of North Wharf, was the first screw pile lighthouse to be built in Great Britain. Fleetwood is the only town in the United Kingdom to possess three lighthouses and the two within the town itself remain fully operational. Wyre Light has now fallen into a state of disrepair.