Countrystride

#133: Whitehaven - A remarkable history

...in which we tour the west coast town of Whitehaven in the company of Blue Badge guide and historic buildings expert Alexandra Fairclough. From the heart of the bustling harbour, we paint a picture of the settlement's early history – of a remote fishing village set around a tidal river – before coal transformed its fortunes forever. As the Lowther family entered the story, the town's wealth and population multiplied; coal and ship-building transforming the sheltered 'haven' into England's second largest port, trade tethered to the notorious 'Triangular Trade'. Leaving the harbour, we visit Whitehaven's informal 'old town', then proceed to the remarkable 'grid-iron' planned streets that introduced Grand Tour designs to Georgian Cumberland, and which inspired similar layouts in New York City. Admiring designed 'vistas', a bounty of listed buildings – more than in any other UK town – and rare one-time warehouses, we discuss the end of many eras, and reflect on the 'gem' town of today.

Duration:: 54m
Broadcast on:: 14 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Country Stride, the podcast dedicated to the landscape's people and heritage of Cumbria and the Lake District. I'm here today, you'll be able to hear the sea goals in the background, a clue to our west coast location on a very rare break in the rain. And I'm here with author, illustrator and a guide for today's walk. Mark Richards, hello Mark. - Hello David, oh this is wonderful. My wife always says, I don't like the coast, not true. You come to someone like this and it's pure magic. It's a wonderful setting. We're in Whitehaven, we've got boats galore and the sun's out and people look quite happy. Well, it's a cheerful place on a sunny day like today. - Now, we have been here once before, a long time ago, you will remember Mark, we walked from St. B's through to here with our good friend and local, Alan Cleaver. We were talking on that occasion about various matters to do with ghosts on the coast, if you remember that. - We were. - We didn't do there really, Mark. We didn't dwell on the history of this fabulous town. I'm sure listeners will know bits about it. The great Lao the dynasties here, the coal mining that absolutely transformed the wealth of this from a lowly backwater to one of the greatest naval towns in the world at that time. And then a steady decline over the years as the coal seems run further and further out under the sea and aren't economic anymore. And we end up here today, which is steadily being revitalised, isn't it? And I think we'll cover a lot of this, but who's our guest today, Mark? And what specifically are we gonna be talking about? - Well, we've got the delightful Alexandra Percluff, who's come all the way from sail in Cheshire, who joined us when we were an Ascomer, who a couple of years ago, I can't remember how long ago it is now, but there's quite a contrast in the subject. Alexandra, she's an expert on vernacular and has a great love of old buildings in their setting and their history of places. So she's the ideal accompaniment for this setting. - Absolutely brilliant, yeah, she was great last time and we're looking forward to today's wonder. And we're just gonna take a bird's eye view of the history of this town, while delving in a little bit to some of the architectural interest, not least the grid system, the famous grid system here that is replicated unbelievably in New York City. So of the many exports that happened from this west coast town, that's perhaps one of the most unlikely. Lots to talk about, let's wander down the harbour, go and meet Alex and begin today's country stride. (upbeat music) (birds chirping) (birds chirping) - We are so fortunate to arrive at Whitehaven on the day as gorgeous as it is today. There's blue sky to the west, there's a few clouds to the east, but they are very innocuous, calm, gentle, welcoming clouds. In fact, the whole sense of the town is welcoming today. Everybody's in a cheerful mood. There's a congregation of yachts in one element of the harbour here. There's a great key ahead of us. I can see, looking west, and I can see the Beacon Museum with the candlestick. I know that name. There's various things I do know about this town, but I have with me, Alexandra Fairclough, who actually knows far more. I'm sure, and I'm really looking forward to hearing it all today. Alexandra, could you tell our audience who you are, and why we're here and where we're going? - Okay, thank you, Mark. Yes, I'm Alexandra Fairclough, and I'm a tour guide. So I do guided tours of Whitehaven, but I'm also a qualified tour guide for the whole of Cumbria. Apart from that, my background is I look after the historic environment. So that means I'm an architectural historian, I'm a building surveyor, I look after historic buildings in terms of the construction type, heritage law. So anything to do with the history and the background of historic buildings and historic places. And this is one of the passions that I have for Whitehaven. Whitehaven itself is a beautiful town. It's a small town on the west coast of Cumbria, and it's about five miles, the closest boundary of the National Park, at the Lake District National Park. So in terms of location, we're right on the west coast, and it's the only cliff area between North Wales and Scotland. And I'm talking really about St B's head to the south. You can see as we're stood here in the harbour area that we are surrounded by two hills on the south and the north side, it's like a horseshoe-shaped bay that's developed into a harbour. We're here today because it's a gem town, and I want to show everybody what a special place Whitehaven is. What is a gem town? A gem town is a town that has been identified as being of special interest, not only for its architecture, but also for its layout. In the 1960s, the Council for British Archaeology decided that this town was one of 51 in the whole of Great Britain that was categorized as a gem town and needs to be protected from development on that basis. In Cumbria, we have two. We're really lucky. We have this one and we have cockamouth. - There's a huge density of really important buildings here, isn't there? - Yes, you're right. We have round 250 buildings that are classed as listed structures. It's got the densest concentration of listed buildings anywhere in the country. We've also got two conservation areas that are very well protected as well, and scheduled ancient monuments. So in terms of heritage and historic structures, we have a wealth here in Whitehaven. - Where are you gonna take us to first and what's the topic? - There stood at the moment, right in the heart of the harbour on the Sugar Tongue, and I'm gonna explain all the names of all these peers and keys, and we're going to walk around the harbour, and then we're going to walk from the harbour into the town, but we're going to explore the history of the town and what gave the town its wealth, enabling it to develop as it has. - Fascinating, well, it's a glorious day. We'll explore the harbour more significantly with your guidance. Well, I've strolled around the harbour with you, and I've looked back and you can see that wonderful horseshoe shape of the bay. Of course, there is a story before all that we see today arrived. - What was a village like originally? - Right, well, Whitehaven was a very small fishing village. Up the road in Parton, there was a Roman fort, but no evidence of Romans dropping foot here in Whitehaven. So we're going to start really with the North Irish arriving here in the 10th century. It would have been a very small hamlet, with a natural bay, they had a river called Powbeck, and they would have entered into the small little harbour via the river, which would have been tidal, and they would have had a small number of fishing boats, and they would have traded possibly in cod and in herring and mackerel, and that's how it started as a fishing village. And there's stories that say that the name of Whitehaven relates to a fisherman called White. It was his haven. Other references have mentioned the White Stone on the south side of the bay, which would be the White Stone Haven, so Whitehaven is another name. The Norse were here. Of course, the Normans didn't come to Cambria. They didn't get that far. We're not in the doomsday book, but there is evidence that lands were gifted to priors and monks and abbots to manage the land on behalf of some of the knights of William the Conqueror, and there was a priory at St B's, a very important priory, and they owned all the land around here, and they farmed it and they mined it, and also they fished it. - Monastic rule was quite significant, but of course, Henry VIII had a trick up his sleeve, and the dissolution of the Monetries came, and therefore the transfer of the lands came about. And what happened at that point? - Well, in 1539, yes, Henry's men came up here to dissolve all the monasteries, and the land was sold off, and it went into private ownership as manners of St B's, and eventually the land was purchased by the Lauda family, a very important dynasty here in Cumbria, and they became very active here. - And when we think of the Laudas, today we think of Lauda the castle, but actually the various branches of that family. - Yes, it was one of the lower branches, if you'd like to call it that. It wasn't the Lauda and Askin branch, although eventually they would come to own it towards the 20th century. It was a smaller branch, they were based in London, but they came and lived up here that actually took over. - Right, well, there we are. The Laudas are here, and for three to four centuries, they influenced what we see today, in effect the affairs of this town, and we'll walk a little bit further and explore the chronology of that family and their influences. (birds chirping) - Now that was a delightful walk around. On the south side of the harbor, we've come past the Bika Museum, which is quite a striking element, a modern element of the theme, and we've come to the old key. We've walked further along it. We've come across to what is, I believe, the lighthouse, which was one of the key elements of this early development. The Laudas came here because of the long, established exploitation of coal in this area. What was their influence at that time? What were they trying to achieve? - Well, they saw the wealth in the land. They saw the mineral wealth, there's 12 miles of coal along this coast, going seven seams deep. So they saw that potential, but also they were involved very much with trading, and they had land holdings in Ireland. So John Laud was brought over here to manage the estates and the coal and the trade from the harbor across the Irish Sea. - So what we have here is the extraction of coal and the capacity to actually convey all that coal across to Ireland. - Indeed, it's very natural crossing here, that one of the closest crossings to Ireland and it is direct. A lot of the major ports that were establishing themselves were along the west coast of England and Scotland, and this was bang in the middle of all that. The first Lauda that was associated with Whitehaven is Christopher Lauda. He was a second son of John Lauda, and he built the first key. The first key is the old key that we're on today. And yes, you've mentioned that these are lighthouse and next door to it is a peer master's house, and that was built a little later on the key. But he wanted to establish a fleet of ships to be able to get the coal from the mines onto the water and across the Irish Sea to Ireland, doubling mainly. - The coal had actually been exploited in Bellpits by the monks of St Bies, and therefore it was a well-known resource for this area, but the Laudas took that on supercharge. - Coal had been extracted as early recorded as 1350s. Bellpits and excavating from the surface horizontally as far as they could go, but they had to develop these a lot more, but it wouldn't be another 100 years before they could do that. - So when Christopher came here, what scale of community was it here? - Well, it was bigger than the very small fishing village I mentioned in the medieval times. They're about 40, 50 tenements, houses, with about a population of 250 people, all focused around this pow back or pow back, and that was very close to the marketplace I'm going to take you to a little later. An incidentally, pow or pow means slow moving, presumably it had a very short water course, so the community was focused on that. Now, we'll move away from the light as back along the old key, and we'll move back to where things really started taking off and developing. (water running) - Well, we wandered round towards the sugar key, and we're now going to explore the second generation of louthers and the supersizing of the town. - Christopher louther was a very short lived. He died in his 30s, so this is why his successor, John louther, was only aged three at the time of his passing, took over and had a more enlightened approach, in my view, to the town itself. The estate was managed by trustees until he came of age, but he came of age quite young, and he had managed to develop quite an extensive experience for such a young age, and he brought all that to a white haven, and he was very, very involved with the development of the town. - And I believe he went on the grand tour. - When young heirs were forced into managing their estates quite young, they had to grow up very quickly, and they were forced to do enlightened tours with their tutors. He would have gone on the grand tour around Europe at an early age and brought these ideas with him. He also lived in London as well, and he was hobnobbing with the likes of the Royal Society and all the enlightened people who were members of that society, so he would have had a lot of great ideas and ideals to pursue. - So in 1705, Sir John dies sadly. His son James inherits. This is the beginning of a real expansion of the whole business and town as a thriving dynamic element on the coast of Cumbria. - James was the heir of John, and James and his heir, a few decades later, also called James, further developed the town of Whitehaven. And by that I mean, they developed the harbor by adding extra keys. We've got the sugar tongue I mentioned, and also lime tongue. You've also got the new pier, which is called the new old key, further north than the old key. And a lot of this happened in the 18th century when both James's were managing the estate. These keys were developed for two reasons. Certainly in the late 18th century, there was starting to be a little bit of unrest with the American War of Independence, and that's why the outer keys were there, for defence and protection. That is why there is an old battery fort, the remains of an old battery fort, quite close to the old new key. But the main driver is to have extra space to offload and unload goods from the ships and have more spaces for more ships. It was also the start of a shipbuilding development here. They did lots of their own shipbuilding because the amount of coal coming from the coal mines started to increase as more coal pits were developed. My understanding is they actually went down some 200 metres. The tones go out as far as four miles. There is 200 kilometres of added levels running like a real labyrinth under the sea we're looking out at. Now at the RSC, it's a phenomenal and quite frightening thought at the extent of it all. Can you give us a bit of a clue as to some of the names of these pits? The main pits that we recognise today are Salton Pit and Wellington Pit, which you can see on the headland when you stood actually at the harbour on your left-hand side, looking to the south headland, you'll see a white sort of like castellated structure and a chimney. Now the castellation was there by Sidney Smirk to look like a castle on a headland in a town that had some gravitas. The chimney, again, it's one of the Sidney Smirk developments and it was supposed to be based on Lord Lauter's favourite candlestick. Coal is from the Carboniferous period and a lot of bituminous coal has methane gases. These gases are very volatile. If they come into contact with a flame, they have an explosion. So in the 18th century, the actual stewards for the Lauter's were a family called the Speddings. James Spedding and his brother Carlisle Spedding and they were instrumental on improving the technology of getting the coal from these pits using up-to-date steam power, as opposed to having to rely on horsepower, which was very time-consuming and expensive. Also, Carlisle Spedding is very well known for designing what they call the steel mill. And the steel mill is a method of lighting underground so the miners could see what they were doing using flint and a steel wheel. It mills it almost to get a spark. Now this methane gas, if they took a lamp down and a natural flame got to it, there would be a massive explosion and that would close the pit, delay extraction of coal, and also cause a lot of injury and death. And the spark did not cause a fire. So it allowed them to have little glimpses of lights to be able to see what they were doing and to be able to extract the coal safely. Was it handheld? It was handheld and it's a little contraption. In fact, the Bika Museum itself has 3,000 artifacts in there and a whole history of white haven in there. It also has an example of the steel mill by Carlisle Spedding. He managed to do this and they were able to then spend more time in the pits, be able to extract more coal using both the technology from the steam and also the technology from the steel mill. And with these mines going out to sea and so forth with methane explosions, are there any notable tragedies? Certainly, there's been lots of tragedies. The worst one was in 1910 when there was a big explosion, the explosion was in the Wellington pits. They went searching for these men and boys that were underground, but at the end, they decided that they couldn't actually risk anybody going down in case there was more collapses and there were 136 men and boys that died. And at the side of the Wellington pits, the candles that you'll see as you're walking up towards, the candles took itself. Wonderful walkway with some mosaics. There is a memorial to those men and boys that died. Now, there were at least 85 widowers and over 230 children lost their fathers at that event. So the town, which was pretty modest initially, grew and grew and grew. To what sort of scale and where was the coal now going to? Right, in 1696, just before John passed away, the population of the town was 2,281. By 1713, so now in James' era, the population had jumped to 4,000 and it carried on growing exponentially. Now, the coal was being exported from Whitehaven across to Dublin, mainly. 8% of the coal in Ireland came from Whitehaven at this time. Salt was also being panned from the sea and that was being exported as well from here. Smaller exports included fish, some of the local linens and things like that, but mainly it was coal. The spreadings were managing the estate. They were aware of what was going on nationally and that exports and imports were starting to take off all round the country and they wanted to have a pass of that. What they wanted to do is rally around and get the local tradesmen to start trading along the transatlantic triangle. Can you give us a structure to how this triangle of slave trade and goods trading operated and what was coming back here? So the coal was being exported over to Ireland with other goods and taken across to Africa and these goods were then exchanged for enslaved people. They were taken then across the Atlantic to Virginia and the other slave holding British colonies in North America and the Caribbean and these ships then returned back here with goods produced by these enslaved people such as the rum, the tobacco, the molasses, the hardwoods, the coffee, cotton, sugar and spices were stood now on sugar tongue which is a key that was used for offloading specific goods from the Caribbean. So that indicates what was being brought over from their sugar and rum and spices. And that shows how influential it was in Kumbria. If you think about it, very, very embedded in our cuisine here in Kumbria. So where did the spices come from for the sausages? The Cumberland sausage that came from the Caribbean. Where did the ginger come from? The gingerbread, it came from the Caribbean and the rum, of course, and anything to do with rum, that was from the Caribbean and it was all part of this transatlantic slave trade. It was offloaded on here and you can't see today but the sugar tongue would have been covered in warehouses and these would have been bonded warehouses. These bonded warehouses, any of the goods that were offloaded were stored in there and the owners did not have to pay tax because they immediately were going to export them somewhere else so they didn't pay tax twice. In the 1980s, I believe all the warehouses on both this tongue and the lime tongue were removed and now you can see a very open key side. Before we move on from this, can you paint a picture of the actual sheer number of boats that were coming in and out of this harbor? In its heyday in the late 19th century, there would have been around 3,000 ships coming in and out of this harbor per year. On the south side of the harbor, there would have been lots of activity from the coal that were still being extracted from the coal mines and on the north side, there would have been a lot of activity from the railway sidings, the ship building and also the fishing industry, which was also big. Well, I've come off the old key. Just beside us here are three cannons with simulated piles of cannonballs and a character with a hammer in his hand. It's a bit of sculpture, but it's got a story to go with it. Yes, this character is a man called John Paul Jones. Originally from Scotland, John Paul came to Whitehaven as an apprentice mariner. He wanted to train on the ships. Over time, he had a few misdemeanors and he was evicted from the ships here, so he went and found his fortune in America. And he rose to the level of captain of a ship in America. It was around the time of the American War of Independence and he elected to come over here to attack Britain on his ship, The Ranger. And he came all the way over here with his crew. He sent them into the town to Wrecky and his idea was to attack the town at nightfall when it was all dark, when they were unaware of what was going on. And whilst his crew were going around the town to see what was going on, he went round to all the cannons around the harbor. We were there to defend the harbor and he vandalized them all. It was completely foiled because when his crew came back, they were very drunk. They'd gone into these alehouses and had their fair share of drink. The locals were aware of what was going on, that there was a ship out at sea that was coming to attack and it was American. So The Ranger then decided to sail away. He was a bit of a rebel and he was also a maverick. But he wasn't really welcomed back into America with open arms. He actually went over to Russia. He was an admiral in the Russian Navy and he died a very poor man. And he was always considered here in Whitehaven as a bit of an enemy because obviously he tried to attack the town. But in 1999, they accepted him and forgave him for all his misdemeanors. Intriguingly beyond here, a hundred yards beyond here, there's a, it's a brown whole metal hull of a ship. It looks like sitting on the key. Indeed, I think it looks like a ship as well. It is actually called The Edge and it's a steel structure clad in cordon steel. And it's supposed to look like a pebble, but in fact, I think it looks more like a ship from a distance. Now, it's there as part of the Millennium Project and the up-to-date restoration and regeneration of the town by the Harbour Trust. And they want to use this as a community building with facilities on the ground floor for a cafe, community space and for water training, so for water sports. And the upper two floors are accommodation for visitors, perhaps to the marina. Perhaps those are going to use the water sports facility. But it's a very unusual structure and I think it fits in very well. (paper rustling) Well, we've passed the beacon and we've come away from the Harbour and we've come into the old town when we talk about the medieval element of this place, which was a little fishy village, which grew in medieval times into quite a market centre. And we've come to a point where there's a little pavilion with some figures in it. Can you describe what it is there? Yes, we're here at the market place and this is part of the heart of the old part of the town. You can see that the little pavilion, as you call it, is an area called the Green Place and that Green Place is where the mariners would come and wait to see if they had work. So these fishermen were there. You can see it from these characters here that they're tying knots and things and they're waiting for the ships to come in and to see whether they had a job on that ship as a crew member. And this is Cass Bronze and it's two sailors by John McKenna and Darren Sutton. And again, it's part of the Millennium Project of the public arts trying to bring life back into the town. Intriguing place because the irregular nature of these dwellings buildings around here, there's no sort of common theme really. No, you can see that the buildings are all slightly different sizes and heights. The road layout is a bit higgledy-piggledy. If you look at the new town that we're going to go into, that's more of a grid iron. This is all different directions of roads, different widths of roads. I found this very attractive, especially on a sunny day. It's quirky, you never bored when you're in this space. I'd rather intrigued to see the more recent element of this town, what made it special, the plan town. We're moving towards the plan town, but before we do, we're coming along Roper Street and there's a stone-built barn here, a warehouse with doors on three levels. It's called the vault, but this is the kind of building that will have been all around the town when it was a busy maritime powerhouse. This is the local vernacular. It is indeed, Mark. You can see the use of local stone. It's slightly formal on the front elevation, but you've got the large openings on first, second and third with the hoist system still there that they would have used to lift goods into for storage and out of for moving around to the harbour. And these would have been all along the strand outside the harbour originally. It's amazing how this has survived. You've even got one stone at the bottom which is to guide horses and wheels to wagons to avoid the step, intriguing that little survival in itself. So this is a microcosm of the past. In other industrial towns on the coast around the Britain, you would have seen red brick, but here the local stone was the vernacular. It was the handy stone and it was the easy to build with. This was the pattern of all the buildings that were serving this busy port. And that's because there was no transport connections to bring in modern materials. They had to use the materials that were close to hand, which would be the local stone. So when did they start bringing other materials into this town? Well, other materials have been brought in when the railways arrived. Remember, we're right on the edge of the Lake District. It is very impenetrable for a large movement of goods. So it had to be when the railways came that could transport such goods around. And they arrived in two stations in Whitehaven, actually. There's Corkical, and that came in 1849, which is on the Furnace Line, but also Whitehaven, which was linked to the Carlisle Line, and that came in 1847. So after that date, any new buildings would have used more modern materials, such as brick or even some sorts of concrete that could have been transported that way. Before that time, it would have been awfully expensive to bring them long distances from where they are sourced. And the railway, it's not visible in the town? No, the railway is very cleverly underground through the town. Like I said, there was two stations they were not in to connect it originally. Over time, there has been a tunnel underneath the town to link Corkical to actually Whitehaven. So you can now get trains from Carlisle right down to Lancaster. I presume this is all because the lathers didn't want to see a railway going in front of their view down Loudest Street. He would have also meant the destruction of the wonderful planned town. So that means if you were coming from Carlisle, you don't have to get off this train at the north end of the town and have your baggage and wheel it half a while through the town through the gridiron to get through to the station, which was called on the south side. Corkical. Brilliant name, isn't it? Having admired that thought, we'll head on to the gridiron pattern of the town. Well, we turned it to Loudest Street and wandered up the street all the way and came to this churchyard. Sadly, the church tower is here on its own because the church itself was burnt down since the Saint World War. But everything is angular here in a straight line. So this is a part of the town that the lathers developed and I'd like to know from you, Alex, what was the structure that they were seeking to attain and how they achieved it? Loudest wanted to develop the town. They wanted to develop the trade and develop the port as well as the coal. But in doing so, they recognised that they were going to have to develop the settlement as well. And John Louder arrived here in Whitehaven, from London, and he bought a property here. And his idea was to bring the ideas that he'd seen on his grand tour and around London into his idea of town planning. This was about the time of the Great Fire of London and they were going through a whole overhaul of the town that had been burnt down and they were redeveloping the whole of the city of London. And what John wanted to do is establish a formal layout with complete control on the buildings that were going to be constructed, following on from some of his father's street layouts. Now, there were several streets existed before Christopher arrived here and that would have been swing pump lane and pole lane on the southern side of the town. And then whilst Christopher was here, he developed King Street and the Strand, where there would have been some warehousing for the harbour, and then there would have been Rogue Street, the main streets of the old town. So what John wanted to do was develop northwards along the basin flat area of the town, a 90 degree gridiron street pan, and he had particular requirements for builders to build their houses along those streets. So what would the gridiron be? A gridiron would have been a geometrical plan form with 90 degree, almost 90 degree corners, so it's a very geometric pattern of streets. So there's easy access and you can easily find your way around. And at this time I presume a notion of a gridiron was not just unusual, it was non-existent, wasn't it? Absolutely, there was nothing as formal as that. It had occurred in ancient classical times, but certainly not in the UK. So John, a very youthful man with his grand tour experience, he wanted entrepreneur builders to come in, local builders, to build houses, to fill the spaces in a particular way. Indeed, Mr. Terence and Nicholas's church at the moment, and this plot was allocated and these dimensions for use of a church only. So John wanted to sell plots of land to individual builders, owners, merchants, or developers, but he wanted to have a strict control of what was built. And it said, quote unquote, "The houses be three stories high, "not less than 28 feet from the level of the street "to the square of the side walls, "the windows of the first and second stories "to be transomed and the same together "with the doors be of hewn stone." And that means they had to be right up to the pavement, they had to be so many stories high, there was no stipulation on how highly stories would be, so you can see some variation in height, there had to be so wide, 15 feet. If you were developing on to build a bigger house, it would still be increments of 15 feet, but they might be four of them, and they would all have windows and doors that would have stone surrounds, so they'd have strong jams in red sandstone generally. Picking up on the local materials, making sure the local quarries that were owned by them were used, but also giving an idea of formality, but also homogeneity as well. How many streets were there in this town? It was a very small grid-iron pattern, you've got the main streets are going off from the harbour, perpendicular to the harbour, so they're going west to east, so you've got dupe streets and louder streets, they're the main frames of the town. You can almost tell the part of the town you're in by the actual name of the street. Almost, yes, you can mark, you can see that when you're in the old part of the town, the streets, not only are they more organic and higgledy-piggledy, a little bit haphazard, they have names that are related to the uses down there, so you have swing-pump lane, and swing-pump lane is to do with the method of getting water from the river, using a swing-pump. You've also got roper streets, which is to do with rope-making, which is another important function in a harbour area, but there's also pipe-lane, and that indicated tobacco that was coming in, as well at the time, very early on. So when we go over to the new town, you've got names that are more nationally known, so you've got Duke Street, named after the Duke of York, James Street, named after James, the Duke of York who was a brother to King Charles II, you've got Catherine Street and Queen Street, and that was named after Catherine of Braganza, who was the wife of King Charles II, so a lot of these names are formal names, and also of course, Lau with the street. Well, with this design streets, the importance of the Lau with the family nationally, but certainly within the context of Cumbria, important people came here, artistic people. Indeed, and they still come here today. Artists came here, we've got Robert Salmon, who was a maritime artist, very famous here in England, but also in America, but more important that we have records of the town in the 17th century by Matthias Reed. Matthias Reed did lots of local paintings of buildings, but also Birds Eye View aerial type paintings, and that shows you a snapshot in time of what the town looked like and the type of architecture that was being built. - And of the writers who came here? - You may have heard the tale of Jonathan Swift, being abducted here from Ireland by his nanny, and he stayed for three years apparently, and he lived over the hill just past Wellington Pit, the candlestick chimney, and it is said that he wrote Gulliver's Travels based on the view of the town that he would have seen from right up there. We've also got writers such as William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Of course, William, his father was one of the stewards to one of the Lau others and the Lau other estate, so he had a link to the Lau the family, but also his uncle was a vicar around here as well, so he would have come here quite a lot, but he did write a poem about Whitehaven. - So the intriguing one is the actual church chair and we're standing beside. - So this is St. Nicholas's church, and one of the Lau others ideas was to allocate large plots of land for particular uses, and this one was for a church here. Now this church is obviously later than the 17th century. It's been rebuilt over time, but it's an important church, St. Nicholas's church, and unfortunately it's succumbed to a fire in 1971. It hasn't been rebuilt. They've just left the tower standing, and sometimes they have exhibitions and there's a cafe inside there when it's open. It's very pleasant to go in there, but this space here is the former graveyard, not an active graveyard now, but it's used almost like a park garden. There's a couple of memorials here to the children that have died in the mines. You can see some gravestones at the rear of the churchyard, but also some of famous was buried here. A lady called Mildred Warner Gail, and she was the grandmother of George Washington. There you are, first president of the United States of America. Well, we'll wander a little bit further. Head back into Lau other street, and consider it a little bit more. Continued a little further along Lau other street, passing the Westminster Cafe, which I gather was the National Westminster Bank, once upon a time. Some lovely grand houses, we've come upon what is the 1897 post office, which is the most elaborate post office I've ever seen, but it's certainly closed now. But my mind reflects back on to the Lau other street itself, and the fact it's the Lau others. We haven't said where they lived and how they related to this street and developed the place. The Lau other family lived in a place called Flat Hall. That's F-L-A-D-B-T Flat Hall, and they established their home there. Over time they wanted to redevelop it in more grandiose style, and they created a building called White Haven Castle on the site of where Flat Hall was. And this was built in 1769, and they remodeled all the gardens and incorporated woodland as well to make it a very grand setting, typical of the movement for country style houses in the 18th century. What is important about that is the form of the building, it's a very tall, castellated building, and it was at the head of Lau other street. So we are the Lau others, we are living on the Lau other streets, and we want a great view. A lot of the design of the plantown was based around vistas, and their vista was a view from their castle all the way to their harbor, and they could see the lighthouse at the end of the road. The notion of the vistas became a theme. They weren't just looking down to the harbor, other streets had to have their own focus of attention. Yes, the idea of having these planned towns where they had these beautiful buildings set along simple lines with similar proportions and details was also to encourage you to look along these viewpoints, but also have a stop at the end of these viewpoints. And if you go down Queen Street, you will see at the top of Queen Street, is a church called St James's Church, and this is a very important classical church. Interior is fantastic, one of the best churches in Kumbria, but also it is at the top of the street, and it blocks the view, so you've got a fantastic view from Lau other street all the way up the side of the hill to where St James's. The motivation for this formalised structure, was it an external one as well, so that people coming here will be impressed? Yes, it was, it was also part of the fashion of the time, if you think about it, in the late 18th century, we're looking at the age of enlightenment, it was also the romantic era, and they were looking at vistas and views. Capability Brown would have been popular, you'd have all the classical architecture would have been designing. They'd all have been on the Grand Tour to Italy and the classical world. The Lau the Family had the idea that why go to the classical world when you have it at home, and why have it just in the capital cities, why don't you have it also around the country? And he had the money to do that, and in doing that, he made this very attractive town. Well, we've got a sense of Lau the street, the layout of the town, the gorgeous array of houses with style and elegance. I think we ought to go back to the harbour and sort of pursue the latter stages of the glory days. We're drawing more towards the end of this podcast. Could you give us a little clue as to what the latter stages are in terms of the decline of the town as such a vibrant place? The town is declined, probably over about two centuries, to be fair. This was the second largest port in the country at one point, and it was transporting a lot of coal. Now, as demand increased and as ship sizes grew, there wasn't enough capacity in the harbour as a port. Other ports took over, such as Glasgow and Liverpool. Also, the connections in terms of transport weren't particularly good, and they have better connections, a bigger workforce, and a better level of accommodation for the people who would be working actually on the port. So that was the first decline in terms of the port. Also, the railways started to take over. They had railway sidings next to the shipbuilding yard, and they used those to transport the coal. And eventually, the coal business declined, lots of the pits closed down, mainly because of inefficiency, and it wasn't feasible to keep these pits open. Eventually, the workforce moved away out of the towns, they didn't stay in the towns, they moved to the cities, and that's where all the workforce went. So there wasn't the labour to actually carry on developing the town. When we come to the 1980s, of course, we had the minor strike, and also they found faults within the geology of the mines that made them very dangerous to actually continue using. So by 1986, on the 31st of March, the last pit here in Orwell, the last pit here in Whitehaven closed, and that was the Hague Pit. The bit of a revitalisation tried to make it an important destination to visit, to explain this history, it opened as a museum but closed in 2016. So we haven't really got any legacy to look back on. This decline also impacted on the town, a lot of the people were out of work, so that started to show a general decline in the character and the condition of the buildings in the town itself. And there's also lots of buildings that were associated with these industries, they were just left to fall down and become derelict. And we're still at the end of that period, there's been a lot of money spent on it, and a lot of restoration works being done, but we've still got a long way to go. And as we look out to see the reflections of the light houses on the end of the sea wall there, the most reflected on is influence and impact on the wider world, as Whitehaven had its influences elsewhere. Indeed, right across the Atlantic, the actual gridiron street pattern that was introduced by Sir John Louder, was adopted for the extension to New York around the same time in the 1660s, 1670s to create a new New York on this gridiron pattern. So the ideas were picked up from here. And therefore became a pattern throughout America. Indeed, all the other towns as well followed suit. They found it was the best way of being able to manoeuvre up and down streets and see up and down streets and also geographically locate places. The Louder family lost interest, let's say, at what point? The yellow earl eventually got to own the estate, and he was the old of Lonsdale, the Louder's of Louder. He was more interested in his land over on the east side of Kombria and in London. And as people died, they had the death duties to pay, and they were quite substantial. And the first thing he wanted to do was offload the undesirable estates that they owned, and this was considered undesirable because he never came here. So what happened to the castle? In the 1920s, it was sold to a gentleman who immediately gave it to the community, and it was created into a hospital. And then when the West Cumberland Hospital was built in the 1950s, they moved a geriatric ward to Whitehaven Castle. And then in the 1980s, they decided to restore the building and convert it into apartments. On a personal level, is Whitehaven special? I personally think it is, I think it's got a real mixture of industrial, architectural, historical, and also the maritime history. It has something for everybody, the people are very friendly. There's a lot of positivity in the town, and there's a hope that the restoration and rejuvenation will continue. I believe you have one idea which actually links to your passion for architecture that might be implanted into this setting. Oh yes, I mean, hopefully when the Renaissance continues and we've got a lot of restoration programmes going ahead, I think it'd be a great idea to have what they call a heritage initiative, where they create investment to allocate monies to owners of buildings, to ensure that the buildings are maintained and sound, so that they are architecturally sound for the future, or even a shop fund to the restoration programme, but certainly tidying the town, redecorating the buildings and repairing them where necessary. That would be really good. Well, that's been really good, Alexandra. I've loved it, it's been since a wonderful afternoon. Your love of this place shines through to match the weather. Thank you very much. Good night. Journey Zen, we're back by the harbour in this lovely late afternoon sunshine. It's been absolutely lovely, the weather today, Mark, and it has suited this trip around town, which I have to say, I think it's been great. I've been to Whitehaven twice in the last month, so this is the third occasion, actually. Each occasion, my admiration for the place has been enhanced, and with Alexandra, it's been enhanced all the more. Yeah, look, I think it's fair to say, isn't it? It's a little bit rough around the edges, and it could do with some TLC. But, having said that, that TLC will be applied to what is a really fascinating and very, very beautiful base. It's always great to be out with somebody who knows what they're talking about. And Alexandra showed us the diversity of architecture, that kind of rubbing shoulders of the higgledy-piggledy old town with this new grid system, which is absolutely fascinating. But also, we came across some little tiny enclaves that you'd never really see, beautiful cottages, and then an example of the old warehouses, which would have been everywhere here in which, sadly, of course, have been lost. Really interesting. There's loads going on today, we've seen about three or four weddings, which is interesting, there's some live music going on. The ever-present girls, I love it, I love the seaside, and it's always great to come to the Cumbering Coast. Right, okay, our housekeeping mark, first and foremost, we should mention it yet again. Heftid, heftid, this fabulous online magazine and newsletter, which comes out monthly, but with articles in between. And there's a lot going on there at the moment, you write a little column for it, your most recent one. How well in, wasn't it? How well in? Really interesting way. Oh, yeah, well, this is it, there's no pure way up a mountain. You can actually trot off a route and do what we've done today, looking around the town, you can find unusual places that have their own part of the geology or the human history of a place and introduce you to new perspectives and vistas, and that's what I've tried to do in the article, and I've got one lined up for September as well. Great, that's your column, then we have Alan Cleaver, local, of course, of Whitehaven, who writes a lovely little column there. If you like country stride and you want to get a little bit more in between episodes, there's a whole lot more at Heftid, and you can find it very simply by going to country stride website and follow the link at the top to Heftid newsletter. Visit us at www.countrystride.co.uk. Next up, there are a few tickets left to our end of summer gathering. Oh, goodness, coming up very soon now, Mark. On the 19th of September, which is a Thursday. That's in Ambleside, Tom McNally talking about what lies beneath some of our minds and quarries. He's got some beautiful photos of that. And then we've got Phoebe Smith talking about how long walks have benefited her mental health. Really interesting that will be. Thirdly, if you like what we do here, the best way to support us is by gifting us as little as two pounds a month on Patreon. There are many, many people who do that already. Thank you so much if you're one of them, you help keep this podcast going. But if you get something from these podcasts and would like to support us, again, go to www.countrystride.co.uk. And you'll find out how you can support us on Patreon. We're on social media, Mark. Oh, yeah, Facebook and Twitter. At Countrystride 1, we're on Instagram as well, I believe. Yes, we are, yeah, we're on Instagram as well. So, if you want to see any photos from these visits that we make, then there's an awful lot more. Inclusive, gorgeous blue sky pictures of white haven today. I've been taking some little videos as well, so we'll put up some of them. Anyway, look, that's it from today and from lovely white haven on a very rare blue sky day. We're signing off and saying, we'll see you on next fortnight's, Countrystride. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]