ABSTRACT
The Lancaster area, with a population of about 125000, is on the edge of the Lake District and is tucked into the north-west corner of Lancashire. Its development was peripheral to the core centres of nineteenth-century industrial growth in Lancashire, which were based on cotton spinning and weaving. It had been a prosperous port for the Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century but that had declined by the end of the century. Only later in the nineteenth century did Lancaster’s fortunes revive with the development of production of the textile-related products, linoleum and oil-cloth. Morecambe, five miles away on the coast (and part of the same local authority since 1974) developed into a working-class holiday resort much later than many of the major resorts such as Blackpool and never attracted very large numbers of visitors from Lancashire itself.
