Cumbria Community Foundation - Furness: Opportunities and Challenges 2021

F U R N E S S – O P P O R T U N I T I E S & C H A L L E N G E S 7 Most lies within the Barrow and Furness parliamentary constituency although much of High Furness is in Westmorland and Lonsdale and is also inside the Lake District National Park. People have lived in Furness for thousands of years. Ulverston received its market charter in 1280 and Furness Abbey was a wealthy Cistercian monastery in medieval times. The Industrial Revolution changed the area out of all recognition. Barrow was a fishing village in 1841 but the discovery of haematite deposits – iron ore – prompted a period of rapid growth aided by the coming of the railway. Today, Barrow Borough – which includes Dalton-in- Furness and Askam – is by far the largest town with 67,800 inhabitants. Ulverston, with a population of 17,558, is the second largest. 1 Paradise is the name of a hamlet on the A595 between Ireleth and Kirkby-in-Furness. Although Barrow’s iron and steel industry is long gone, it maintains a proud shipbuilding tradition and manufacturing remains a key component of the local economy. Essentially, Furness is an area of striking contrasts. A place where industrial decline sits alongside the technologies of the future, where mountains, lakes and the wide horizons of Morecambe Bay sit alongside the scars of industrial decay, where pockets of extreme poverty sit close to areas of prosperity. There’s nowhere like Furness, where even seekers of Paradise 1 will be satisfied.