Fleetwood is more than a Fisherman’s Friend

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Fleetwood, a fishing town out on a limb, perched where the River Wyre meets the vast tidal waters of Morecambe Bay and the Irish Sea.

But the inveterate traveller in me couldn’t resist riding the tram from Blackpool to the end of the line, where the North Euston Hotel is the first of many surprises piquing my interest.

A curvy grand dame with neoclassical features, it came about thanks to a partnership between two men: local landowner, politician and financier Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood and Decimus Burton, an esteemed architect who embellished many of London’s royal parks and upscale streets.

Peeking into the hotel (it’s still operating), I walk through the kempt gardens opposite, where there’s a bronze statue of Hesketh-Fleetwood, then cross to the esplanade, where plaques and information boards convey the story of this Lancashire outpost, from its ancient history — think Romans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons — to the creation in 1841 of Fleetwood, one of England’s first planned Victorian towns.

A liberal-minded gent, Hesketh-Fleetwood envisaged this as a holiday resort for the working class of the north of England.

The seeds were planted in his mind when he visited St Leonards-on-Sea, a new resort that Burton had conjured next to Hastings, a fishing town on England’s south coast. At the tip of the Fylde peninsula, Fleetwood was fashioned during the advent of the railways and linked by a new line to London via Preston, for whom Hesketh-Fleetwood was a member of parliament.

For a brief period in the 1840s, with Britain’s west coast mainline not yet completed, Fleetwood became a popular spot for those travelling between England and Scotland. Passengers would come by boat from Scottish ports, stay at the North Euston Hotel, then catch an onward train to London. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert called by in 1847 on their return journey south from Balmoral, their royal retreat in Scotland (Her Majesty gave Hesketh-Fleetwood her white gloves as a gift).

Heavily in debt from building the town and its railway, Fleetwood’s founder suffered a hammer blow in the 1850s when direct trains started linking Glasgow with London Euston, leaving Fleetwood bypassed. To add salt to the wound, Blackpool was emerging as the premier resort on the Lancashire coast — a crown that, despite many ups and downs, it still holds.

While I do love a bit of Blackpool, Fleetwood has its own, sleepier charms. You could walk for ages in peace by the briny waterfront, go crabbing at the boating lake, bag some fish and chips and lay down a blanket by the sand dunes or in the esplanade gardens sloping by the Mount, a hilltop pavilion and events venue from which Fleetwood’s first residential streets fanned out.

When the tide is favourable, you can board a 10-minute foot ferry across the Wyre estuary to Knott End, a quiet village with its own promenade and pubs.

I stick to Fleetwood, admiring other works by Decimus Burton, including two lighthouses he built to aid vessels navigating the bay’s treacherous sandbanks. The tallest, the Pharos, a red sandstone tower looming almost 30m above today’s parked cars, took inspiration from the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt.

I see more of Burton’s legacy, including Queen’s Terrace, a row of neoclassical houses, where both the architect and Hesketh-Fleetwood lived for a time. Now divided into offices and flats, the terrace neighbours the former Customs House, also designed by Burton and repurposed as the Fleetwood Museum.

Well worth the £4 ($8.30) entrance fee, it chronicles the ebbs and flows of a town that developed a more industrial edge, with its expanding port thronging with fishing vessels, shipyards and docks, where cargo from across the globe — Caribbean sugar, Californian grain, Baltic timber and flax — would be unloaded.

Maritime exhibits, from fishing nets to models of ocean-going trawlers, dominate the museum.

One gallery is dedicated to Fisherman’s Friend. Created in 1865 by a Fleetwood pharmacist, James Lofthouse, it fused menthol, eucalyptus and liquorice, helping to soothe the ailments of local mariners who would angle for shrimp and cockles in the bay and go further offshore, fishing in the harsh and frigid North Atlantic waters around Iceland and Greenland. More than five billion of these lozenges are still produced annually in Fleetwood with most exported overseas (a screen in the gallery streams Fisherman’s Friend TV adverts from countries including Australia).

Also in the museum are bygone travel posters of Fleetwood and photographs of the town’s favourite sons and daughters, notably the tenor Alfie Boe and world champion boxer Jane Couch, the daughter of a trawler “decky” (deckhand).

The biggest exhibit is Harriet, a ketch-rigged fishing smack (ship) sheltered in a shed out back. Built in Fleetwood in 1893, it was used for catching fish like sole and hake before her retirement in 1977. Pointing out its fine details — including the pitch pine planking on a formidable oak frame — is Peter, one of the museum’s volunteers, who has a palpable pride in the town and is keen to share stories and hazy memories from Fleetwood’s heyday.

He tells me there’s still a buzz and bundles of community spirit on Fleetwood Day, one of its annual family-friendly festivals, held in early May.

Cut off from the national rail network in the late 1960s and with its fishing industry in decline since the “cod wars” of the 1970s, Fleetwood is often regarded as one of England’s “left-behind” coastal towns, scarred by decades of neglect from central government and with pockets of deprivation and one too many boarded-up shops.

The town’s high street — the first in England to have trams running the full length of it — is lined with down-to-earth watering holes and eateries, charity stores, bookies, booze shops, barbers and beauty parlours. I like the bakeries (full of tempting homemade sausage rolls and vanilla cream buns) and smart retro artworks promoting Fleetwood’s pleasures.

The liveliest spot in town — at least on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday (9am to 4pm) — is the market, which has about 150 indoor and outdoor stalls and a mix of old-fashioned English and cosmopolitan flavours. To an audio backdrop of pop tunes from yesteryear, the chirps of gulls and Lancashire chatter, I wander by everything from clothes and hardware to a classic market cafe and Caribbean and Thai food kiosks.

Exiting the market, past a unit selling mobility scooters, I skip by a gang of pensioners with faded sailors’ tattoos on their forearms, and head to the Fisherman’s Walk tram stop, opposite which is an anchor and a little wooden boat with flowers.

Blackpool is just over a half-hour away, but it’s a lovely day, and I’m in no rush, so I’ll break up the ride with stops at other unsung towns and villages, enjoying walks along their uncluttered promenades and clifftop trails as the Irish Sea sways and sparkles in the afternoon sunshine.