The History of Morecambe and Heysham Past and Present

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Parkinson Property has been letting and managing property in the Lancaster and Morecambe area since 1986 and we provide a complete property management service. High on the South Downs, he learns how trains used to carry day-trippers up the climb to the Devil's Dyke, where flying kites was a popular past-time. The town still hosts a rugby league team, with Heysham Atoms playing from their Trimpell Sports and Social Club base. He begins in Barkingside, where Victorian philanthropist Thomas Barnardo made it his mission to transform the lives of destitute children, tries his hand at loading a container onto a pocket wagon at Tilbury Docks, and ends his trip in Rochester, where he encounters a host of familiar characters and explores a town that was an inspiration for many of Charles Dickens' works. He learns how the railways helped to make Birmingham the pen-making capital of the world, hears the chilling tale of one of 19th-century Britain's most notorious murderers and samples the delicacies concocted in a Victorian kitchen at Shugborough Hall.

Portillo goes underground at Big Pit coal mine in Blaenavon, where he discovers how miners powered the Industrial Revolution. Portillo visits the oldest working factory in the world at Cromford, explores the country's first public park in Derby and finds out why Burton's beer is said to be the best. The Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group subsequently sought to correct the GP's claims and clarified the etiology of vitamin D deficiency in the local population, explaining "rickets is a very rare condition and has multiple causes". Travelling on to Mevagissey, he goes pilchard fishing, discovering that the pilchard was renamed as the Cornish sardine in the 1950s, and visits the Lost Gardens of Heligan on the Heligan estate. Portillo investigates the Victorian origins of snooker, before ploughing a crooked furrow at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester.Along the way, he does the washing in Port Sunlight—a model village on the Wirral—and hears stories about the aptly named George Francis Train's time in Birkenhead, Merseyside. Morecambe suffered a decades-long decline after a series of incidents that damaged tourism and the local economy. Following in the footsteps of Victorian holidaymakers, he travels north to Crieff to experience the popular Crieff Hydro.

Portillo samples 19th-century foodie delicacies, explores a stunning landscape shot to fame by rails and royals, and risks life and limb for the gift of the gab.This photograph was taken in 1940 at a time when the brewing of nettle drink in Heysham had become widespread.

On 3 August 1928, the name changed again when the Corporation of Morecambe amalgamated with Heysham Urban District Council to form the Municipal Borough of Morecambe and Heysham. Portillo starts in Faversham, where he visits the Shepherd Neame Brewery, one of the oldest in Britain. Portillo observes the amazing engineering feat involved in building the railway along Dublin's treacherous East coast, explores 19th-century crime and punishment in a Victorian jail, and finds out how the lions of Dublin Zoo changed the fortunes of the railways. Heysham’s history spans many centuries and its landscape has been the feature of several notable works of art.

At a full meeting of the Morecambe Hotel and Tourism Association on Monday 8 March 2010, it was unanimously resolved that the MHTA would join with Bay Tourism to become one association under the name of the Bay Tourism Association and the MHTA would cease to operate as an association. Along the way, he meets a former locomotive engineer who offers him the chance to drive a steam engine. We want to create an archive of images of Heysham and the surrounding area and so we are asking for anyone with suitable photographs or postcards if they could submit the images to us so that we can scan the image and build up the archive.