barrow

If you wanted to, you could travel to Barrow-in-Furness by ship.
But most people go by road or rail, along the southern edge of the long peninsular north of Morecambe Bay.

It feels out of the way, isolated. You're greeted by a horizon lacking high-rise or multistorey buildings.
What stands out are the Victorian Town Hall Tower and a great big pale grey shed - the Devonshire Dock, where BAE Systems, formerly Vickers, build submarines for the Navy.

The town centre's got boarded up shops - not surprising for any town in Britain nowadays, but weirdly they've plastered pictures over the front windows, of what that shop would ideally look like if it was actually trading as a shop. Mustang Sally's once was an "American Diner". Now it's a poster of an "American Diner".

Even more bizarrely, some of these postered shopfronts have also been infilatrated by celebrities. Even in dereliction, it seems we can't do without them. Standing inside the former Rapid Snaps photoshop, for instance, you suddenly come face to face with Gok Wan. But you realise he's not real, because he hasn't got any legs behind that piece of shop furniture. 

Barrow Island, reached by a roadbridge, contains the dockyards. And block after block of red sandstone tenements, made for shipyard workers in the nineteenth century. It resembles Glasgow, of old.