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Whitehaven is a town and port on the English north west coast and near to the Lake District National Park in Cumberland, Cumbria, England. It lies by road 38 miles (61 km) south-west of Carlisle and 45 miles (72 km) to the north of Barrow-in-Furness. It was the administrative seat of the former Borough of Copeland, and has a town council for the parish of Whitehaven. The population of the town was 23,986 at the 2011 census. The town's growth was largely due to the exploitation of the extensive coal measures by the Lowther family, driving a growing export of coal through the harbour from the 17th century onwards. It was also a major port for trading with the American colonies, and was, after London, the second busiest port of England by tonnage from 1750 to 1772. This prosperity led to the creation of a Georgian planned town in the 18th century which has left an architectural legacy of over 170 listed buildings. Whitehaven has been designated a "gem town" by the Council for British Archaeology due to the historic quality of the town environment. Whitehaven was the site of a major chemical industry after World War II, but both that and the coal industry have disappeared, and today the major industry is the nearby Sellafield nuclear complex, which is the largest local employer of labour and has a significant administrative base in the town. Whitehaven includes a number of former villages, estates and suburbs, such as Mirehouse, Woodhouse, Kells and Hensingham, and is served by the Cumbrian coast railway line and the A595 road. Early history Although there was a Roman fort at Parton, around 1.2 miles (1.9 km) to the north, there is no evidence of a Roman settlement on the site of the present town of Whitehaven. The area was settled by Irish-Norse Vikings in the 10th century. The area name of Copeland, which includes Whitehaven, indicates that the land was purchased from the Kingdom of Strathclyde, possibly with loot from Ireland. Following the arrival of the Normans, in about 1120 St Bees Priory was founded by William de Meschin, which was granted a large tract of land from the coast at Whitehaven to the river Keekle, and then south down the River Ehen to the sea. This included the small fishing village of Whitehaven. Following Henry VIII's dissolution of the priory in 1539, ownership of this estate passed through a number of secular landlords until it passed into the hands of the Lowther family in the 17th century. Whitehaven was a township within the "Preston Quarter" of the parish of St Bees, and the town's churches were chapels-of-ease of St Bees until 1835 when three ecclesiastical districts were created in Whitehaven. Growth and prosperity The modern growth of Whitehaven started with the purchase by Sir Christopher Lowther of the Whitehaven estate in 1630 and the subsequent development of the port and the mines. In 1634 he built a stone pier providing shelter and access for shipping, enabling the export of coal from the Cumberland Coalfield, particularly to Ireland. This was a key event in the rapid growth of the town from a small fishing village to an industrial port. In 1642 the manor of St. Bees was inherited by Sir John Lowther, 2nd Baronet, of Whitehaven (1642–1706), who developed the town of Whitehaven, its coal industry and the trade with Ireland. He oversaw the rise of Whitehaven from a small fishing village (at his birth consisting of some fifty houses and a population of about 250) to a planned town three times the size of Carlisle. At his death the 'port of Whitehaven' had 77 registered vessels, totalling about four thousand tons, and was exporting more than 35,000 tons of coal a year. Whitehaven's growing prosperity was also based on tobacco. By 1685 there were ships regularly bringing tobacco from the British colonies of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania in America, and by the early 18th century about 10% of England's tobacco imports passed through Whitehaven. By the middle of the 18th century it was the second or third port in England for tobacco imports. The tobacco was then sold on the domestic market or re-exported, e.g. to Ireland, France and the Netherlands. However, after the Acts of Union 1707 united England with Scotland, thereby abolishing excise duties between them, the port of Glasgow began to take over Whitehaven's tobacco trade, leading to the later creation of Glasgow's Tobacco Lords. By the second half of the 18th century there was a marked decline in shipping of tobacco via Whitehaven, and by 1820 the Customs Collector did not mention tobacco in his report on Whitehaven. Whitehaven Town Hall, which started life as a private house built for a merchant, was completed in 1710. Daniel Defoe visited Whitehaven in the 1720s and wrote that the town had grown up from a small place to be very considerable by the coal trade, that it is now the most eminent port in England for shipping off of coals, except Newcastle and Sunderland and even beyond the last. They have of late fallen into some merchandising also, occasioned by the strange great number of their shipping, and there are now some considerable merchants; but the town is yet but young in trade. To replace the tobacco trade, Whitehaven turned to importing sugar from Barbados, cotton from Antigua and coffee and cocoa from St Lucia. Due to the coal trade Whitehaven was, after London, the second port of England in terms of tonnage of shipping from 1750 to 1772. Even by 1835 Whitehaven was still the fifth placed port, with 443 ships registered, but by the end of the 19th century only 68 vessels were registered. Whitehaven was involved with the transatlantic slave trade, and records show slave ships leaving Whitehaven for voyages to Africa between 1711 and 1767. In 2006, the Copeland Council (Whitehaven's local authority) issued a formal apology for Whitehaven's role in the slave trade. Scottish-American naval officer John Paul Jones raided the town in 1778 during the American Revolutionary War, burning some merchant ships in the harbour. During the 19th century the port of Whitehaven was overtaken by Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, as they had deep-water dock facilities and were closer to large centres of population and industry. The huge development of a national railway network had also reduced Whitehaven's 18th century competitive advantage of having coal extracted very close to a harbour for shipment by sea. An 1888 legal case, Bush v Whitehaven Port and Town Trustees, was one of a series of legal cases involved in the development of the doctrine of frustration of contract in English law. Coal mining James Pit is a pit in Whitehaven. The school "St James' Juniors" is on the site of the old pit. Early mining The earliest reference to coal mining in the Whitehaven area is in the time of Prior Langton (1256–82) of St Bees Priory, concerning the coal mines at Arrowthwaite. St Bees Priory was dissolved in 1539, and the lands and mineral rights passed to secular owners. The first o.... Discover the Matthew Marchon popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Matthew Marchon books.