ENGLAND’S “saddest town”, where the high street is bare but for barbers and vape shops, is set to be transformed by a £200million facelift.
Once a bustling port town, Barrow-in-Furness has fallen into the gutter after the steel industry dried up.
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Locals complain the Cumbrian town’s streets are “plagued by boarded-up shops and broken windows”.
When a popular YouTuber who explores Britain’s roughest places visited Barrow, he branded it “England‘s saddest town”.
And stats show the town is racked with poverty, with the Office for National Statistics officially classifying it as one of England’s most deprived.
But Barrow’s woes will soon be reversed, after a major £200million regeneration project was announced to get the town in shape for an influx of workers.
A sparkling-new 800-home development is chalked for a brownfield site near the dockyard, and a a high-tech training centre has already popped up.
The regeneration project can’t come soon enough for fed-up locals.
Trevor Vincent, a local charity shop worker, said: “Everything is closing down – all we’ve got left are barbers, takeaways and vape shops.”
Spearheaded by Simon Case, a former Cabinet secretary, the project – dubbed Team Barrow – hopes to restore the spot on the doorstep of the Lake District to its former glory.
Case said: “It is the living, breathing example of what happened to some industrial towns after the government cut defence spending following the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
At one end of Barrow sits the enormous BAE Systems factory, which builds the UK’s key military submarines – including the Trident nuclear programme.
It already employs more than 14,500 people, but a surge in orders means the factory must expand its workforce, to be hosted in Barrow.
Demand from the Astute, Dreadnought and SSN-AUKUS submarine programmes means BAE need to ramp up production.
Over the next decade, the Barrow’s population is expected to swell from 60,000 to 90,000 as workers and their families settle in.
Some of them will be housed in the new 800-home waterfront development called Marine Village.
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And the University of Cumbria has built a new campus offering a range of courses from engineering to nursing and computer science.
Anticipating Barrow’s bustling future, Case even likened the town to Bournville – the village near Birmingham built to house workers at the Cadbury’s factory.
He said: “With the pressure that we’ve got on getting the Astute boats finished, then Dreadnought and then Aukus, we started to focus on this two years ago for almost Bournville-like reasons.”
“The town is a strategic national asset, although it hasn’t always been viewed that way.
“Pretty quickly, we realised we needed Team Barrow to create an environment that would deliver that happy, skilled workforce we need to support the defence nuclear enterprise.
“Thanks to Mr Putin and Mr Xi, the business case makes itself!”
The government, the local council and BAE Systems have joined forces to deliver the plan.
Alex Norris, the local growth minister, said: “Visiting Barrow last year I saw the huge impact Team Barrow is having in revitalising, strengthening and supporting the community.
“Establishing a new independent board is a vital step in ensuring every penny of the government’s £200 million funding is well spent, and I urge the community to get involved in having their say in shaping Barrow.”
