About
Morecambe was built by the railway and lived off the holiday trade, and both facts run through everything the Heritage Centre displays. The town barely existed before the 1840s, when a railway company drove a line to the shore of the bay and created a harbour and a resort more or less from nothing, naming the place after the bay itself.
What followed was a century of remarkable success.
Trains brought hundreds of thousands of working people from the Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns, and Morecambe supplied them with piers, a promenade, ballrooms, a swimming stadium, illuminations, boarding houses and eventually a superb Art Deco hotel. The Midland Hotel of 1933, curved, white and glamorous, remains the finest thing in the town and one of the best pieces of modernist architecture on the English coast.
The Centre records all of this — the piers that burned and were demolished, the entertainers who worked the summer seasons, the landladies, the Miss Great Britain contests held here for decades, the Lancashire wakes weeks that filled the town, and the slow decline as cheap foreign package holidays drew the crowds away from the 1970s onwards.
Alongside the resort story sits the bay, which is the other half of Morecambe's identity: the vast sands, the cockle and shrimp fisheries, the guided walks across the treacherous crossing to Kents Bank, the notorious quicksands and tides, and the fishing families of the shore villages. Displays draw on temporary and permanent exhibitions covering archaeology, architecture, coastline, tourism, entertainment and the people and families of the town, assembled largely from local donation and volunteer research.
The Centre occupies a unit in the Arndale shopping centre, which is an unglamorous setting for a collection about glamour, but it puts the museum where people actually are.
It opens three days a week, charges no admission and is run by volunteers. For a town whose heyday is within living memory but whose physical evidence has largely been demolished, this kind of collecting matters more than usual. Piers burn, ballrooms are cleared and boarding houses become flats, and what remains of a resort's most successful century is very often only photographs, programmes, tickets and the recollections of the people who worked the seasons — precisely the material that a small volunteer centre is best placed to gather while there is still someone to gather it from.
Categories:
Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- The Centre opens on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 11am to 4pm — three days a week, so check before travelling.
- It is inside the Arndale shopping centre, not a standalone building, so you will be looking for a shop unit rather than a museum frontage.
- Walk down to the Midland Hotel afterwards. Seeing the 1933 building in the flesh is the natural complement to the displays, and it is only a few minutes away.
- Talk to the volunteers. Most are Morecambe residents who remember the resort in its later years, and their recollections add a great deal.
- The shopping centre setting makes this one of the most accessible small museums in the region — level entry, flat floors, lifts, accessible toilets and adjoining parking.
- Combine the visit with the promenade, the Stone Jetty and the Eric Morecambe statue for a half-day covering the whole seafront.
- If the tide is out, look properly at the sands. The scale of the bay is the thing photographs never convey, and it explains a great deal about the town.
- Never walk out onto the sands unaccompanied. The bay has fast tides and quicksands and has killed people; cross only with the official guide.
Highlights
A resort built by a railway
Morecambe is one of the clearest examples in Britain of a town created deliberately by a railway company. Before the 1840s there was little here beyond the fishing hamlet of Poulton-le-Sands; then a line was driven to the shore, a harbour built, and a resort laid out and marketed to the industrial towns inland.
The Centre documents that creation and the extraordinary growth that followed, which is a useful reminder that seaside resorts were commercial products designed to generate traffic, not organic settlements that happened to acquire visitors.
The Midland Hotel
Opened in 1933, the Midland is a curved white streamlined building of real international quality, designed by Oliver Hill with work by Eric Gill, and it remains the finest thing in Morecambe and one of the best modernist buildings on the English coast.
It was built by a railway company to signal that the resort had ambitions beyond the day-tripper trade. The Centre documents its construction, its decline into near-dereliction and its restoration, and the hotel stands on the promenade a short walk away, so the displays can be checked directly against the building.
Piers, ballrooms and lost entertainments
Morecambe had two piers, a substantial ballroom culture, a swimming stadium, a fairground and a summer season of variety entertainment that employed performers for months at a time. Almost all of it has gone — burned, demolished or closed — which makes photographic and object collecting the only remaining route to it.
The Centre's material on the West End and Central piers, the dance halls, the illuminations and the summer shows documents a whole entertainment economy that vanished within about thirty years and left remarkably little physical trace.
Morecambe Bay, cockles and shrimps
The bay is the other half of the town's identity: an immense expanse of sand and mudflat, with cockle beds and shrimp fisheries worked by families from the shore villages for generations, and potted Morecambe Bay shrimps still a recognised delicacy. The Centre documents the fishing methods, the carts and nets, the families involved and the processing.
The bay is also lethally dangerous, with fast tides and quicksands, and the displays do not soften that — a subject given terrible modern relevance by the deaths of cockle pickers in 2004.
Collections
The collection documents Morecambe and the surrounding coast, covering the town's creation as a railway resort in the 1840s, its growth through the Victorian, Edwardian and interwar periods, and its later decline. Holdings cover the piers, ballrooms, swimming stadium, fairgrounds, illuminations and summer variety seasons; the boarding house trade and the Lancashire and Yorkshire wakes weeks that supplied it; the Miss Great Britain contests; and the architecture of the town, in particular the Midland Hotel of 1933.
Material on Morecambe Bay covers the cockle and shrimp fisheries, fishing families, cross-bay guided walks and the dangers of tides and quicksands.
Further holdings include archaeology, coastal and environmental material, photographs, ephemera and family collections donated locally, supporting both permanent and changing temporary exhibitions.
The Resort
Displays on Morecambe's creation by the railway, its piers, ballrooms and entertainments, the boarding house trade, the wakes weeks and the town's long decline and partial recovery.
The Bay
Material on Morecambe Bay: the cockle and shrimp fisheries, the fishing families, the cross-bay walks, and the tides and quicksands that make the sands so dangerous.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.