Barrow wasn't always like this - I mean, it was never the Ritz on Broadway, but as a young tyke I do recall being able to spend at least a few hours doing something worthwhile on that street. The premier topic of discussion among pensioners in this town has very swiftly become the death of the high street, something I know very well myself from working in a café frequented by octogenarians.
"Isn't it just dreadful...there's nowt you can do in Barra' anymore!"
"Oh I know, I know..."
"Well, they shut down Debenham's, Goldsmiths, Topshop, River Island, Pound World, Body Shop, Thornton's, Diggles..."
"Of course, simply terrible isn't it..."
"...Marks & Spencer's, ooh me and our Derek used to go there for a coffee and cake bless his soul, WH Smith's..."
"Indeed, yes...another latte?"
Still, despite its dilapidation that would put 28 Days Later to shame, there is something oddly tender about Barrow's high street, be that only due to my nostalgia value or not. Standing by the market hall entrance on a January evening and watching the lights of the Buccleuch dock come to life with the rain thumping lightly on the rooftops...it's quaint, and it's homely.
Barrow-in-Furness at night is a rather different story.
I could count the number of pubs I feel truly safe in on one hand, and yet it makes for a wonderful night out on the town. In the February of 2022 myself, Jonty and Rob would hit up Barrow on a Friday night quite often. Starting in the Duke of Edinburgh (one of the aforementioned 'safe' pubs, a hotel with a la carte dining), idle chit-chat is passed around over a couple crisp pints of Lancaster Amber Ale, the log fire roaring as teenagers speed their hatchbacks down the main road outside. Blur's Parklife plays in the background and I decide it's a very fitting tune for the night ahead, so I keep it in my head. The next natural step is to head down past the Tesco Metro and terraced houses on Rawlinson street, jacket collars turned up in the light, cold drizzle.
The Blue Lamp is the kind of pub you would absolutely be battered in. We walk in to an atmosphere of rowdy, leathered late-20s lads stretching out their muscle fit tees and sporting the "dickhead's skin fade". Another round - a Carlsberg, two Stella Artois. We struggle to hear one another over the foghorn voices of the group of women next to us, and the fat bloke in the corner is staring at Rob weirdly, so we split. And we split to my favorite spot, my Jerusalem in a vast ocean of piss. The Robin Hood.
One wanders in to a lively, lovely atmosphere of both old and young, from flatcaps to stussy shirts, each worn bench seat overflowing with faces of red and tipsy faces. Guinness is a requirement, three pints straight from the source. Liquid blacker than Thatcher's heart, brought to the lips to instantly wash away the February cold with its malty-sweet and bitter remedy. The old bloke with grey whiskers next to me tells an anecdote of going to the Guinness brewery in Dublin; I listen as closely as I ever did to a university lecturer. We sit and laugh and banter as we empty our glasses, who should we see but Matty and Jack? Long time no see, how you doing mate? Intense discussion. You're destined to do great things in life mate, I love you... ...Nah mate, I love you! We dap one another. Outside the front doorway, my frozen fingertips struggle to roll a cigarette, I fumble for my lighter. The guy next to me gets talking, a monologue about the glory of Barrow in the 80s...good for him, I think, as I gaze skyward at the frigid sky. A vast blanket of satin strewn with rough diamonds that sparkle brightly through the light pollution.
It's nearing half past 11, and we grow restless in the pubs. I have work the next morning, so a club is out of the question...salvation presents itself in the form of Preston Street Working Men's Club (though they let women in these days). The rhythm of ABBA and cheese hits thumps, drunks sit piled onto old sofas and around tables, techocolour disco strobes light up the event room like a battlefield. A very interesting place indeed.
Those Barrow pubs - the Kill One, the Ambrose, the Knights, the Labour Club - I could go on about them and my stories of Saturdays there all day. Barrow pubs are your traditional Northern industrial drinking holes; they're unrefined, loud, dodgy, cheap. They smell of stale cigarette smoke and beer-soaked carpets, there's some sort of gambling machine from 1996 stuffed in a corner, and somebody definitely got beat up there yesterday. In nearby Ulverston, the smaller and more picturesque market town, the pubs have a much different yet uniquely old English feel to them. It's local fact that at one point in the 19th century Ulverston had more pubs per capita than any other town or city in the United Kingdom. Their décor consists not of cheap 70s sofas but antique wood paneling and log fires. They're comfier and smaller, well-worn...but not in the same way Barrow's pubs are. They've been the communal spot for geezers old and young since the 1910s and have seldom changed since, permeated by tall tales, old anecdotes and arguments from decades gone by. The drink of choice is ale not lager, and there's often a friendly old pub dog laying under the tables. You don't fire down shots and hit the club after, rather you pack in round a little table bending ears into the deep hours of the night.
These pubs bring to me a nostalgia of working class Britain from an age I never experienced. They're truly the pride and staple of a working man's life - the proletariat toiled in the shipyard all day and then poured into the King's Arms to rest their tired bodies. Many pubs (like the Robin Hood I mentioned earlier) do evoke feelings of being back in the 1960s. One can imagine the same old men in blazers sipping their pints of bitter 60 years ago, and the apprentices fresh off work and ready for the weekend in their trendy new shirts. In this way, the British realism of the past resurfaces and remains poignant with each passing generation.
I look back at the decades past, the post-war, the 80s and beyond, and can pinpoint the feelings that make this realism what it is. And yet in the 21st century, a new aura of Northern life is being shaped, one that future generations might or will look back on with a similar fondness. A new breed that favours big nights out over evenings in the pub, defined by Arctic Monkeys or Sam Fender, and Jagerbombs over ale. However it all remains Northern realism at its heart and core, because it captures the soul of what life in a little town in Cumbria (or anywhere else in England) is like now. I love Barrow in the day and night, because of not in spite of its crudeness. It's my home and my pride.
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