Fleetwood, United Kingdom

A manor house at present-day Rossall, in the southwest of the town, was in the possession of the Allen family by the time of Henry VIII. The Allens were prominent Roman Catholics, and Henry VIII repossessed the land. Cardinal William Allen was born at the manor house in 1532. It was ultimately sold to Thomas Fleetwood, comptroller of the Royal Mint, whose son Edmund, expanded the house into Rossall Hall. The land remained in the Fleetwood family for 300 years.

By the 1830s, the house and estate was in the ownership of Edmund's descendant Peter Hesketh, High Sheriff of Lancashire and MP for Preston. A man of somewhat liberal views for his time, Hesketh believed that the sheltered harbour and views over Morecambe Bay gave the area the makings of a busy seaport and popular resort for the less-affluent. With no rail link between London and Scotland, he envisaged Fleetwood as the transfer point between the railway and the steamers to Scotland, and set about encouraging a railway link from Preston. With a new career in parliament to prepare for, he engaged Frederick Kemp as his agent. He originally considered naming the new town Wyreton or New Liverpool, but after changing his name to Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood in 1831, he settled on the name Fleetwood. After some delays, he recruited the prominent architect Decimus Burton, whose work in St Leonard's-on-Sea he had admired, to lay out what would be the first planned town of the Victorian era. The plans were complete by 1835, and construction of the first buildings and the railway line began in 1836.

Burton's plan was to use the largest of the sand-dunes on the north-facing shore as the focus of a half-wheel street layout. This was landscaped, and became known as the Mount. It served as the hub of Burton's half-wheel design, the main residential streets acted as the spokes, and the main commerce area of Dock Street was the rim of the wheel. The oldest surviving building in the town, once the custom house, later the town hall and latterly Fleetwood Museum, dates from 1836 and housing from as early as 1838 still exists in the town. The crown jewel was the North Euston Hotel, built in 1841, a fine semi-circular building overlooking the bay and the river's estuary. The hotel was built to serve overnight guests making the railway journey from Euston, and was close to the point of departure for the steamers to Scotland. This journey was made by Queen Victoria in 1847, but by the mid-1850s the completion of the western railway link between London and Scotland over Shap Fell rendered Fleetwood's role as a transport terminus obsolete.

Burton designed two lighthouses for the town: The Upper Lighthouse, usually referred to as the Pharos (after the Pharos of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), can be seen for 13 miles (21 km) and Beach Lighthouse is visible for 9 miles (14 km). Both opened in 1840. A third lighthouse, Wyre Light, built in 1839–40 by blind engineer Alexander Mitchell, offshore on the northeast corner of North Wharf, was the first screw pile lighthouse to be built in Great Britain. Fleetwood is the only town in the United Kingdom to possess three lighthouses and the two within the town itself remain fully operational. Wyre Light has now fallen into a state of disrepair.

Fleetwood Market, still a prominent permanent market, was established in 1840.

By 1838, Hesketh-Fleetwood had run into serious financial difficulties, with costs for the railway in particular ultimately exceeding £300,000. He had numerous financial arguments with Frederick Kemp, who borrowed against the estate revenues to finance the expansion of the town, and was suspected of taking financial advantage of Sir Peter. Hesketh-Fleetwood became short of cash and was forced to mortgage his properties. Depressed, he gradually withdrew from the project, and by 1844 he had been obliged to sell much of his estate. He leased Rossall Hall itself to the Church of England, which intended to set up a boarding school as a North of England equivalent of Marlborough School. Under the auspices of Rev. St. Vincent Beechey, the vicar of Fleetwood, it was to become Rossall School. Virtually bankrupt, Hesketh-Fleetwood retired to Brighton, giving up his parliamentary obligations in 1847. Meanwhile, Kemp's influence expanded. He had set up the Fleetwood Estates Company to manage the land, and the North Lancashire Steam Navigation Company in 1843 to manage the expanding steamer trade. However, by the late 1850s, the combination of the new western railway route and the rise of neighbouring Blackpool as a prominent seaside resort signalled a decline in the town's fortunes.