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Heysham Harbour

Despite a new railway hotel and passenger station being opened at Northumberland Road, Poulton Le Sands (as Morecambe was then known) proved to be far from ideal as a practical port due to its dependency on the tide. In the 1860s, the Midland Railway Company entered an agreement with Furness Railways to transfer its Northern Ireland passenger service from Poulton Le Sands to Piel on the Cumbrian coast - served by the Furness Railway..
Despite the initial success of this partnership however, the Midland Railway Company decided to develop its own port at Heysham where deep-water access was more reliable. In 1865 there was an Act of Parliament entitled  Heysham Railway and Pier Bill. Lancashire Record Office hold an Ordnance Survey sheet showing the site of the proposed Heysham Pier.
In 1897, the Midland Railway Company purchased land for the construction of the new harbour and railway  link. Their contractors, Price & Wills (harbour) and Godfrey & Liddelow (railway) began construction in the same year. By 1898, there were about 200 men employed and this figure soon reached approximately 2,000.
Workers (navvies, short for ‘navigators’) were housed in two wooden 'villages' known as Klondyke and Dawson City, being named after a river and a town in the area of the North American gold rush which had started in 1896.
The Midland Railway archives from 1897 appear to reveal a navvy village on the site of the present Trumacar schools..

This striking aerial view of Heysham Harbour dates from about 1940 and is from the John Price collection. The Oil Jetty can be seen extending from the north harbour wallI and that dates from 1939/40
The photo was published by Peter Cook in the 2013 Annual report of Lancaster Birdwatching Society and reproduced with his permission.
The Ordnance Survey map (1915-19) below shows approximately the same area as the photograph,

The harbour extended out from the headlands Near Naze in Half Moon Bay and Red Nab rocks (bottom centre of map) with two substantial sea walls to a narrow mouth just short of the deep water channel shown on the map as (Heysham) ‘Lake’.
See separate page for the area before the Harbour was constructed.
Two distinct areas were enclosed, the  roughly rectangular Harbour basin itself about 800m long  by 200m wide. and a large triangular area accessed by a lock from the south side of the harbour basin near the harbour entrance and intended to be both a wet and dry dock but never developed. Eventually this became known as the ‘Dry Dock’ despite a substantial area of it being a freshwater pool as can be seen in the photograph above right.
 

For an 1898 extract for the Visitor newspaper describing the early works at the harbour    click here.
A fuller account of the harbour construction is provided by the diary of a Heysham harbourmaster, Captain A R Wilmott in  Across the Water - A History of Shipping in Morecambe Bay, edited by Avril Moncaster (2009: pp 42-49).

Heysham Harbour was officially opened by the Midland Railway Company in 1904 with direct rail connection, and four new steamers (Antrim, Donegal, Londonderry and Manxman) were built to open services to Belfast and Douglas.