Tribute to an era

The area around Whitehaven was settled by Irish-Norse vikings in the tenth century. The area name of Copeland, which includes Whitehaven, indicates that the land was purchased from the Kingdom of Strathclyde, possibly with loot from Ireland.

The Priory of St Bees owned the village of Whitehaven until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1539. Before 1715 the parish of St. Bees included Whitehaven. The town was largely the creation of the Lowther family in the 17th century. In 1630 Sir Christopher Lowther purchased the estate and used Whitehaven as a port for exporting coal from the Cumbrian coalfield, particularly to Ireland. In 1634 he built a stone pier where ships could load and unload cargoes.

Whitehaven grew into a major coal mining town during the 18th and 19th centuries and also became a substantial commercial port on the back of this trade.
John Paul Jones led a naval raid upon the town in 1778 during the American War of Independence; it was the last invasion of England .

The town has links to many notable people: Jonathan Swift, who claimed that an over-fond nurse kidnapped him and brought him to Whitehaven for three years in his infancy; Mildred Gale, grandmother of George Washington; and William Wordsworth, who often came into town to visit his family.

Whitehaven is the most complete example of planned Georgian architecture in Europe and recently has been pursuing growth through tourism. Due to Whitehaven's planned layout with streets in a right-angled grid, many historians believe that Whitehaven was the blueprint for the New York City street grid system.