England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Whitehaven St James

The Parish

The chapelry of Whitehaven St James, its mother parish being St Bees, is one of 3 such chapelries serving the town & port of Whitehaven which sits in the extreme west of Cumberland on its Irish Sea coastline and some 40 miles southwest of the county town of Carlisle. Whitehaven sits largely between the course of the A595 road (which runs from the A66 near Cockermouth all along the western coast of Cumbria to the port of Barrow in Furness) and the sea. The stories regarding the origins of the town's name are largely apocryphal but revolve around the port and the pale cliffs which lie to both north and south. Whilst the Vikings certainly visited the haven and may well have had a summer camp hereabouts until Tudor times there was little here beyond a few fisherman's huts. The core of the town is clearly from above a planned town with a neatly laid-out grid of streets angled on a northeast to southwest orientation. Development came courtesy of the money of the Lowther family who finance a quay in 1634 and began the town's construction in 1666. Whitehaven initially flourished as a port exporting mainly to Ireland but also as a fishing port for herring. The twin industries of coal & iron grew Whitehaven substantially, coal being extracted from deep mines which extended a great distance under the sea, the export trade peaked in 1928 at 400,000 tons per annum. Iron was exported too but also served a ship-building industry too. Whitehaven's decline was largely due to its position isolated on Cumberland's western coast with a largely rural hinterland, by 1980 coal exports had ceased and the town has something of a post-industrial feel as a consequence. During its prosperity Whitehaven grew from the initial laid-out core and is nowadays part of a broad urban fringe to the coast stretching for almost 4 miles from Parton through the town and along the valley of Pow Beck to Mirehouse in the south. As a coastal community many small streams take water into the nearby Irish Sea. Whitehaven is sited at between sea level and 120 metres in the higher parts of Hensingham, inland the coastal fringe buts up to the flanks of Cumberland's Fells rising to 352 metres on Dent, the first objective on A A Wainwright's Coast to Coast Trail. St James' chapelry occupies a tiny area of the town, the population of Whitehaven swelled during the period of this transcript to almost 12,000 with huge numbers arriving to work in its industries from Scotland, Ireland and even the Isle of Man, the volume of marriages recorded here for St James is consistent with a population of around 6,500 in this chapelry. Domesday Book has no coverage in the west beyond the course of the River Esk consequently Whitehaven has no mention in that tome.

The Church

St James' church stands on the hills to the north of the town centre on Queen Street, it is a relatively modern church built in 1753 to serve the rapidly growing population of the town. Strangely the design for the church was created by Sir James Lowther's mining engineer, Carlisle Spedding, his only such work. The design of the nave as a broad box and now covered in a roughcast makes the building appear decidedly modern. The church comes complete with the traditional western tower, here some decoration is evident in the form of pinnacles in contrast to the austerity of the nave. The final flourish is the elliptical apse at the eastern end, even if its Venetian style windows are now blocked. In contrast to the austerity of the exterior Pevsner found the interior to be "serenely beautiful" with a fine sliding door with etched glass an impressive entrance. Like most urban churches this is one to approach on foot after finding nearby parking. The church is not laid out east to west as is traditional but southwest to northeast within a dedicated block, this means the better angles are skewed more eastwards than the normal southeastern aspect favoured for its light, close properties to the west limit views from that angle.