Welcome to Barrow-in-Furness: the forgotten town behind the U.K.’s nuclear defense seeking resurrection.
At any given moment, a Vanguard-class submarine is somewhere in the world’s oceans, carrying up to 40 nuclear warheads, its commanders and some 130 crew prepared for an apocalyptic call from the U.K.’s prime minister to strike its target.
Tucked at the bottom of a peninsula, looking out toward the Isle of Man, is where those submarines began their life: BAE Systems’ Devonshire Dock Hall. The site is a six-pronged shipyard stretching 850 feet across and 170 feet into the air, and it stands as a kind of watchkeeper over Barrow-in-Furness, a small town of about 67,000 people in the U.K. What’s inside: the construction of nuclear-warhead-packed submarines—the expensive protectors of an entire nation.
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BAE Systems Fortune 500 Europe rankWhen the Devonshire Dock Hall was being constructed in the waning years of the Cold War, between 1982 and 1986, the U.K. government was spending around 5% of its GDP on defense. Its military put boots on the ground in the Falkland Islands while prepping for a potential war with the Soviet Union alongside NATO, pumping more money into Barrow. In the past 30 years, though, the story has reversed. U.K. government spending on defense fell through the turn of the century to a low of 2.1% of GDP by 2013. That spending decline was punctuated in Barrow by mass layoffs, collapsed supply chains, and state-driven austerity.
As the U.K. government recommits to bulking up its military, BAE Systems, the 140th-largest company in Europe by revenue in 2023, is tasked with rearming the country at sea, on the ground, and in the air. The long-suffering residents of Barrow-in-Furness, battered by years of funding cuts, declining health, and falling standards, are facing a last-chance saloon to once again reap those benefits.
Barrow’s past
Barrow has long anchored the U.K.’s enviable naval prowess. In 1847, the town had a population of just 450 people. Within 30 years, that figure had ballooned to 47,000 as Barrow’s port assembled submarines for the Royal Navy.
The town built 112 vessels in a five-year period during the Second World War, leading to German aerial bombardment in “the Barrow Blitz.” In the years after the war, Barrow continued to host naval construction, cementing the town’s status as “the Chicago of the North”; generations of shipbuilders prepared for any order that came Barrow’s way from the Ministry of Defense.
“They’ve been building submarines for a hell of a long time now. So hence, it’s no fluke that we’re leaders in that technology,” John Irving, the premises manager for Barrow’s Dock Museum, tells Fortune.
What Barrow’s residents weren’t prepared for, however, was peace.
The so-called peace dividend that followed the end of the Cold War promised a new era of lower defense spending in favor of other areas, most notably health. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, found the peace dividend allowed a marked rise in health spending without hurting the U.K.’s bottom line. At the same time, jobs began to disappear from Barrow. Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering, the operator of the shipyard from the 1970s to the early 1990s, slashed thousands of jobs in a short period after the end of the Cold War, taking more jobs in the supply chain with them.
“I am fearful of the effect that the redundancies will have on the fabric of life in my community,” John Hutton, a former MP for Barrow and Furness, said in an ominous plea to Parliament in 1992, following one of those layoff rounds.
Hutton’s fears would be realized in a way perhaps not even the biggest pessimists could predict.
“The history is that you’ve got a major employer that’s kind of dominated the town. And when that’s positive, that’s great. When it’s been in recession, that’s extremely negative,” Jonathan Brook, the Liberal Democrat leader of Westmorland and Furness Council, tells Fortune.
It’s a cruel irony that while the peace dividend enabled a countrywide increase in health spending, the health of Barrow’s citizens continued to decline. As of 2019, the local authority of Barrow-in-Furness ranked as the fourth most deprived in England for public health.
The town suffers from historically high levels of coronary heart disease, cancer, and lung disease, which have been linked to Barrow’s industrial past. As of 2021, a quarter of residents were obese, while data from late 2024 showed a quarter of the working-age population is economically inactive. Barrow’s industrial heritage can explain some of the health gaps, which were exacerbated when layoffs hit the town, an issue that has been passed on to younger generations.
The town suffers from historically high levels of coronary heart disease, cancer, and lung disease, which have been linked to Barrow’s industrial past.
“What we’re now seeing is this intergenerational worklessness,” which manifests in addiction, poor health, and premature death, says Brook.
Janet Garner, BAE’s future workforce director, remembers Barrow’s boom era. Garner joined the shipyard 39 years ago, watched as money flowed into the town in the Cold War era, and stayed to observe the after-effects of falling defense spending and years of austerity.
The BAE Systems Plc shipyard in Barrow-In-Furness, U.K.Tom Skipp/Bloomberg via Getty Images“It’s a very, very different place, and some of the challenges that the town’s got now are very entrenched,” Garner says of Barrow.
Despite deindustrialization, Barrow is still very much a town beholden to the port. A quarter of the town’s working-age population consists of BAE employees. Residents of the town also work for the Sellafield nuclear plant and Kimberly-Clark, the U.S. group behind Kleenex. Fortune 500 Europe wind contractor Ørsted also set up one of the world’s biggest wind farms in Walney, off the coast of Barrow. But there is no doubt among locals that BAE’s success is key to Barrow’s resurrection.
“What we do is about national security. So not only is it vital for us to be able to deliver our plan, it’s vital for the town. And without the two working together, it’s not going to work,” Garner says.
Rebuilding Barrow
On a clear day (not that they’re the majority), Barrow’s residents can see the peaks of the Lake District, only a short drive away from the BAE shipyard. James, a second-year apprentice with BAE, travels there with his partner, a Barrow native, on the weekends to go hiking.
“I found it very easy to settle here,” James says. (Fortune isn’t disclosing apprentices’ surnames at the request of BAE, owing to national security concerns.)
But what if employees, doing physically intense work all week, don’t want to go hiking in their downtime? Sadly, there aren’t many options.
“What we do is about national security. So not only is it vital for us to be able to deliver our plan, it’s vital for the town. And without the two working together, it’s not going to work.”
Janet Garner, BAE’s future workforce director“Have you walked around the town?” Brian Webster-Henderson, OBE, deputy vice chancellor of the University of Cumbria, asks rhetorically in response to a question about how the university might attract students outside Barrow to study at a new local campus.
“Not every student wants to climb a mountain, or row a canoe on a lake in the freezing cold, or go wild water swimming. I wouldn’t come if there was no cafés, no nightlife, and closed shops.”
To change that perception, Barrow is planning a makeover, having secured a 10-year, £200 million “Transformation Fund” unveiled under the previous Conservative government. While £20 million per year is unlikely to reverse decades of decline, Councillor Brook regards it as a “catalytic fund” that can inspire more private investment. So far, though, it’s hard to see any of that investment on Barrow’s high street. The town’s center is sparsely populated, with paintings covering some abandoned shop fronts, and wooden boarding covering those that have so far missed out on a makeover. Debenhams department store, which once anchored the town’s high street, has lain vacant since the troubled retailer abandoned its lease in 2021. In February, BAE announced the old Debenhams site would become a virtual reality training center, familiarizing younger recruits with the factory. The rest of the town, though, shows little sign of regeneration.
The stragglers
To date, many BAE employees have found a solution to Barrow’s lack of life: being in the town as little as possible.
Several companies advertise serviced apartments in the town, name-checking BAE Systems employees in their pitches for tenants, one labeling its apartments a “home away from home” for those workers staying in town from Monday to Thursday. Those workers frustrate Barrow’s recovery because they spend the majority of their paychecks elsewhere on weekends.
Abbey Apartments offers weekly bookings at a discount for employees who live in Barrow irregularly. David Clark, a Barrow native who runs Abbey Apartments, worked as an apprentice on the Trident defense program in the late ’80s and early ’90s, before being caught up in the mass layoffs that originally rocked the town.
After moving abroad to work in housing development, Clark came home in 2015 when he saw an opportunity in Barrow’s regeneration, buying the local workingmen’s club and converting it into apartments.
His part-time tenants come from all over the U.K. Clark name-checks Liverpool, London, Portsmouth, and Bristol as just some of the locations where clients spend their weekends.
“At the moment, the consultants and the professionals don’t like the way Barrow looks, which means they don’t want to live there, which means Barrow definitely needs to be improved, and the town center in particular needs to improve,” Clark states.
Phil Drane, program director of Team Barrow, is the man tasked with spending the £200 million provided under the Transformation Fund.
He accepts the town is still in its “bust” phase: “You see how much people [here] are proud of their place, and how they’ve been through tough times, and that rubs off.”
Locals and policymakers agree on what the town needs to thrive. The priorities are new housing and the replacement of older terraced housing stock. BAE operators said in 2024 that Barrow needed 900 new homes a year to facilitate people taking up new positions. This needs to be followed by a regeneration of the high street.
“If we don’t offer the right accommodation aligned to the people we want to see come into the town, then we will end up with a town full of HMOs [houses of multiple occupancy], with people that come here Monday and go home Thursday, and that will not regenerate the town,” says Garner.
Training Barrow
Around 70% of BAE’s apprentices are Barrow residents, Garner adds. Optimists believe those younger workers are well placed to benefit from an expectant industrial boom, bringing with it higher wages.
Four years ago, BAE’s apprenticeship programs for its submarines division attracted around 2,500 applicants. That number has risen to 6,000, Garner says, evidencing the growing interest in defense jobs since the onset of the war in Ukraine.
“What’s happening in Ukraine made it feel more important, what I’m doing now. You don’t have to look far to see the consequences of not having this technology,” says apprentice James. Still, it’s not guaranteed that apprentices are receiving the best education before they enter the shipyard. Furness College, the only further education college in Barrow, which teaches many of BAE’s apprentices, received the lowest possible score of “inadequate” from U.K. education regulator Ofsted in 2024. Ofsted complained that too few apprentices regularly attended class, and more broadly lamented a “decline over time in attendance, retention, and achievement.”
Four years ago, BAE’s apprenticeship programs for its submarines division attracted around 2,500 applicants.
A spokesperson for BAE told Fortune the company is aware of the rating and is engaging in positive dialogue with the college to make improvements.
Older students will soon flock to the wet shores of Barrow. The University of Cumbria is set to welcome its first pupils to a new Barrow campus in September. It is hoped that with a university campus in the town, Barrow can encourage more people to stick around after they graduate, helping to reverse a brain drain of younger people from the area.
Amy, a BAE apprentice and recent first-time homebuyer who lives outside Barrow, says she would have been more likely to have bought in the town had the university been there in her early years.
There is some contention among locals, however, that as more of Barrow increasingly becomes BAE’s training center, there will be fewer people around to do the lower-paying jobs every town needs to sustain itself, from education to health care to hospitality. In time, the locals could be priced out of this once-bust town.
Deanna, another Barrow-based apprentice with BAE, mentioned that she gave up her job at a school to work in human resources at the docks, citing better wages and prospects. Her family worked in the shipyard, while her partner is also a BAE employee.
Clark, of Abbey Apartments, worries regeneration is made harder if BAE continues to dominate Barrow’s employment figures.
“The town itself is suffering because people don’t want these kinds of lower-paid jobs of doing admin or working in a shop, because they can get a better salary in BAE,” Clark says. “The knock-on effect is the town then begins to lose people, because not enough people are coming in to fill all the positions.”Team Barrow’s remit involves diversifying the town’s economy to safeguard it against future busts, director Drane says.
“It’s great that we have a dominant employer here, and we have great existing industrial businesses,” he notes. “But to diversify things, we need to consider what employment sectors should be represented, and how we grow and build those.”
A glint of hope
“The era of the peace dividend is over,” Grant Shapps solemnly declared in January 2024 while he was U.K. defense secretary.
A grim, yet realistic assessment of the geopolitical climate the U.K. found itself in last year has only intensified since Donald Trump’s inauguration, with the U.S. president distancing his country from its historical role as the West’s peace broker. That assessment may have also provided the first real glint of hope for Barrow’s residents in decades.
Since the beginning of 2022, BAE’s market value has almost tripled from £18 billion to £51 billion. Sales are up to £26.3 billion ($33.6 billion), while BAE reported a £77.8 billion order book last year, up 32.4% since 2022.
BAE is in the process of completing a £31 billion order from the U.K. government for a submarine refresh, known as Dreadnought, out of Barrow. The company has an order pipeline of £180 billion ($240 billion) in addition to its extensive backlog. To aid its ambitions, BAE is building new research facilities and renovating its decades-old infrastructure in Barrow. The supply-chain effects of those renovations are already beginning to be realized, mostly in demand for local construction workers to build facilities and housing to absorb Barrow’s latest boom.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (C) and Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey (R) meet with BAE system apprentices as they look at a submarine model during a joint visit in Barrow-in-Furness.Oli Scarff – WPA Pool/Getty ImagesBut with so many areas in need of improvement, the burning question is: What does success look like for BAE and Barrow in the future?
Getting off the top of the deprivation tables is a must, says BAE’s Garner. Team Barrow’s Drane cites metrics like increased footfall in the town center, alongside better facilities, as important barometers of progress. The race against time to build housing and attractive amenities to keep BAE employees in Barrow is entering its final phase.
Irving, from the Dock Museum, has read enough about Barrow’s previous booms and busts to know whether the latest optimism around the town is something new, or uncomfortably familiar.
“They are obviously very much aware that it was boom or bust in the past, and obviously people far better than me are looking at how to prevent that for all the future generations in the town,” he says.
Councillor Brook says past attempts at regeneration were “sticking plasters” that quickly tore apart under strain.
“We’re into more radical surgery,” he notes.
If that surgery goes according to plan, it could be the template to revive forgotten industrial towns across the country. If it goes wrong, locals will begin to question the value in being Britain’s protector. That is, if they haven’t already.
This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline ‘Will a Defense Spending Boom Revive This U.K. Town?’
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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