Whitehaven includes a number of former villages, estates and suburbs, such as Mirehouse, Woodhouse, Kells and Hensingham, and is served by the Cumbrian coast railway line and the A595 road.

He oversaw the rise of Whitehaven from a small fishing village (at his birth consisting of some fifty houses and a population of about 250) to a planned town three times the size of Carlisle.

[14] To replace the tobacco trade, Whitehaven turned to importing sugar from Barbados, cotton from Antigua and coffee and cocoa from St Lucia.

[17] Scottish-American naval officer John Paul Jones raided the town in 1778 during the American Revolutionary War, burning some merchant ships in the harbour.

During the 19th century the port of Whitehaven was overtaken by Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, as they had deep-water dock facilities and were closer to large centres of population and industry.

The huge development of a national railway network had also reduced Whitehaven's 18th century competitive advantage of having coal extracted very close to a harbour for shipment by sea.

[8] However, Lowther was noted for his unscrupulous business practices, and a lease of the coal royalties owned by St Bees School was obtained in 1742 on manifestly unfair terms: an annual rent of £3.50, with no payment per ton raised, for 867 years.

With this proven method of pumping Lowther was able to exploit the coal measures under the sea by sinking a pit at Saltom on land below the cliffs south of the harbour, to a depth of 456 ft (138m).

Saltom Pit was used as a central pumping station, draining many of the other local mines via a drift driven in the 1790s, and continued in use long after it had ceased to work coal.

The workforce attempted to open a new face, but a decision had been taken to close, and after two years of recovery work, Haig finally ceased mining on 31 March 1986.

As of 2024[update], its Member of Parliament (MP) is Josh MacAlister of the Labour Party, who has held the seat since the 2024 United Kingdom general election.

[34] The prospect of a rival pier being built at Parton to the north of Whitehaven galvanised Sir John Lowther into developing the harbour, and by 1679 further work was under way.

Its peak of prosperity was in the 19th century when West Cumberland experienced a brief boom because haematite found locally was one of the few iron ores that could be used to produce steel by the original Bessemer process.

In the 20th century, as in most mining communities, the inter-war Great Depression was severe; this was exacerbated for West Cumbria by Irish independence which suddenly placed tariff barriers on its principal export market.

Another £5.5 million has been spent on developing a 40 m (130 ft) high crow's nest and a wave light feature that changes colour depending on the tide, together with The Rum Story on Lowther Street, voted Cumbria Tourism's small visitor attraction of the year 2007.

Whitehaven's planned layout was with streets in a right-angled grid which it is thought was imitated by the new towns of the American Colonies, with which there were strong trade links.

Sir John acquired a market charter in 1660 for the town, but the urban expansion did not start until the 1680s when he laid out a spacious rectangular grid of streets to the north east of the existing tiny hamlet.

Walker donated the building to the people of West Cumberland, along with £20,000 to convert it into a hospital to replace the old Whitehaven Infirmary at Howgill Street, which was established in 1830.

The two lines were separated by the town centre, and a tramway was constructed through the market place allowing goods wagons to be horse-drawn from Preston Street to the harbour, but there was still no through route for passenger trains.

In 1941, Fred Marzillier and Frank Schon relocated Marchon Products Ltd from London to Whitehaven, which was a special development area, after their offices were destroyed by German bombing.

At Whitehaven they started manufacturing firelighters, then in 1943 they moved production to the site of the Ladysmith pit coke ovens at Kells, where they formed a sister company, "Solway Chemicals", to produce liquid fertilisers and foaming agents.

[50] The intention was to manufacture high quality silk and rayon fabrics for the fashion trade, but during World War II they mainly produced parachute nylon.

It supplied material to the great fashion houses such as Edward Molyneux and Bianca Mosca in London and Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin and Givenchy in Paris.

In 1945, Kurt Oppenheim, a 26-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany, bought the abandoned Whitehaven Brewery site on Inkerman Terrace and began using it as a home for the family and a factory to house the production of curled hair.

Curled hair was utilised as part of the filling for bed mattresses, railway and carriage seating, car and domestic upholstery and when rubberised it was used in flooring.

By the mid-1960s, the space requirements outgrew the factory in Hensingham and only the offices were kept in the original Tower Brewery in Whitehaven, whilst production of curled hair and flexile urethane foam was moved to an 11-acre site with two large aircraft hangars at Silloth Airfield.

Whitehaven has also played host to a Maritime Festival, which started in 1999 and was held every two years, and then annually (the last being in 2013) attracting an estimated 350,000 people to the small town.

The 2011 festival (featuring Razorlight plus several 1980s acts including Madness) continued the successful culinary theme, with the return of Jean-Christophe Novelli and other favourites.

In 2012 the date of the festival was changed to the first weekend in June, to make it part of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebration (with a red, white and blue themed firework display).

[56] On 2 June 2010, Whitehaven became a focus in the international media in relation to gun laws in the United Kingdom, following a killing spree targeting people living in the western area of the county.