Barrow stands at the end of a peninsula on the Cumbrian coast, looking south across Morecambe Bay and west toward Walney Island and the Irish Sea. The Furness district had been quiet for centuries; Furness Abbey, founded by Stephen, Count of Boulogne in 1123 and relocated to its present site by 1127 (later passing to the Cistercian order in 1147), was its most important building, and its red sandstone ruins still draw visitors. The town came alive in 1850, when extensive hematite iron ore deposits were discovered nearby. Industrialist Henry Schneider, who had arrived in 1839, played a central role in their exploitation; James Ramsden, a railway engineer who became managing director of the Furness Railway, drew up the street plan. The town was incorporated in 1867. By the 1870s, Barrow had more aristocrats per head than anywhere else in Britain and the Barrow Hematite Steel Company ran the largest steelworks in the world. The wide tree-lined avenues of the oldest parts of town, including Central Barrow, Hindpool, and Salthouse, look more like a city than a town because Ramsden planned them on a city scale.

In 1886, Barrow Shipyard launched the Ottoman submarine Abdul Hamid for the Ottoman Navy. Designed by Swedish industrialist Thorsten Nordenfelt, she was steam-powered, carried two 356mm torpedo tubes, and could dive to one hundred and sixty feet. She became the first submarine in the world to fire a live torpedo underwater. She was not, by the standards even of her own time, a particularly successful boat: she was poorly balanced and lost trim when firing. But the precedent had been set in this Cumbrian town. The vast majority of Royal Navy submarines built since have been built here. Devonshire Dock Hall went up in 1986 to give them a controlled assembly environment. A 24,300-tonne capacity shiplift outside the hall lowers completed vessels into the water independently of the tide. An extension in the late 2010s pushed the total area beyond 35,000 square metres, keeping it one of the largest shipbuilding construction complexes in Europe.

Barrow was a target in the Second World War because of its shipyard. The Barrow Blitz, raids over April and May 1941, killed and displaced people and left scars across the town centre. The Dock Museum on the Walney Channel tells the story of those raids alongside the history of the steelworks, the Furness Railway, and the shipyard itself. The museum is built in and around an old graving dock and has free entry. There were no significant air raids on Barrow after 1941. The shipyard came back, and the town came back with it. The cradle bridge across the docks, which carried the Barrow Island railway, was closed in 1966 for safety reasons. The last hammerhead crane, the iconic yellow crane of Buccleuch Dock, was dismantled in 2011, despite calls for it to be listed in the way Glasgow's Titan Clydebank has been. The skyline keeps changing. The work goes on.

BAE Systems Maritime - Submarines, the company name now over the shipyard gate, is investing three hundred million pounds in Barrow to construct buildings capable of manufacturing the new Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines that will replace the Vanguard class and carry the Trident nuclear deterrent. King Charles III granted the port royal patronage in 2025. Off the coast of Walney Island, four wind farms turn together: the 189-turbine Walney Wind Farm, the 108-turbine West Duddon, the 30-turbine Barrow Offshore Wind Farm, and the 30-turbine Ormonde Wind Farm. Walney was the largest offshore wind farm in the world when it was completed. Rampside Gas Terminal on the south side of town processes gas from the Morecambe Bay fields, depleting now, which Spirit Energy plans to repurpose as a one-gigaton carbon storage cluster. Sellafield and Heysham nuclear power stations are within twenty-five miles. This peninsula has been generating Britain's energy and weapons for a very long time.

Barrow has been called the most working-class town in Britain, by surveys that count fish and chip shops and working men's clubs per head; it has fourteen working men's clubs alone. A traditional favourite food is meat and potato pie. Green's of Jarrow Street is the local champion, declared to be Britain's best pies in a book on the subject by journalist Martin Tarbuck and beloved of Dave Myers, the Barrow-born Hairy Biker. Marsh's of Barrow once produced a sarsaparilla-flavoured fizzy drink called Sass; production ended in 1999 and old bottles are now collected. The Furness Golf Club on Walney Island, founded in 1872, is the sixth-oldest golf club in England. Barrow A.F.C. play at Holker Street, in EFL League Two. Barrow Raiders play rugby league at Craven Park. Glenn Cornick, the original bass guitarist of Jethro Tull, came from here. So did the Turner Prize-winning artist Keith Tyson, who worked at the shipyard before he became an artist. The submarine and the painting are both, somehow, the town's work.