Before 1857, Grange was a fishing village clinging to the northern lip of Morecambe Bay. Then the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway pushed a line through, and a station opened on 1 September of that year. Trains brought tourists. Tourists brought money. Within a generation Grange had reinvented itself as a Victorian seaside resort on a mile-long promenade, with hotels and boarding houses lining the front and the bay glittering beneath. In 1894 the town was given the status of urban district. It joined a small wave of similar resorts on the English northwest coast, each promising sea air, spring water, and respectability. By 1932 a Grade-II-listed lido was built on the seafront - an art-deco rectangle of blue water that closed in 1993 and has been the subject of restoration campaigns ever since.

Grange's defining feature - the sands of the suffix - have been migrating away from the town for decades. The River Kent used to flow past the promenade. Its course gradually shifted south, abandoning the foreshore. What had been a tidal strand of mudflats and notorious quicksands became a flat green meadow grazed by small flocks of sheep. The promenade still runs the full mile, but for years it looked out across pasture rather than water. Then, in the early months of 2007, sustained easterly winds nudged the river back toward its old channel. The town has been watching the bay's mood ever since. Across the water lies the resort of Morecambe; once, before the railway, the principal route between them was a tracked crossing over the sands themselves from Hest Bank.

The clean salt air that drew Victorian holidaymakers also drew the medical establishment. In 1891 one of the first sanatoriums in Britain was established at nearby Meathop, on the belief that the air and local spring water would help patients with tuberculosis. The town's later attempts at public swimming have been less fortunate. A 3.5-million-pound Berners Pool, designed by Hodder Associates and winner of a RIBA Design Award in 2004, opened in 2003. Running costs and structural problems forced it to close in 2006. It was demolished in 2013 and the site became affordable housing. The campaign to reopen Grange Lido has, by contrast, kept going - the derelict art-deco building opened for public tours in August 2019.

Above the town rises Hampsfield Fell, almost always shortened to Hampsfell. At its 727-foot summit stands the Hampsfell Hospice - a sturdy limestone tower built in 1846 by the vicar of Cartmel as shelter for walkers caught in bad weather. The eastern doorway carries a line from Homer: RODODAKTYLOS EOS, 'rosy-fingered Dawn.' Painted boards inside praise the view and welcome visitors. Up a flight of stone steps onto the roof, a crude alidade lets you sight nearby peaks and identify them. Alfred Wainwright devoted a chapter to Hampsfell in his Outlying Fells of Lakeland. The summit is fringed with the strange shattered geometry of limestone pavement.

Today Grange has 4,279 residents, give or take, and serves as a base for visitors who want southern Lakeland without the Lakeland crowds. There is an ornamental duck pond, a traffic-free promenade, hotels and B&Bs, and a steady stream of walkers heading for the limestone pavements of Hampsfell or south to the marshes. Holker Hall sits a few miles west; Cartmel and its priory are a short drive northwest. The town shares its parish church and primary school with one of the prettiest stretches of the Cumbrian coast. In December 2019 National Geographic published a piece encouraging readers to 'resist the lure of the Lake District' and explore this gentler coastline instead. The article recommended Grange. The town, in its quiet way, agrees.