On the night of the 5th of February 2004, a group of cockle pickers walked out onto Warton Sands as the tide retreated. They were Chinese migrant workers, most of them from Fujian province on the southeast coast of China. They had come to Britain looking for work and ended up in the hands of an illegal gangmaster who sent them to gather cockles in the dangerous tidal flats for almost nothing per shift, in conditions no British worker would have accepted. They were 30 in all that night. As the tide returned, faster than they expected, one of them, Guo Binglong, made a desperate call to 999 — he was 33 years old and his voice on the recording, asking for help in broken English, has haunted Morecambe ever since. The lifeboats and the rescue helicopters tried. The tide was already winning. Twenty-three people drowned, Guo Binglong among them. Their gangmaster, Lin Liang Ren, was convicted of manslaughter in 2006 and jailed for 14 years. The cocklers had names: Yu Hui, Liu Qin Ying, Cao Chao Kun, Zhao Xiao Qing, and others whose families in Fujian buried them in absence. They were exploited workers, not statistics — and the bay where they died is the same bay that families still walk on summer afternoons.

People have crossed Morecambe Bay on foot for centuries, partly because doing so saved miles of detour around the estuaries of the Kent and the Leven. The route has always required a guide. Since the 16th century the Crown has appointed a Queen's Guide to the Sands (or King's Guide, depending on the reign) — a paid post held by people with intimate knowledge of where the rivers run on a given day, how the quicksand has moved, and when the tide will turn. Cedric Robinson held the position for 56 years, retiring in 2019. The guided walks across the sands raise money for charity and draw thousands. Without the guide, the same walk would be reckless. The bay does not give second chances to people who misread its channels.

Beneath the tidal flats lies one of Britain's significant industrial resources. Morecambe Bay holds Britain's second-largest natural gas field, trapped in Triassic Sherwood Sandstone with a Mercia Mudstone seal above it and a Carboniferous source rock below. The North Morecambe Field was discovered in 1976 and came online in 1994. At peak production, the two main fields supplied 15% of UK gas demand. The fields are taxed at 62%, a reminder that strategically valuable energy is rarely cheap to operate. The South Morecambe field was briefly mothballed in 2011 before production resumed in July of the same year. Rampside Gas Terminal on the western shore processes what the rigs send down the pipelines. The bay also has wind potential. In 2004 a proposal floated a bridge across the bay flanked by wind turbines, harnessing tidal power; in 2019 the Northern Tidal Power Gateways project proposed a tidal barrage with a road on top. Neither has been built.

The cocklers' tragedy was the subject of Nick Broomfield's 2006 drama Ghosts, a fictionalised but carefully researched account; Channel 4's documentary series The Other Side commissioned a factual companion from a Cumbrian filmmaker. The ITV crime drama The Bay, which premiered in March 2019, takes both its setting and its name from these waters and has been filmed around the coastline through multiple series. Karen Lloyd's book The Gathering Tide: A Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay, published in 2016, is a year's memoir of walking the bay's edges — social history, archaeology, wildlife, and the strange in-between landscapes that aren't quite sea and aren't quite land. The bay is a Ramsar wetland of international importance, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and a Special Protection Area for birds. Estuaries and intertidal sands draw enormous flocks of waders and wildfowl every winter. Beauty and danger, gas and grief, all in the same square miles of sand.