The bay had been called Morecambe long before the town was. John Whitaker used the word "æstury of Moricambe" in his 1771 History of Manchester, and four years later Antiquities of Furness called it "the Bay of Morecambe." The town's name was only made official in 1889, gathering up the hamlets of Poulton, Bare, and Torrisholme under one identity. By then the railway had already done its work. The Morecambe Harbour and Railway Company, formed in 1846, ran tracks through to Skipton, Keighley, and Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire by 1850. While Blackpool drew its crowds from the Lancashire mill towns, Morecambe filled up with Yorkshire holidaymakers travelling west along the same line. So many Bradford workers came on holiday and stayed to retire that the town earned the nickname "Bradford-on-Sea." From 1956 to 1989, it was where Miss Great Britain was crowned every summer.

The slide into decline came faster than the boom had. Central Pier was damaged by fire in 1933 and finally removed in 1992. West End Pier was partly washed away in a November 1977 storm and demolished the following year. The largest Pontins resort in the country closed in 1993. The strangest chapter is the one Morecambe still doesn't quite know what to do with: in 1994 Lancaster City Council backed an attraction in Happy Mount Park called The World of Crinkley Bottom — a Mr Blobby theme park tied to TV star Noel Edmonds. Projected visitor numbers did not materialise. The attraction closed after thirteen weeks. The legal fight that followed, locally remembered as Blobbygate, cost North Lancashire taxpayers £2.6 million. Bubbles swimming pool closed. Frontierland fairground closed in 1999. On the 5th of February 2004, twenty-three Chinese cockle pickers from Fujian province drowned in the bay, working for an illegal gangmaster on the sands the locals knew never to trust at a rising tide. The decade did not deliver many easy stories.

What is happening now is something between a recovery and a refusal to give up. The Midland Hotel — a streamlined 1933 art deco landmark on the seafront with interior pieces by sculptor Eric Gill — underwent an £11 million restoration led by Manchester developer Urban Splash and reopened in June 2008. The freehold passed to the Lancashire-based Lancaster Foundation in March 2011. The Morecambe Winter Gardens, the great Victoria Pavilion with its theatre, restaurant, and ballroom, is being slowly renovated by volunteers. Most ambitious of all is Eden Project Morecambe, designed by Grimshaw Architects with biodomes shaped like mussels and a focus on the marine environment. The £100 million scheme is a partnership between the Eden Project, Lancashire Enterprise Partnership, Lancaster University, and the county and city councils. Add the RNLI hovercraft station from 2002, the Marcus Vergette Time and Tide Bell installed beside the Stone Jetty in March 2019, and the new promenade wave-deflection wall the same year, and the seafront is busier with serious investment than it has been in fifty years.

Morecambe's roll call is unusually wide. Eric Morecambe himself, of course, the comedian who took the town's name. Dame Thora Hird (1911–2003) was born here and made a career out of warm, sharp character acting; she co-starred in The Entertainer, the 1960 film Laurence Olivier shot on location in the town. The playwright Alan Bennett spent so many family holidays here that he wrote, in his essay Written on the Body, that he believed he had been conceived in a Morecambe boarding house over the August Bank Holiday of 1933. Helen Worth played Gail Platt on Coronation Street for nearly fifty years. Wayne Hemingway, founder of Red or Dead and a Northern Soul DJ, was born here in 1961. Sir Peter Ratcliffe, the nephrologist whose work won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was born here in 1954. Busta Rhymes lived with his aunt here as a child. Tyson Fury, world heavyweight boxing champion, still lives in the town and owns a gym in it. Baylight, the annual February light festival begun in 2023, drew an estimated 28,000 visitors in 2024 and roughly £460,000 in spending. Morecambe has never quite forgotten how to throw a party for itself.