TODAY'S pictures offer a nostalgic look at how Barrow's main shopping streets have changed through the decades as the town looks to new funding sources to help regenerate what is on offer to visitors, fashion seekers and food buyers.

Barrow has been selected as one of 69 historic towns to share £95m to give high streets a new lease of life.

There will be a four-year High Street Heritage Action Zone overseen by Historic England to deliver physical improvements and cultural activities and to restore and enhance the town's historic character.

The town has also been shortlisted as part of the billion pound Future High Streets Fund.

To give a taste of how Barrow town centre has changed in the past 60 years, these details are from a trade directory from 1959.

The town then had eight banks, nine bakers and another nine fish merchants.

You could visit 14 drapers, 17 outfitters or 25confectioners.

Barrow also 33 specialist butchers and an amazing 56grocers - many of them trading from traditional corner shops.

Along the years, many once familiar names have vanished from the town centre - such as the Dolings hardware store, Story the jeweller,Woolworths - with its famous pick-and-mix sweets - and other once popular chains such as the tailors Burton and Greenwoods, or Dewhurst the butcher and the Maypole Dairy.

Many will remember the Pass department stores in Duke Street - where you could buy anything from a pin to a piano - and the Barrow Co-operative department store, cafe and bank on Abbey Road.

Another big change is due in spring next year when Marks and Spencer is due to leave Dalton Road after more than 100 years for a new food hall at the Beehive Business Park, near Daltongate, Ulverston.

It has taken roughly 150 years for Barrow’s main shopping area to move from roughly the area of Morrisons towards the bottom of Dalton Road and all the way back again.

Barrow Village developed towards the railway station at the Strand and the market hall.

After1882 it was pulled towards the new gateway to Barrow at the Central Station.

The drift back started in the early 1970s with the opening of Asda.

When Tesco and others joined it on the edge of town the pace of change picked up.