Leather Lane is now an attractive housing development by South Lakeland District Council. In the 1880's the Local Board (an elected body before the introduction of Town Councils) wrote of the area "Pity 'tis that these lots of miserable and foulsome tenements cabined, cribbed, confined, cannot be swept away for they forcibly remind one of the unsavoury and insanitary days of the courts and alleys of our larger towns and cities". Rumour had it that one or two 'young bloods' of Ulverston visited a cottage nearby for the purposes of 'nocturnal high jinks'.