Barrow Raiders have today unveiled a new identity for the 2027 season, in front of local businesses and civic leaders at the Speed Competitions Stadium.
The club’s name does not change. Nor do its colours. What changes is the badge, and the way the club presents itself in everything it puts its name to.
The new badge sets the club’s name against the shipyard that defines the town’s skyline, with a submarine at its centre and the year 1875 on the ball beneath it.
The club took the view that its identity should come from Barrow and from nowhere else.
Barrow is a town built by work. Hard, physical, unglamorous work, done in shifts and in all weathers by people who got on with it and did not make a fuss. The yard has set the rhythm of life there for a century and a half, and generations of the same families have gone through those gates.
Rugby league took root in towns like this for that reason. It was the game of the men who did that work, and it has always carried the same qualities: toughness, graft, and a refusal to be beaten by something simply because it is difficult.
There is also a plainer reason the badge looks the way it does.
A submarine is a raider. That is what it is for, a vessel that goes out unseen, does what it went to do, and comes home without telling anyone where it has been. Barrow has built them for more than a century. And for the last 25 years, Barrow’s rugby league club has been called the Raiders.
“We have been the Raiders for many years and we have never really said what we meant by it,” said Barrow Raiders chairman Steve Neale.
“That is what today is about. Anyone who has worked in this town will recognise themselves in that badge.”
“We were never going to change the name. It might not have started here, it came down the county from Carlisle in 1997 and we kept it, but it is ours now, and there are three generations of supporters who have never called this club anything else. It stays."
