The docks today are eerily still, with boarded-up Victorian and Edwardian buildings, chain-link fences, and the occasional vessel, up out of the water, waiting to be serviced, dismantled, or quietly abandoned. There is a memorial garden to lost trawlers, with rusted anchors instead of gravestones. I have the nameplates of one Grimsby trawler, the Nimrod, found burned out on a beach, on the wall of my house. All along the shorelines south of the Humber, fragments of a once-great industry wash up after northeasterlies — bits of boat or quay timbers, sections of net, lifebelts, lobster pots.

This town was founded on fish. According to a 13th-century epic, it was fathered by a Danish fisherman called Grim, who saved the infant son of Denmark’s legitimate king instead of obeying orders to drown him. Not that such mythmaking feels relevant to many Grimbarians today. For most of the town’s history, any fish caught locally was for local consumption, although it has been a busy port since at least the 11th century. The simultaneous 1848 arrivals of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and the East Lincolnshire Railway, changed everything. Fresh fish, from the apparently endless stocks of the North Sea, could now be carried quickly aboard 40-wagon “Fish Specials” to the bottomless markets of the South. Grimbarians perfected the technique of preserving fish in ice, at first brought from Norway, until the Grimsby Ice Factory was established in 1900. Long the world’s largest, it produced up to 1,200 tons of ice daily, until it ceased production in 1990. The Factory survives, still with much of its machinery, the unique but crumbling centrepiece of the network of surviving dockside streets known as the “Kasbah”.

A century ago, Grimsby was frantic with fishing. Over 160 trawlers might unload their catches in a single day, with boats moored two deep along quay walls. Between a third and half of all residents were directly employed in the industry, everyone connected to it in some way. Fishermen from as far away as the Thames and even Devon relocated up here. (Between 1841 and 1901, the town’s population grew from 3,700 to 75,000.) They prospected the wide and unpolluted German Ocean as far as Greenland, almost imperial in their ambitions. A vastly expensive, Italianate-style, 309-feet-tall Dock Tower was opened by Prince Albert in 1854, evidence of the trawling industry’s importance to the Empire. The Tower still stands: a striking seamark and symbol of vanished might.

Trawling is one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. A few years ago, the Marine and Coastguard Agency reported that UK fishermen were six times more likely to die at work than those in any other profession. Apart from falling overboard, dangers include being injured by nets, ropes, and occasionally even the quarry, with “sea cats” (Atlantic wolffish) able to inflict nasty bites. Deckhands are not even well paid, with average salaries of under £16,000, although they often get a share in any profits.

All this would have been even worse in Grimsby’s glory days. In the 19th century, apprentices as young as 13 endured desperately hardscrabble lives aboard stinking smacks, sometimes brutally or incompetently captained. The bulwarks were only two feet six inches high, and inexperienced hands could easily be swept overboard, even in moderate seas. A list of losses between 1878 and 1882 shows 169 causes of accidental death, ranging from “Lost during heavy gale” to “Fell asleep whilst holding light when net was being drawn in” and “Fell overboard when larking in rigging”.

Many apprentices deserted, and if recaptured, frequently chose imprisonment over returning to sea. That Grimsby was particularly problematic is suggested by the levels of incarceration in comparison with other fishing ports. In 1889, the town locked up 123 apprentices, and Hull 15 — and other fishing ports, such as Brixham or Lowestoft, almost none. In 1873, shocked national newspapers reported on groups of returned apprentices being marched through the centre of Grimsby, chained together. As the Grimsby Herald repined: “Respectable people said they would be glad if Grimsby could be erased from the map of England. If they knew as much about the treatment of some of these lads… they would feel surprised that the judgement of Heaven did not fall upon us.”

Suggested reading

Poundbury and the English apocalypse

By Fred Skulthorp

But some boys prospered, and eventually became wealthy skippers and owners. Substantial Victorian and Edwardian villas in Grimsby’s suburbs still testify to some men’s discipline and ambition. In 1882, James Plastow, originally from the Hackney poorhouse, told a Board of Trade inquiry that within five years of coming to Grimsby he had managed to save enough to buy several smacks. He told the doubtless gratified inquiry board, “I believe every lad in the fishing trade has the same chance of a successful life as I have had, provided he saves his money instead of spending it.”

Needless to say, the majority of young men were not so sensible. Enter the “three day millionaires”, with large amounts of money to spend after particularly prosperous voyages. Acutely conscious of the danger of their employment, they played even harder than they worked. Their antics afflicted Grimsby with public drunkenness, high crime rates, and excessive venereal disease, all exacerbated by the borough’s notorious misgovernment.

Grimsby has many of these same problems today, but without the prosperity. A recent film set in the town, Three Day Millionaire, centres on three young trawlermen who decide to carry out a major robbery. Like many popular depictions of Grimsby, it shows the town as a sinkhole of crime and dangerous desperation. (See also Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2016 action-comedy Grimsby, in which Cohen played a feckless football hooligan, as well as the end-scene of 2006’s This is England, in which the disillusioned young skinhead protagonist, played by Grimsby-born Thomas Turgoose, casts a St George’s flag into the sea.) These depictions are overdone, yet not wholly misplaced.

If 19th-century Grimsby had its troubles, the 21st-century town arguably has even more, with an especially bad reputation for sexual assault and violence. Grimsby is Lincolnshire’s most dangerous major town, and one of the ten most dangerous major towns in Britain, with an overall crime rate of 134 crimes per 1,000 people, 78% higher than the rest of Lincolnshire. This is blamed on many things, from bad education to a lack of youth clubs, to the even more nebulous “lack of discipline”. Locals’ attitudes are unsentimental; in a 2019 Grimsby Telegraph poll, an overwhelming majority of respondents favoured solutions to youth crime such as “Bring back borstal”. Causes are doubtless complex, but the removal of community spirit, and sailorly solidarity, cannot have helped.

The town’s fate has always been tied to its fish. The country’s insatiable demand, plus the ever-greater efficiency of 20th-century fishing, had inevitable effects. Cod stocks close to the coast dwindled sharply after the Fifties. Once the town’s trawlermen would have been able to fish off Iceland and Norway instead, but from the late Forties onwards they were faced with increasing resistance from local fishing interests. Between the Fifties and the Seventies, British trawlers were increasingly excluded from these territories, with three long-running “Cod Wars” — a combination of international legal cases, high politics (Henry Kissinger declined to support the British, because the US needed Iceland’s military bases), and angry confrontations on the high seas — trawlers cutting others’ nets, and even ramming each other, while naval vessels manoeuvred nearby.

More from this author

The violent heart of Boston

By Derek Turner

Then came the EEC’s fisheries policy, to which the UK became subject after 1973. It was in many ways misguided. British fishermen resented suddenly having to share fishing grounds as close as 12 miles offshore with trawlers from other EU countries — sometimes more advanced super-trawlers, or ones using illegal small-meshed nets, which scooped up fry with the adult fish. Ted Heath was widely seen to have given away too much to foreign fishing interests. This launched a “narrative of betrayal…that fishing was considered expendable,” Barrie Deas of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations reflected in 2018. “It tied us into this absolutely atrocious deal — a top-down, unsympathetic system.”

The Common Fisheries Policy introduced in 1983 was supposed to safeguard stocks, but too often, its effects was even more overfishing of key species like cod and haddock, and the counterintuitive dumping overboard of huge quantities of perfectly edible side-catches of other species, because they had been caught outside CFP-designated catching seasons.

By the end of the Eighties, Grimsby’s fishing had almost gone.

Eventually, and grudgingly, Brussels offered substantial subsidies for British fishing — over €243 million between 2014 and 2020. But it was too little too late: the sum could neither revive the industry, nor compensate emotionally. At the apex in 1891, there were 861 Grimsby-registered trawlers. As of December 2022, there were seven, only four of which operate from the port, each of those ten metres or under, fishing for shellfish, which are not subject to quotas. EU-registered trawlers extract around eight times more fish (by value) from UK waters than British boats do from EU waters.

Grimsby’s strong pro-Brexit showing in 2016 was propelled by such bitter economic facts, but also by nostalgia for departed pride and brave heydays. Fishing today makes up just 0.1% of the British economy, but when a flotilla of 30 trawlers sailed up the Thames in June 2016 to fly the flag for Brexit, they carried as cargo not just Nigel Farage, but the hopes and dreams of multiple seaside towns. As one retired fisherman said sadly in 2020, “You’d got guys in a cake factory — perfectly brilliant skippers sticking cherries on cakes. Where does your pride go with that?”

Now that the UK has decoupled from Europe, is there hope for Grimsby? Brexit does offer the theoretical opportunity to revive the fishing industry, and to manage fish-stocks better, at least while they remain within the UK’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. Last December, the UK reached a six-species quota agreement with the EU and Norway, in a deal the Government claims will add £190 million to the UK industry. But foreign-owned trawlers still operate within the UK’s not yet exclusive Economic Zone Any vessels that break any new agreements may get away with it, as the UK has only 12 fishery protection vessels to patrol an area three times the size of the UK’s land-area.

Even if there were a resurgence in British-owned boats, Grimsby may be too far gone — its last few large vessels now operate out of elsewhere, its workforce is mostly retired, its skillset largely dispersed, its attitudes altered. Industry veterans often live in straitened circumstances, sometimes suffering long-term ill-health, including a high incidence of asbestos disease from long onboard exposure. At least 1,000 have depended on the Grimsby branch of the Fishermen’s Mission, which helps “retired or shipwrecked” fishermen. Their example hardly encourages young Grimbarians to work on trawlers.

Suggested reading

The gangs of Calais

By David Patrikarakos

But the tradition is not quite dead. Although no Grimsby-registered trawlers land white fish at the port today, the Fish Market is still busy selling creatures caught predominantly off north-east Scotland, Iceland, the Faroes and Norway. The fish arrives in the evening, to be graded and sorted overnight before the Market opens at 6am the following morning. Sellers and buyers bid on pallet-loads of fish packed into 50kg boxes, and the whole auction (normally around 125 tons of fish) can be over within an hour. Frozen fish is also sold, originating from as far away as Russia, India and China. Although some of the fish is trucked off west along the A180, much is still sold to local processors, and through fish and chip shops, stalls at markets, and vans delivering door-to-door across Lincolnshire and beyond.

The smell of the past still sometimes literally fills the air, courtesy of surviving factories making fish-fingers, preparing shellfish and smoking all kinds of things that swim. Grimsby is the UK’s premier seafood processing centre, with more than 50 factories adding around £2 billion annually to the economy. (The European Commission, ironically, granted “Grimsby Traditional Smoked Fish” Protected Geographical Indication in 2009.) Brexit seems to be making some firms consider pulling out, but the Government is taking up some of the slack, for example in November giving a local cold storage facility a £5 million injection.

Fish processing is monotonous and unglamorous but it is also nationally important. One Grimsby firm alone, Young’s, provides around 40% of the fish eaten in the United Kingdom.

The switch from exporting to importing and processing is emblematic of modern Britain, but it seems especially sad here, in this town with a vanished raison d’être — this town that has worked so hard, endured so much, and made such a contribution to national life. Back at the disconsolate docks, on a gull-grey December’s afternoon, it is impossible not to regret the departure of an epic fleet.

 ***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

It could have been a lot worse than threats: the good guys policing the piscatorial business are frequently murdered; some 18 fishery inspectors from Papua New Guinea were “lost at sea” in the space of just five years. Gerlie Alpajora, a Philippine government inspector, suffered a different fate. After exposing a raft of illegal tuna-fishing, she was assassinated in her sitting-room with a bullet to the head.

The reality for those working in the seafood trade — which is funded by a leviathan $35 billion from the world’s taxpayers — isn’t much better. Thailand’s coastal shrimping relies on slave labour, which is eminently expendable: about 24,000 fishermen die every year. As one commentator in Seaspiracy remarks: “We have heard a lot about Blood Diamonds. This is Blood Shrimps.”

Yet the crime on the high seas that concerns director/presenter Ali Tabrizi is ecological destruction. Cue the predictable, tear-inducing segment on the 150 million tons of plastic swirling around the bellies of whales. Far more horrifying, though, is the ecological holocaust caused by mainstream, commercial fishing methods. Usually, these involve “bottom trawling”, where boats pull gigantic nets across the ocean floor which scrape up fish — along with everything else in their path — wreaking havoc on ocean habitats. The United Nations suggests that it causes up to 95% of global oceanic damage.

Longline fishing, a technique often vaunted as preferable to bottom trawling, isn’t much of an improvement. Here, boats drag fishing lines bearing multitudinous hooks through the water. The hooks are indiscriminate; they catch and kill unintended species — from sea birds to whales — by the score. So whether you’re bottom-trawling or longlining; the methods are prodigiously wasteful: 40% of fish netted is so-called “by-catch”, unwanted fish which is dumped over the side of the trawler, usually dead. Meanwhile, longlines also snag on the ocean floor, and are never retrieved, killing marine fauna long after the boats have departed.

“Thank Poseidon”, you may say, “I only eat certified sustainable seafood approved by the Marine Stewardship Council.” But as the makers of Seaspiracy prove beyond reasonable doubt, the little blue “MSC” printed on supermarket packaging is hardly worth the label it is written on. The MSC receives income from giving its approval; and so few who apply get rejected. Ditto “Dolphin Safe Tuna”; one researcher discovered that 45 dolphins died for the sake of eight “friendly-fished” tuna.

What the labels don’t tell you is that over-fishing has caused wild fish-stocks to plummet. Seafood species have declined by 90% in the post-War period. In one of Europe’s most underreported scandals, 10,000 dolphins die every year in nets off the Atlantic coast of France. Then there are the seabirds which, like us, depend on natural fish-stock: their number has dived by 70% in just seventy years.

Neither does Seaspiracy let fish-farming off the hook. On industrial “aqua farms”, whether they are inland or cages in the ocean, fish spend their lives packed as tight as sardines in cans. Not infrequently, the water deteriorates into a toxic, anaerobic brew of antibiotics, faeces, and growth-enzymes which seeps into adjacent areas — a two-acre Scottish fish farm produces about the same amount of waste as a town of 10,000 people. Yet it’s Seaspiracy’s secret footage of salmon being eaten alive by lice that is most hard to forget.

Suggested reading

Has Boris forgotten our fishing history?

By Mary Harrington

Still, it is a tough sell, getting viewers to feel for fish in the way that they weep over furry and feathery things. (I confess, though, that my inner schoolboy warmed to herring on discovering they communicate by farting.) Sea-creatures, as great literature has often had the acuity to recognise, are Other; hence Scylla and Charybdis, Moby Dick and Jaws.

They are monstrous things in the primordial waters we escaped from, which makes it hard to secure money for their conservation. Eco-lucre is based on the animal popularity contest; a team led by Stefano Mammola from the Italian National Research Council analysed the EU’s Life programme, which funds climate and environment action, between 1992 and 2018 to see how money was allocated. The study found that 23% of Europe’s vertebrates received funding compared with 0.06% of invertebrates. In total, vertebrates attracted €970m (£880m), six times more than the €150m for invertebrates. Risk of extinction does not influence how much money a species received. Giant clams just aren’t as sexy as grey wolves.

Doubtless Seaspiracy will still make a splash, though perhaps not on the scale of the same production team’s anti-factory farming Cowspiracy from 2014. For although Seaspiracy makes for striking television, one would need to be as mad as Captain Ahab to swallow all of its political solutions. There is the sensible suggestion of “No-Catch Zones” (a mere 1% of the globe’s oceanic expanse is presently protected), and fishing subsidies could certainly be made more transparent. But Seaspiracy, taking its lead from Cowspiracy, which reputedly turned more people vegetarian than any other “text” in history, also wants us to do the “only ethical thing”: stop eating fish.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

In shoving this message down our gullet, Seaspiracy comes over all fishy itself. Not all fish-farming is as tainted as Tabrizi would have us believe. Either he has never heard of organic fish farming, or has chosen not to highlight it. Be it ignorance or manipulation, it is unseemly methodology. Also, if the vegetarians promoting “plant-based alternatives” believe arable farming to be intrinsically environmentally good, they need to get out to the grain prairies of East Anglia more — and watch the chemically loaded, eroded soil wash into watercourses, and thence to the sea.

More to the point, it’s entirely impractical. People will never stop eating fish; Homo sapiens developed a taste for trout, a hankering for haddock as soon as he climbed down from the trees. To cater for demand, commercial fishing was begun as early as Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Oppian’s Halieutica, the oldest surviving treatise on sea fishing, dates to circa 180AD. And if the Romans did not invent the artificial fishpond, they perfected it. The earliest known Roman fishpond in England is at Eccles, Kent, and was built around about the time of Oppian.

During the Medieval Era, Western Europe was speckled all over with man-made fish-ponds. All of them organic, all of them brimming with wildlife; there are few better places for nature than a pond. And these fishponds were maintained precisely because they provided food. Sometimes the best conservation of nature comes from satisfying the stomach. It is perfectly possible to have your fishcake and eat it.

John Lewis-Stempel is the author of Still Water: The Deep Life of the Pond

The song in question, “Three Score and Ten”, tells the story of a single stormy night in 1884, and the horrific death toll that came with it:

And there were three score and ten, boys and men
Were lost from Grimsby Town
From Yarmouth down to Scarborough
Many hundreds more were drowned

Their herring craft, their trawlers
Their fishing smacks as well
They long did fight the bitter night
And battle with the swell.

But it’s not just the sentimental pleasure of singing a sad song with a catchy chorus that keeps this song alive. Fishing is woven deep into the culture of the British Isles: so deep, that despite today being only a tiny contributor to our economy, and with little political leverage, it may yet scupper Boris’s Brexit deal.

More from this author

England will miss our Church when it's gone

By Mary Harrington

Why, then, does fishing stir people up? It’s not jobs or money. According to Commons Library research, the UK fishing industry employs about 24,000 people and earns around £1.4bn per annum. As a proportion of Britain’s £2.1 trillion 2019 GDP, that’s small change. And with 27,000 employees in the UK alone, Amazon provides more jobs today than the entire British fishing sector.

The BBC recently had a go, suggesting that ‘supporters of Brexit’ see fishing as ‘a symbol of sovereignty that will now be regained’. But it goes deeper than abstract ideas of control. The environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth argues that if we’re to find national identity anywhere, it’s in the relationship we have with our landscape we inhabit. And for the inhabitants of the British Isles, no matter which wave of migration brought us here since this landmass was settled in about 900,000BC, that identity has been bound up with the sea.

Wherever you live in the British Isles, it’s not possible to be more than 70 miles from the sea. We have around 19,500 miles of coastline: more than Brazil. The sea has sustained and shaped Britain for thousands of years.

The usual angle on this story is about commerce and colonisation. In its pomp, the might of the British Empire was inseparable from its maritime culture. This fact, and Britain’s decline from imperial grandeur, underpinned the recent controversy over singing “Rule Britannia” at the Proms . But so far the culture war has largely ignored those working-class men who plied the same waves not to conquer or trade, but to catch fish.

Fishing has been part of British culture since time immemorial, but especially on the North Sea coast. The monks of Wyke Hull were granted a special licence to fish in the Humber by King Henry II in the 12^th century. Then in the 19^th century, when the arrival of railways opened up new inland markets for fresh fish, a wave of migration to the area made Hull a fishing boom town. Often-illiterate fishermen set sail in ‘fishing smacks’, light sail-powered vessels of around 50 feet with a crew of around four men, to trawl for deep-sea fish as far afield as the Faroes and Iceland.

suggested reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

Working on a North Sea fishing smack was brutally dangerous: between 1863 and 1871 around 1,000 such boats were operating from ports along the northeast, and every year around 120 of them were lost to accidents. In Grimsby alone, 1,024 men were lost between 1880 and 1893, all from fishing smacks.

Nor was joining a fishing crew always a choice. The historian Peter Anson noted that of the boys and men who made up the Grimsby fishing fleet, “Most of the apprentices had been brought up in orphanages and reformatory schools.” It’s likely that of the “three score and ten” who died on that stormy October night in 1884, some had been forced into the trade.

This hard and dangerous work bred a unique working culture. In his 1934 travelogue English Journey, JB Priestley described fishing as employing perhaps the last of the wild men in this tamed Island of ours; fellows capable of working day and night without food or sleep […] and then also capable of going on the booze with equal energy and enthusiasm.

This culture was transmitted (as is often the case for working-class history) through myth and music. If they survived long enough to be drawn into the culture of working fishermen, apprentice smacksmen would soon learn the songs that beat the rhythms of working life at sea. Shanties and ‘capstan songs’, surviving today only in sheet music and the folk music scene, were tools of the trade: rhythmic tunes sung onboard to give the beat for hauling ropes to work the ship, or turning the capstan to winch in heavy nets.

Indeed, ”The Smacksman”  is itself a capstan song, which contrasts the idyllic appearance of life at sea with its grim reality. Nothing could be more quintessentially British than this cheerful sing-it-on-the-job ditty about having a horrible job:

Once I was a schoolboy, on the shores I used to roam
And watch the boats go out to sea, at the setting of the sun.
I thought I’d like the seafaring life but very soon I found
It wasn’t common sailing when we reached the fishing ground.

It was, “Heave on the trawl my boys, never mind the storm!”
When we get the fish aboard we’ll have another haul.
“Heave away the capstan, merrily heave away!”
It’s the same old cry in the middle of the night as it is in the early day.

The rhythms of fishing life occupied not just those at sea, but everyone onshore too. The whole community turned on the rhythm of the ‘long-tripper’ boats that by the onset of the First World War employed some 17,000 full-time fishermen. ‘Fishwives’ would mend nets, bait lines and process the catch, selling fish from the docks or carrying it to market in woven baskets. Even lullabies had a tang of the sea: the Northumbrian lullaby “Dance to your daddy” promises the baby “You shall have a fishy/When the boat comes in”.

As North Sea white fish grew in popularity, inland fishing declined. Britain lost the taste for herring (today, we export 93% of the British herring catch) and embraced cod-and-chips. Meanwhile, advances in fishing technology began to transform the industry from the dangerous sail-powered work of the 19^th-century smacksman to something more industrial, increasingly carried out by huge trawlers with refrigerated holds and even on-board canneries, that could put to sea for weeks at a time.

Then, in the mid-20th century, a sector focused not on inland fishing but North Sea trawling collided with the ‘rules-based international order’ — and sank.

suggested reading

Tories have to choose between beef and liberty

By Danny Kruger

The 1970 Common Fisheries Policy was an attempt to address the growing problem of overfishing resulting from the ever more efficient design of 20^th-century trawlers. It wasn’t the first such attempt to allocate fishing rights; the nations signing the 1964 London Convention on Fisheries are all now EU members.

But when Britain joined the EEC in 1973, it was allocated quotas set based not on the total catch by British vessels, but only on fish caught in EEC waters. And these didn’t include the more distant North Sea fishing-grounds where the bulk of the British trawlers worked.

Thus it’s both true and not true that ‘Ted Heath sold British fishermen down the river’, as the popular perception has it today. Yes, CFP quotas were skewed against Britain — but this wouldn’t have mattered had Britain been able to go on fishing further afield. And Britain’s ‘long-tripper’ fishermen were defeated not by Brussels, but by geopolitics.

In the 1970s, in another effort to manage the excesses of overfishing, the UN established Exclusive Economic Zones around coastal states, giving each state the sole right to economic exploitation of these waters. This triggered the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland, over the right to fish off the Icelandic coast. At the height of the Cod Wars, British trawlers were shot at by Icelandic fishermen, and one large vessel was even shelled by Icelandic artillery after it was spotted fishing inside the limit.

Britain’s military clout seemed sure to guarantee victory in the Cod Wars. But Iceland had a trump card up its sleeve: geography. The Cod Wars took place at the height of the Cold War, and the US naval base on the Reykjanes peninsula in western Iceland was critical to America’s efforts to track Soviet movements via the key chokepoint between Greenland, Iceland and the UK.

More from this author

How sexual empowerment screws women

By Mary Harrington

So Iceland threatened to withdraw from Nato if the British did not stop fishing in Icelandic waters. Fearful of losing its naval base, the United States put pressure on Britain. Britain folded: the Cod Wars ended in 1976 with Britain agreeing to respect an exclusive 200-mile Icelandic fishing zone around its coast.

But by then there was nowhere else for the British fleet to go. As an EEC member, quotas for British territorial waters had been set meanwhile by the Common Fisheries Policy. It’s no surprise, then, that that the peak year for British fishing was around 1 million tons of fish caught, in 1973 — the year Britain joined the EEC.

Thus British fishing sank under the triple weight of European treaties, marine conservation and Cold War geopolitics. Neither the Right nor the Left saw fit to fight for it: too working-class for the 20^th-century Tories, and too old-fashioned for the Thatcherites, nor was fishing ever a unionised power-base for the Labour Party. No one noticed as Britain’s once-thriving coastal communities slid into despair, becoming some of the most deprived in the country.

But if Brexit teaches us anything, it’s that ignoring something lots of people care about doesn’t make that thing go away. Today, fishing once again threatens to blow Brexit off course — and Boris may find that even his ‘compromise’ position is not enough to calm the political waters.

The Leave vote was as much about identity as substantive economic matters. And below the surface of Britain’s supposedly modern 21^st-century culture is a powerful undertow of maritime memory, that has nothing to do with imperial grandeur — and everything to do with fish. Boris’ deal may yet founder on our yearning for the unquiet sea.

Lowestoft isn’t dead yet. But it is on life support. It’s hard to imagine, as you wander along its depleted high street and past the shabby facades looking out over the 19th-century harbour, that this town on the coast of sleepy Suffolk was once an industrial powerhouse. Until, that is, you begin to stumble upon the innumerable reminders – the museums and statues and faded signs on old maritime buildings – of its former status as a major fishing port. You can’t avoid them. And neither should you wish to. For you cannot understand any town without knowing its history.

But no place can survive on glories past. These days, Lowestoft is just one of our many battered and blighted former industrial towns, the sort that were once the pride of the nation but are now regarded by some among our political and cultural elites as a bit of an embarrassment. This old maritime jewel isn’t even treading water; it is slowly sinking.

More from this series

Our modern parenting is making monsters

By Giles Fraser

Dean moved his family up from South East London 34 years ago. “I’d go back if I could.” I ask how things have changed. “The fishing industry has been destroyed. You used to be able to hop from boat to boat in the harbour. Now you’d drown.” What else? “Factories have closed. The main shops have gone. All we’ve got left is takeaways and charity shops. A lot more foreigners live here now. But I’m not prejudiced,” he swiftly assures me.

Almost everyone I speak to here says the same thing. Fishing destroyed. Factories closed. Shops gone. Town in decline.

In its heyday, Lowestoft was home to a fleet of over a thousand trawlers and drifters. Some vessels fished in waters as far afield as Norway. It is said that if you weren’t employed in the industry yourself, you knew someone who was. Fishing was later supplemented by the presence of major employers such as Shell, Sanyo, Boulton and Paul, and Eastern Coachworks.

The town benefitted additionally through its appeal as a holiday destination. Holidaymakers would flock here in summers past to enjoy the golden beaches and other attractions.

Today, the only trawler – the Mincarlo – doesn’t leave the harbour (it is a museum ship), and the big firms have decamped. The holidaymakers still come but, in truth, it’s hard to imagine Lowestoft as a resort of choice.

The belief that the European Union – and in particular the Common Fisheries Policy with its rigid quota system – is responsible for the town’s plight is widespread. There is much truth in it, of course. But it isn’t the only explanation. God knows successive British governments must take their share of responsibility for the evisceration of our industrial base.

Still, it’s no wonder that 63% of the electorate in this part of Suffolk voted Leave in the referendum and almost 40% for the Brexit Party in the recent European elections. The Remain campaign never really stood a chance here. The EU has become the symbol of all that has gone wrong in Lowestoft. Brave would be the politician who ventured into this town to tell people they got it wrong and must vote all over again.

More from this author

Why Glasgow deserves better

By Paul Embery

Looking in at the Woodbine café (established 1895) near the entrance to the docks, I get talking to some locals. Christie Vorster and her family were forced out of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe when she was 13. Now, 17 years later, she is unemployed and in receipt of Universal Credit. She hunts daily for worthwhile employment. Her last job, at a day centre, didn’t offer enough hours. She isn’t hopeful of finding anything soon.

Her despair is justified. The most recent figures I could find reveal that 33% of the town’s population have no qualifications, and the number of young people in receipt of out-of-work benefits across the wider district is double the national average.

Those in work don’t have it much easier here. A report last year by the Low Pay Commission showed that the local authority has one of the highest rates of workers earning only the minimum wage across the whole of Britain.

“There’s just nothing for young people to do here,” Christie says.

We are joined in our conversation by 79-year-old Billy Crago. Billy fished out of these waters for half a century, eventually buying and operating his own trawlers. “Fishing was a huge industry here,” he tells me. “Everything depended on it. Other industries relied on it: boat-building, engineering works, dry docks. But they all went when fishing went.” I tell him I witnessed something similar when much of the Ford motor plant was closed in my hometown of Dagenham. I feel his pain.

“The fish market workers used to queue along the road to come in here when I was a little girl,’ says Rose Sinacola, who serves the teas and breakfasts in this place. ‘They would bring their urns with them. It would open at six o’clock in the morning. But everything’s changed now.”

“There’s a lot of violence,’ comes a voice from a table behind me. Christine McKensey-Stowe is sitting with a friend. She is 63 and in receipt of Employment and Support Allowance, surviving on £70-a-week. She says she is too ill to work and has been waiting for a home medical assessment for 14 months. ‘There’s a gang culture. And they’re starting young. I was abused by a nine-year-old in McDonald’s for telling him off for smoking.”

Christie and Christine begin swapping tales of violence and arson and other such lawlessness. I ask if they ever see police officers walking the beat. Christine looks at me with an equal measure of bewilderment and derision. I may as well have asked if Elvis comes to town for the occasional gig. She nods towards the high street. “It’s tough for old people when the shops close down. Most of them can’t work a computer, so they can’t shop online. It must be terrible for them.”

“And the rents are too high for young people,” Rose says. “Unless you’ve got a well-paid job, you can never expect to get your own place.”

Suggested reading

Stoke, the city that Britain forgot

By John Lichfield

I ask if any of them has faith in politicians to put things right. They don’t. “I’d chuck them all out and start again,” Christine says. “They don’t bother about people here. Everything’s being cut. I don’t know much about politics, but I know enough to know they don’t care about us.”

I get the sense that neither the modern Left’s preoccupation with identity politics and class war, nor the New Right’s zeal for free trade, nor the liberal cosmopolitanism of the so-called ‘centrists’ would resonate here at all. I doubt that any among Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg or Chuka Umunna would be welcomed as some knight in shining armour in this town.

Buzzwords such as ‘diversity’, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusivity’ are far from the lips of people in Lowestoft. But speak about work and community and family, and the conversation comes alive. It is obvious that there is a hankering for something much more meaningful than that which is offered by the political mainstream, something rooted in the concepts of place and belonging and social solidarity.

These folk are atomised and disaffected for sure. But there is a residual community spirit that refuses to be extinguished. They are desperate to be proud of their town – if only it would let them.

More from this author

Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

Leaving the Woodbine, I head towards the war memorial near the entrance to South Pier. A collection of wreaths lie at the base of the granite obelisk. One displays the logo of Ukip. There is nothing from the other parties. I reflect on what the men immortalised here would think of their town today. They battled against fascism, of course. Real fascism. I wonder how they might react to their descendants being accused of enabling fascism for daring to vote for a return of the very national sovereignty they gave their lives to defend.

Before I depart, I take the short walk up to Ness Point, the most easterly point of the British Isles. This small headland juts out into the waves, as if straining to be joined with continental Europe, only to be reined back in by the rest of the country. Westminster is just over a hundred miles from here as the crow flies. It may as well be an ocean away.

Looking out across the grey, forbidding North Sea, I imagine the days when armadas of drifters and trawlers would leave this place, sometimes for weeks on end, to ply their trade on the unforgiving waves. I picture, too, the families of the fishermen sitting by oil lamps in their modest little cottages, anxiously awaiting the return of their loved ones. These days the anxieties of the townsfolk stem not from meteorological storms, but from those of globalisation and unfettered capitalism.

Suggested reading

How communities lost their soul

By Nicholas Boys Smith

Heading back inland on the train as the light begins to dwindle, we are quickly into the Suffolk countryside. The spires and farms beyond the carriage window are evocative of A.E. Housman’s “Into my heart an air that kills” – his lament for a world lost and unrecoverable. There may be no blue remembered hills among these flatlands, but it is certainly a land of lost content. I see it shining plain.

For Lowestoft is a tale of our times. Its long, slow decline stands as a testament to the alienation and neglect of our post-industrial and coastal communities. Once confident and proud, they now fight to keep their head above the waterline. We should feel a sense of shame for having abandoned these places to their fate.

Yet, for all that, I didn’t detect a seething fury among the people I left behind. More a sense of resignation and acute disenchantment. A quiet anger and utter pessimism in the prospect of anything or anyone coming to their aid.

I don’t expect the good folk of Lowestoft to be hammering at the gates of parliament any time soon. But I do fear that, such is their cynicism in the entire political process and its ability to improve their lives, they will – if they haven’t done so already – disengage from it completely. Perhaps never vote again.

That may suit some people, of course – those who privately regard voters in these communities with contempt and believe the country would be better off if their voices stayed unheard. But for the health of our democracy and civic life – and most importantly our sense of ourselves as one nation – the implications of that would, in the long run, be far more profound.

Lowestoft isn’t dead yet. But it is on life support. It’s hard to imagine, as you wander along its depleted high street and past the shabby facades looking out over the 19th-century harbour, that this town on the coast of sleepy Suffolk was once an industrial powerhouse. Until, that is, you begin to stumble upon the innumerable reminders – the museums and statues and faded signs on old maritime buildings – of its former status as a major fishing port. You can’t avoid them. And neither should you wish to. For you cannot understand any town without knowing its history.

But no place can survive on glories past. These days, Lowestoft is just one of our many battered and blighted former industrial towns, the sort that were once the pride of the nation but are now regarded by some among our political and cultural elites as a bit of an embarrassment. This old maritime jewel isn’t even treading water; it is slowly sinking.

Suggested reading

Sun, sea, sand – and shooting up

By James Bloodworth

Dean moved his family up from South East London 34 years ago. “I’d go back if I could.” I ask how things have changed. “The fishing industry has been destroyed. You used to be able to hop from boat to boat in the harbour. Now you’d drown.” What else? “Factories have closed. The main shops have gone. All we’ve got left is takeaways and charity shops. A lot more foreigners live here now. But I’m not prejudiced,” he swiftly assures me.

Almost everyone I speak to here says the same thing. Fishing destroyed. Factories closed. Shops gone. Town in decline.

In its heyday, Lowestoft was home to a fleet of over a thousand trawlers and drifters. Some vessels fished in waters as far afield as Norway. It is said that if you weren’t employed in the industry yourself, you knew someone who was. Fishing was later supplemented by the presence of major employers such as Shell, Sanyo, Boulton and Paul, and Eastern Coachworks.

The town benefitted additionally through its appeal as a holiday destination. Holidaymakers would flock here in summers past to enjoy the golden beaches and other attractions.

Today, the only trawler – the Mincarlo – doesn’t leave the harbour (it is a museum ship), and the big firms have decamped. The holidaymakers still come but, in truth, it’s hard to imagine Lowestoft as a resort of choice.

The belief that the European Union – and in particular the Common Fisheries Policy with its rigid quota system – is responsible for the town’s plight is widespread. There is much truth in it, of course. But it isn’t the only explanation. God knows successive British governments must take their share of responsibility for the evisceration of our industrial base.

Still, it’s no wonder that 63% of the electorate in this part of Suffolk voted Leave in the referendum and almost 40% for the Brexit Party in the recent European elections. The Remain campaign never really stood a chance here. The EU has become the symbol of all that has gone wrong in Lowestoft. Brave would be the politician who ventured into this town to tell people they got it wrong and must vote all over again.

More from this author

The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

Looking in at the Woodbine café (established 1895) near the entrance to the docks, I get talking to some locals. Christie Vorster and her family were forced out of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe when she was 13. Now, 17 years later, she is unemployed and in receipt of Universal Credit. She hunts daily for worthwhile employment. Her last job, at a day centre, didn’t offer enough hours. She isn’t hopeful of finding anything soon.

Her despair is justified. The most recent figures I could find reveal that 33% of the town’s population have no qualifications, and the number of young people in receipt of out-of-work benefits across the wider district is double the national average.

Those in work don’t have it much easier here. A report last year by the Low Pay Commission showed that the local authority has one of the highest rates of workers earning only the minimum wage across the whole of Britain.

“There’s just nothing for young people to do here,” Christie says.

We are joined in our conversation by 79-year-old Billy Crago. Billy fished out of these waters for half a century, eventually buying and operating his own trawlers. “Fishing was a huge industry here,” he tells me. “Everything depended on it. Other industries relied on it: boat-building, engineering works, dry docks. But they all went when fishing went.” I tell him I witnessed something similar when much of the Ford motor plant was closed in my hometown of Dagenham. I feel his pain.

   Billy Crago at Woodbine café

“The fish market workers used to queue along the road to come in here when I was a little girl,’ says Rose Sinacola, who serves the teas and breakfasts in this place. ‘They would bring their urns with them. It would open at six o’clock in the morning. But everything’s changed now.”

“There’s a lot of violence,’ comes a voice from a table behind me. Christine McKensey-Stowe is sitting with a friend. She is 63 and in receipt of Employment and Support Allowance, surviving on £70-a-week. She says she is too ill to work and has been waiting for a home medical assessment for 14 months. ‘There’s a gang culture. And they’re starting young. I was abused by a nine-year-old in McDonald’s for telling him off for smoking.”

Suggested reading

Books that unveil the beauty in life's bleakness

By Jenny McCartney

Christie and Christine begin swapping tales of violence and arson and other such lawlessness. I ask if they ever see police officers walking the beat. Christine looks at me with an equal measure of bewilderment and derision. I may as well have asked if Elvis comes to town for the occasional gig. She nods towards the high street. “It’s tough for old people when the shops close down. Most of them can’t work a computer, so they can’t shop online. It must be terrible for them.”

“And the rents are too high for young people,” Rose says. “Unless you’ve got a well-paid job, you can never expect to get your own place.”

I ask if any of them has faith in politicians to put things right. They don’t. “I’d chuck them all out and start again,” Christine says. “They don’t bother about people here. Everything’s being cut. I don’t know much about politics, but I know enough to know they don’t care about us.”

I get the sense that neither the modern Left’s preoccupation with identity politics and class war, nor the New Right’s zeal for free trade, nor the liberal cosmopolitanism of the so-called ‘centrists’ would resonate here at all. I doubt that any among Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg or Chuka Umunna would be welcomed as some knight in shining armour in this town.

Buzzwords such as ‘diversity’, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusivity’ are far from the lips of people in Lowestoft. But speak about work and community and family, and the conversation comes alive. It is obvious that there is a hankering for something much more meaningful than that which is offered by the political mainstream, something rooted in the concepts of place and belonging and social solidarity.

These folk are atomised and disaffected for sure. But there is a residual community spirit that refuses to be extinguished. They are desperate to be proud of their town – if only it would let them.

Suggested reading

More than a beautiful game

By Michael Dalton

Leaving the Woodbine, I head towards the war memorial near the entrance to South Pier. A collection of wreaths lie at the base of the granite obelisk. One displays the logo of Ukip. There is nothing from the other parties. I reflect on what the men immortalised here would think of their town today. They battled against fascism, of course. Real fascism. I wonder how they might react to their descendants being accused of enabling fascism for daring to vote for a return of the very national sovereignty they gave their lives to defend.

Before I depart, I take the short walk up to Ness Point, the most easterly point of the British Isles. This small headland juts out into the waves, as if straining to be joined with continental Europe, only to be reined back in by the rest of the country. Westminster is just over a hundred miles from here as the crow flies. It may as well be an ocean away.

Looking out across the grey, forbidding North Sea, I imagine the days when armadas of drifters and trawlers would leave this place, sometimes for weeks on end, to ply their trade on the unforgiving waves. I picture, too, the families of the fishermen sitting by oil lamps in their modest little cottages, anxiously awaiting the return of their loved ones. These days the anxieties of the townsfolk stem not from meteorological storms, but from those of globalisation and unfettered capitalism.

More from this author

The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

Heading back inland on the train as the light begins to dwindle, we are quickly into the Suffolk countryside. The spires and farms beyond the carriage window are evocative of A.E. Housman’s “Into my heart an air that kills” – his lament for a world lost and unrecoverable. There may be no blue remembered hills among these flatlands, but it is certainly a land of lost content. I see it shining plain.

For Lowestoft is a tale of our times. Its long, slow decline stands as a testament to the alienation and neglect of our post-industrial and coastal communities. Once confident and proud, they now fight to keep their head above the waterline. We should feel a sense of shame for having abandoned these places to their fate.

Yet, for all that, I didn’t detect a seething fury among the people I left behind. More a sense of resignation and acute disenchantment. A quiet anger and utter pessimism in the prospect of anything or anyone coming to their aid.

I don’t expect the good folk of Lowestoft to be hammering at the gates of parliament any time soon. But I do fear that, such is their cynicism in the entire political process and its ability to improve their lives, they will – if they haven’t done so already – disengage from it completely. Perhaps never vote again.

That may suit some people, of course – those who privately regard voters in these communities with contempt and believe the country would be better off if their voices stayed unheard. But for the health of our democracy and civic life – and most importantly our sense of ourselves as one nation – the implications of that would, in the long run, be far more profound.