I don’t think this is true. Yes, the fairies are harder to see. But if you’re paying attention, even industrial, tarmac-ribboned, electrified modern England still has plenty of “thin places”: spots where the air is different, and the uncanny is just at the edge of awareness.

Dunwich, on England’s Suffolk coast, is one of these places. But now it is in cinders after a four-day blaze. Amid this summer’s arid, weeks-long drought and successive heatwaves, all of England is tinder-dry. In windy, flammable coastal conditions, all it took was one spark — a glint through broken glass, a careless cigarette, or abandoned barbecue.

The Dunwich fire, though now hemmed in by local fire crews, consumed 150 hectares of heath and woodland, forcing the evacuation of local villages, holiday parks, and other establishments. Conservationists are calling it a disaster from which local ecologies will take 25 years to recover. Oh, my England! But perhaps this can stand as a reminder that even this green and pleasant land, so long inhabited and so deeply over-written and sculpted by successive histories and people, still has its own elemental power; its own quiet but overwhelming force. Its own spirits, not displaced by industrialization at all, that answer to none of us, but only themselves.

If you’ve encountered one of England’s thin places, you’ll know what I’m referring to: an eerie, liminal sense of things just out of eyeshot, of eyes watching you from the grass. This tends to be more associated with Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland: the uplands and borderlands less thoroughly rationalized, mapped, and subdued. But the rich tradition of artists, writers, composers and eccentrics who have fled (and still flee) to Suffolk’s big skies attests to the distinctive way this region’s own special landscape is still thick with fairies.

Think of the estuaries, where sea and sky, fresh and salt, blend imperceptibly into one another. The long cry of the curlew. Half-rotted wood, sunk in mud, clung with limpets and moss. These are English thin places that sing to something just as liminal in the English, as a people: a paradoxical love of home, but also of longing for the open sea. This is a people that looks out beyond the estuaries, the salt tang, and sucking mud — but also back at cottages, cozy pubs, and warm firesides. Suffolk captures that restless yearning for the horizon, long ground into the seafaring English psyche, and the same people’s island-dwelling love of home.

Much more than any twee nonsense about Paddington, or tea, or manners, the paradoxical, slightly melancholy experience of desiring both these things at the same time is at the heart of what it means to be English. And Dunwich is, in this sense, especially liminal and melancholy, because even before this summer’s fire most of it was already lost.

During the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman invasion, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. A thriving port covering an area similar in scale to, though smaller in population than, medieval London, it was listed in the Domesday Book as having three churches. Historians estimate its population at that time as around 3,000. In the 13th century, a Franciscan friary was built on the nearby headland. But then climate disaster struck.

A storm surge in the late 13th century repeatedly battered the region, flooding the port and gnawing at the coastline. The harbor silted up. The shore changed shape. And, importantly, the river that was the town’s raison d’être moved. Dunwich was suddenly no longer a sheltered harbor, sitting at the meeting-point of the river and the sea. Now the river was more than a mile away, winding through a different estuarial flat. The town lost its purpose. Further floods swept more homes into the sea. No one rebuilt them; people moved on.

Now, Dunwich is a tiny coastal village, home to around 200 people, a chip shop, and (temporarily, once a year) a lot of London cyclists. They gather every summer (the last event was a couple of weeks ago) to ride overnight from London Fields to Dunwich Beach, in the cult-like “Dunwich Dynamo” bike ride, known by the nutters who participate as the “Dun Run”.

The first time I visited Dunwich I was in the heady early stages of falling in love. We arrived there and were caught as instantly by the otherworldly atmosphere, as by the sea breeze. It was a bright day; we sat on the shingle watching the North Sea roll in, blue and brown, as passing dogs leaped in and out of the waves.

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We built towers from the smooth rocks on the beach, dozed, dreamed amid the whisper and roar of wind and water. Hours slipped by. Time works differently there. The fairy denizens of Dunwich may not be those of green cliffs and woodland, of the kind you might still sense in (say) north Wales, or Cornwall. But they’re there. Dunwich attracts a stream of visitors so dedicated that despite its tiny population, its beachside and chip shop do a roaring trade. This isn’t just mad London cyclists. It’s that people come to be, for a little while, at the edge of everything.

A popular local legend has it that on foggy nights, you can hear the sound of church bells ringing over the water, from the town that fell into the sea. I’ve never experienced this, but it feels profoundly true, in the sense that Dunwich is thronged with shades. The ruins of its friary can still be seen, and visited, on the headland — and here, too, many report strange happenings: weird lights bobbing about the ruins at night, said by some to be the mysterious Hobby Lanterns or jack-o’-lanterns, unexplained lights reported to lead travelers toward cliff-edges or other dangers. Others report seeing ghostly monks pacing the ruins, or hearing their chants.

Since that first visit I’ve returned as often as I can just to sit at that eastern edge of England, between sea and sky. The coastline itself feels ethereal: its very history attests to how little faith we really can place on the ground staying solid beneath us. But perhaps this summer’s blazes are less a departure from that ancient Dunwich story, than a continuation of it.

This is a part of England that’s always been thin, elemental, and only tenuously mastered by its inhabitants. War history aficionados sometimes visit Dunwich to explore the concrete bunkers that still stand along that coast, half-eroded by salt and wind, from wartime preparations for a seaborne invasion that, mercifully, never came. Its still earlier ruins were left following an invasion not borne by sea, but by the sea itself.

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All those centuries ago, the devouring sea, and changing coastline, shrugged off an entire habitation. This time, it was a fire that drove its human inhabitants away. I dare say they’ll be back; but perhaps we should heed the warning. We’ve grown used to an England so domesticated, industrialized, controlled and controllable as to render this kind of abrupt eviction by the landscape itself all but unimaginable. We tend simply to take for granted the belief we’ve mastered all those elemental forces, permanently, such that worrying about fire, or flood, or erosion is merely a thing of our more primitive past, or something that happens to people in other countries.

Even contemporary responses to climate change don’t really depart from this complacency. Manmade climate change is real. But wherever some kind of coordinated policy effort emerges, to respond to it, in practice this only ever seems to produce more and different technological efforts: more solar farms, different cars, a thicket of new rules.

What if the response we actually need is to think differently? Periodically some bushy-bearded Merlin type will bob to the surface of the mediasphere to warn that what we should be doing is not building more or different stuff, but attending more closely to the thin places, and what they have to tell us. No one ever listens, or if they do, somehow the product is only ever more or different stuff.

I could respond to the fire in Dunwich with a threnody for a landscape that has shaped my summers, and my imagination of England, for my whole adult life. A place I love deeply, caught as it is between land and water, singing so evocatively of both salt air, deep England, and all our accumulated centuries of ghosts. But I find that instead I read this as a wake-up call from the still deeper England, the land that was there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and will still be there long after we — and whoever comes after us — are gone.

However mild and generous that land is, for the most part, now and then it too can still shrug, as though scratching an itch — and, in doing so, dislodge whoever or whatever was there at that moment. Anyone who claims the right to call this land home would do well to listen. To spend time in its thin places, hear what they have to tell us, and mend our lives accordingly.

Local elections are traditionally an opportunity for upset, rebellion and protest. And in May, when the voters of Conservative metroland (from Tunbridge Wells and Tandridge, to Nuneaton and Bedworth) go the polls, the Greens will be hoping to repeat the gains of last year, when they established pluralities and majorities in the councils of Mid-Suffolk, East Suffolk, Babergh and the Forest of Dean. Of course, this was amid a general wave of anti-Conservative feeling. But these results were distinct. The Green Party, once the preserve of the bohemian bourgeoisie, holed up in university enclaves such as Brighton and Bristol, has managed a startling prison break, vaulting fences and stiles to advance across the fields of Tory England.

Whether these victories stick is an open question. But safe seats are only safe until they aren’t, and the last time dozens of Tory strongholds swung, in 1997, they never returned to the Conservative fold. There have been numerous theories to explain this metamorphosis: Nimbyism, short-lived protest voting, disaffection at the cost-of-living crisis, strategic localism, and a genuine slippage from Conservative conservationism to Green ecologism. But, while the Greens have recently been associated with a younger urban electorate concerned about housing, social liberalism and technological acceleration towards net-zero, the party always contained a “small is beautiful”, Little England wing. An older block that prioritises “green space”, local control, local public transport and responsive administration.

To understand the true colours of this countryside revolt, I head out to Mid-Suffolk, the first local authority the Greens have ever governed by majority control. Arriving in the market town of Stowmarket, I am greeted at the station by three of the district’s Green councillors, Teresa Davis, Colin Lay and James Patchett. In their chinos, desert boots, tattersall shirts and gilets, none stands out as a typical Green. All are former Conservatives with backgrounds in the military, farming, and charities: the lieutenants of Suffolk’s Burkean platoons. They show me around Stowmarket, from the Union Jacks adorning the Victorian high street, to the large and prosperous new estates patched onto its exterior. This was a bedrock of Conservative support in 2019. And nothing about the town speaks to a Green Party positioning itself towards an exodus of disgruntled millennial Corbynites from Labour, as some have suggested. Patchett admits that: “We’re almost the opposite [of young and professional]. If you look at the people who are in the local Green Party, who come to the meetings, well… we, in our forties, are the young ones.”

Stowmarket, still the centre for Suffolk farming communities in the outlying areas, is now also something of a dormitory town, with trains running to London in just over an hour. On the outskirts of the town lies the Orwellian-sounding “Gateway 14”, a vast freeport made up of huge distribution and logistics warehouses, the product of the Conservative’s attempts at a national industrial policy and “levelling up” in the area. Many residents grumble about the development, occasionally caveating with the need for “jobs for the young”. And this isn’t the only controversial infrastructure project in the region: Green Party support has also surged in East Suffolk, where Government plans to extend nuclear power capacity with Sizewell C have been met with stiff resistance.

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Davis, Lay and Patchett deny that the Green Party surge in Suffolk comes down to Nimbyism, though they do allow that the pace of development targets from Whitehall has caused resistance. And speaking of the freeport, Lay offers little to ameliorate stereotypes of campaigners with a proprietorial attitude towards their surroundings, and a scorn for anything concrete or new: “There were a lot of objections to the project from the local people who live on the farms because their view used to be of rolling hills towards Stowmarket — now you’ve got a view of Suffolk’s biggest shed.”

It also seems that the pressures of the renewable energy transition, through developments such as solar farms, are, counterintuitively, pushing farmers and rural voters towards the Green Party. “We just had three solar farm applications go through planning,” says Patchett. “We’re obviously not against solar power. But we are against solar in inappropriate places. If developers are taking rich, fertile farming land and wanting to build solar farms on it — then we’re opposed to that.” The Green councillors justify working in opposition to certain green energy developments, because “one, the residents don’t want it and, two, these fields are the wrong place to put it”.

It seems odd that the Greens would be the best party to vocalise these niggles. Why have Davis, Lay and Patchett clustered there rather than in the party most associated with their perspective? “I don’t think the Conservatives have an identity you can get behind. We’re all disillusioned Conservatives, aren’t we? The first time I voted Green was four years ago, I always used to be Blue,” says Davis. Lay puts the Tory conversion to Green politics down to multiple factors, with the issue of competence looming large: “I think [the Truss debacle] reinforced what a lot of people were already thinking and gave them permission to say no — enough is enough.”

Their attempts to convert the surrounding areas have been boosted by recent events. All the Stowmarket Greens have set about capturing the conservationist and bucolic streak within Tory voters that has been alienated by Rishi Sunak’s Net Zero U-turn. “You’d knock on the door of a big detached house. You’d 100% know they were a Conservative voter. They’d have lovely big gardens. They admit to voting Conservative,” says Patchett, “You’d then ask them their views. ‘We like the environment, we like nature. We believe in all these things as well.’ That’s how we are flipping Conservative voters.”

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Despite the Stowmarket councillors’ insistence that the Green surge wasn’t down to a protest vote, others see their local victories more pragmatically. One Ipswich resident says they switched from Blue to Green because, “Tories aren’t really Tory anymore. Labour is the above with red ties and barely any real point of distinction. Green is a good protest vote.” Although they do concede that: “I wouldn’t [vote] the same at a general election.”

However, the often dismissed question of building continues to rear its head. Geri Silverstone, a political consultant who has worked closely on Green political issues, tells me the party’s eastern surge is down to infrastructure pressures rather than a wholesale abandonment of the Conservatives. “It’s a reaction to development,” he says. “Those Suffolk districts have been under the cosh to meet government targets. There’s been a backlash from their residents. These areas are predominately 50+ years old and that’s why you’re seeing a movement from traditional Conservative voters to the Greens. It’s an alternative — they think this is a party that’s going to say no.”

Up the coast, in the small, Georgian town of Halesworth, I test this theory out on Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay and local councillor Toby Hammond, who were analysing river water connected to run-off sewage plants. Ramsay also puts the Green swing primarily down to local alienation. But he admits that the Greens have been pursuing a different politics in Suffolk from the one they might in urban enclaves: “You’re going to see a very different style of Green politics in rural Suffolk than you’re going to see in Brighton, certainly. The leader of Mid-Suffolk is a farmer who is very pro-farming. We’re less tied up with some of the more fringe issues discussed elsewhere.”

To scrape beneath the competing rhetoric, I went looking for Green converts at what used to be called “the Conservative Party at prayer” — a local Anglican Church hosting an environmental panel. The event was attended by the Bishop of St Edmundsbury, Thérèse Coffey (then-Secretary for the Environment), Green Party activists, Ramsay and Conservative Councillor Richard Rout. The congregation: a grey sea of fashionably dressed parishioners. I was probably the only person under 30, and one of five under 40. A pensioner, dressed in fashionable workwear, sidled up to me and joked that “Coffey doesn’t know what she’s in for”, and there was an audible grumble as she entered the church.

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Various stalls lining the church outlined local concerns, everything from newts and birds, to the greatly disliked plan to run a series of pylons from Norwich to Tilbury to connect an offshore windfarm to the national grid. There were few — Green, Conservative or other — willing to make any kind of case for the potential efficacy of the pylon plan. No one, politician nor voter, mentioned that the cost-of-living and climate crisis, alongside energy security and Net Zero goals, might warrant speed over caution.

Outside, a tall man in a tweed suit, with a voice like Laurence Olivier, identified himself to me as former Conservative Councillor Michael Gower. “I’m a Tory Green! Don’t you believe it,” he bellowed. After asking him what “Tory Greenism” consisted of, Gower told me it’s “about doing things on the ground. I’ve been planting trees and testing water quality. Tories are local activists! We don’t like Sizewell C, and we don’t like the onshoring of wind turbines!” But, after he’d finished, I was none the wiser. Was he a green Conservative or a conservative Green? Was there any difference? How did an objection to onshore wind farms square with his professed environmentalism?

If Suffolk is anything to judge by, the “Green revolt” seems to be powered by those with the wealth and time to force a change in local politics. Rather than a national movement, it will remain a narrow phenomenon, both generationally and geographically, unless it can reach beyond its established confines. Because elsewhere in Halesworth, life goes on.  Young farmers, builders, and tradespeople gather in the pub, easily ignoring rural England’s debate over the future of the nation. The young sink pints, murmuring the politics of dark complaint, while receiving no echo in the church just yards away.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.