A few years after Winn’s excavations, the first furnaces were built, and the Domesday hamlet of Scunthorpe started producing pig-iron. The borough’s old crest features a blast furnace belching flames, with the redolent motto: “The Heavens Reflect Our Labours.” Soon, the county’s companies started turning the iron into steel. By the end of the First World War, Scunthorpe produced 3% of the UK’s steel, some of it armouring the first military tanks, invented in Lincoln; by the start of the Second, it was producing 10%, some of it used in D-Day landing craft.

Since then, Scunthorpe metal has gone into everything from Sydney Harbour Bridge to the London Eye. But this elemental industry is rusting away. British Steel has recurred in the last decade’s headlines, almost always linked to job losses. Now, up to 800 of its remaining 3,200 steel jobs are at risk — a painful reversal for Lincolnshire.

Scunthorpe’s steel was for many years a magnet, attracting workers from all over Britain, and sometimes overseas — Germans before the Second World War, Eastern Europeans afterwards, Asians in the Seventies. In 1960, almost a third of Scunthonians (around 20,000) were directly employed in steel. A BBC documentary from that year, Scunthorpe is Booming, shows a town of bustling streets, with optimistic interviewees talking about all the things they could buy thanks, directly or indirectly, to steel — cars and foreign holidays and “tellies” — although a few did express reservations about the social effects of all this dynamism. Industries sprang up to cater to steel’s ever-lengthening supply chains, and all these new consumers — including Golden Wonder crisps. (Some locals claim the cheese and onion flavour was invented in the town.)

It was Steve Cook who cast Scunthorpe’s last ingots, in 2000. He started at British Steel in 1968 with just four O-levels, and retired in 2007, having risen to the rank of Quality Manager. Sitting in his immaculate house within earshot of the furnaces, he exudes quiet pride: “Scunthorpe was renowned for making one of the best steels in the world, and the name British Steel was synonymous with quality.” He recalls an avuncular employer, which sponsored his studies in metallurgy, then provided a job for life. The town, he remembers fondly, largely revolved around shift-times, with hooters announcing shift-changes. Streets would fill with men on bicycles and then as suddenly empty again, an almost instinctive mass movement of those who were busily forging the future. Now the town’s commuters, faces fixed to their phones, are living in worlds of their own.

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Not everyone enjoyed their time working in Scunthorpe steel. Conditions were hazardous in the early days. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, steelworkers would work 12-hour weekday shifts, and 24-hour shifts on alternate Sundays, with no extra pay even on Christmas Day. Veterans of the Twenties recalled their lunches being layered with fine iron grit. There were frequent accidents: on the worst day, in 1975, 11 workers died when one of the town’s iconic “Four Queens” furnaces blew up. As recently as 2021, a fireball erupted unexpectedly at the British Steel works, although luckily no-one was hurt. Last year, a 27-year-old worker was killed falling from a crane.

And not all the social impacts of the works were positive. Influxes of large numbers of young single men, and the Tartarean thirstiness of their work, resulted in problems with public drunkenness; as early as 1860, extra constables had to be drafted in. Employers took a zero-tolerance approach, with workers liable to be sacked if they had any alcohol on their breath — except for one steelworks, which ran what must have been a highly lucrative “wet canteen” into the Seventies.

A community spirit nevertheless emerged, grounded in shared experience and Methodist morality (nearby Epworth was John Wesley’s birthplace), and reinforced by institutions. Technical colleges and grammar schools, a hospital, a theatre, and an array of social and sporting clubs all began to appear, most famously Scunthorpe United, founded in 1899, and nicknamed “The Iron”. Workers wistfully recall a steely solidarity, with its own vocabulary — casters, feedstocks, gangue, sinter, trunnion — and a confidence borne of mastering dangerous elements for their own and everyone’s benefit. Steelworkers took on an almost mythic quality at times in the popular imagination, brilliantly skilled men silhouetted against incandescent orange, controlling leviathan cranes that swung 130-tonne ladles filled with 280 more tonnes of molten menace. Today’s call-centres, industrial parks, and offices are pallid by comparison.

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When British Steel was born, in 1967, as the British Steel Corporation (BSC), there was much excitement about “the white heat of technology”. Innovations would, it was argued, remould the tired old post-imperial country. BSC emphasised quality over quantity, investing constantly in technical research. Britain had always been a world-leader in steel — but the pace of change had sped up. Some of the cars snapped up by Scunthorpe’s happy Sixties shoppers would have weighed a ton and a half of mostly British-made steel, but cars were becoming steadily lighter and smaller. There was less and less demand for Scunthorpe’s product, even before the whole motor industry went into the doldrums, along with British shipbuilding.

Then as now, successive governments failed to capitalise on British technical ingenuity. Ted Heath hoped that the new local authority of “Humberside”, into which Scunthorpe was lumped in 1974, might be an English Ruhr. But BSC always found itself fighting, often unavailingly, against cheaper Asian imports and other countries’ tariffs. The would-be Ruhr sometimes seemed at risk of becoming more of an American-style rust belt.

Enter: the Iron Lady. In the first two years of her reign, Margaret Thatcher appointed the uncompromising Ian MacGregor as chairman of BSC. Two of Scunthorpe’s four ironworks were closed. A December 1979 announcement of swingeing cuts at Scunthorpe was dubbed “Mr MacGregor’s sick Christmas card” by the town’s mayor, and led to a 13-week strike. But MacGregor was up for a fight, and ultimately, he won. In 1980, BSC had employed 166,000 nationwide, and lost £1.8 billion every year; by the time MacGregor left in 1983, it employed 71,000, and annual losses had been cut to £256m. In 1985, it recorded its best results since the Sixties. Scunthorpe was a crucible of a new economic order, melted and remade by monetarism — but there was a human cost, as in the mining communities of the North. Unemployment nationwide was almost three times what it is now.

Meanwhile, the nation was losing its grip on the industries that built it. Now a profitable company, BSC was privatised, before being absorbed into the British-Dutch Corus Group — the biggest steelmaker in Europe and the third-largest in the world. Corus was itself taken over, just in time for the financial crash, by the Indian firm Tata, which ended up selling it in 2016 to a venture capital firm for £1. After reintroducing the nostalgic name, the firm sold the plant on in 2019 to China’s Jingye Group, which now operates as British Steel. With every takeover, hundreds of jobs were lost; since 2007, Scunthorpe’s annual steel production has halved from 5m to 2.5m tonnes. This most substantial of great British industries is now forced to trust in overseas investors with no stake in the borough, and its rooted community relies on boardroom decisions in Beijing. Britain’s steel production is, after all, something of an afterthought from a Chinese perspective; in 2019, the UK produced just 7m tonnes of steel, compared with the 996m made in China.

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The now barely British British Steel, reeling under high energy costs, is a pressure point for the Government. On the one hand, there is the wish to protect jobs in a “Red Wall” seat, won for the Conservatives in 2019 by the granddaughter of a steelworker. On the other, there is a national commitment to Net Zero carbon emissions, and steel accounts for around 14% of UK industrial emissions. Recently, British Steel has threatened to shed at least 260 jobs at Scunthorpe, and maybe as many as 800 — a quarter of all the jobs left — unless the Government gives it money to invest in greener electric furnaces. The Government has offered £300m, but negotiations appear to be foundering, because the money is thought insufficient, and comes with preconditions about guaranteeing employment for a decade. If all these Scunthorpe jobs do go, many Scunthonians fear they would be followed inexorably by others.

The Government claims to be committed to the industry, although support sometimes seems uncertain, and no new measures were announced in the latest budget. Steel does not contribute much directly to the UK economy — just £2 billion in 2020, when it accounted for 1.2% of manufacturing output and 0.1% of UK jobs. Still, there is strong ongoing and projected demand for steel — for projects ranging from HS2 to healthcare, flood defences to the military — and much of it could be produced here. Better to have our needs met in Scunthorpe than Baoshan, surely.

Industry veterans are sceptical about the Government’s Net Zero priorities. David Amoss, who spent 30 years working in Scunthorpe, points out: “The steel’s still got to be made and it may as well be made in Scunthorpe as in the Far East. I find this carbon footprint thing an absolute distraction and a nonsense. Not that I don’t believe we’re destroying our own planet, but if we don’t do it someone else is going to.” Steel that is not made here will just be made in another country, perhaps one with weaker environmental safeguards, and boosting their economy instead of ours. Steve Cook concurs: “From a global point of view, it’s just shifting the problem elsewhere.” Besides, closing down both furnaces could cost more than £1 billion.

Manufacturing has long been a victim of modern Britain’s focus on service industries over making things the world both needs and wants. “If steel does go, as a manufacturing country we’re buggered,” says Amoss. “I fail to understand how any country can really exist with any sort of wealth if it doesn’t make anything and consumes a lot.” To those who built their lives around industries like steel, today’s Britain can seem an unkind as well as unwise country, ungratefully casting off its past and recklessly mortgaging its future in the interests of expedience and profit.

The story of steel in Scunthorpe is unique, but it echoes that of the North’s, or Wales’s, mining communities. Our nation is replete with towns like this: so strongly associated with its industry that it is almost impossible to envisage existence without it. After 150 years of unglamorous and unrelenting endeavour, Scunthorpe’s whole reason-to-be has suddenly become ethically suspect, its Britain-building citizens at risk of being abandoned. Can a forward-looking national realism, drawing on an old sense of obligation, compete with today’s green and globalised agenda? This time-tempered town is not the only one nervously awaiting an answer to that question.

Theddlethorpe has always had an industrious underbelly. Between 1972 and 2018, it was known for the Theddlethorpe Gas Terminal, where natural gas gathered from beneath the North Sea was collected, then fed into the National Grid. At its peak, Theddlethorpe handled around 5% of the UK’s gas supply, but with the shift away from fossil fuels, the plant became redundant. In 2021, just as locals were feeling grateful for the site’s long-promised return to agricultural use, came news that the terminal might have an unwelcome afterlife — as the landward end of an undersea nuclear waste dump.

It is one of four sites being considered by the government for a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF), the others all being on the far side of the country, near Sellafield, a huge nuclear site in Cumbria. The idea is that vast storage caverns would be blasted into bedrock up to 1,000 metres under the sea, several miles offshore. “Higher activity” radioactive waste would then be transported to Theddlethorpe from 23 surface storage locations across the UK, and trundled out along a tunnel, to be walled up and forgotten.

The news was as unexpected as it was unpleasant. The nearest nuclear power station to Theddlethorpe is in Suffolk, 96 miles away as the fallout flies, 145 miles along often poor roads. The nearest train stations to which waste could be brought are Grimsby or Skegness, each about 20 miles away and both at the end of lines in need of upgrading. Economically, the area is dependent on tourism and agriculture, both of which could clearly be affected adversely by real or even imagined proximity to vast amounts of toxic substance. And the Lincolnshire coast is incidentally famous for its large numbers of migratory birds, who could carry toxins hundreds of miles.

So, the prospect of the area becoming not just a major industrial locus, but one dedicated solely to the handling of waste with a hazardous half-life of up to 100,000 years, filled locals with puzzlement as well as dread. “Why here?” one teacher asked wonderingly. “What possible economic, logistical or political justification could there be for such a scheme in a place like this?”

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The Theddlethorpe site lies above potentially exploitable energy reserves of gas and oil, and below them, coal; such geology is supposed to preclude the presence of a GDF. Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) recognises this as a problem: “Possible exploration in the future in this area means that it is more likely that future generations may disturb a facility.” As local resident and geologist-ecologist Biff Vernon points out: “Of course, we don’t want to extract these resources now, but thousands of years in the future, a civilisation might think differently. In their own literature, the GDF people rule out a site that overlies potential economic resources.”

And surely it makes sense to localise the inevitable risks of a subsea GDF. There hasn’t been an accident at Sellafield since the fire of 1957, but the beaches nearby nevertheless need to be combed constantly for radioactive objects, with 98 recovered during 2021. The immediate vicinity of Sellafield is already unfit for many other purposes; why contaminate hitherto unaffected areas? Especially because it would clearly be much cheaper to store waste close to its sources. NWS admits: “The transport provisions to the Theddlethorpe GDF Search Area are currently limited” and “significant works” would be required. The Government proposal suggests these works would cost between £20 and £53 billion — although as the tale of HS2 shows, the cost of extending transport networks is liable to gross underestimation. This throws up a question considered taboo in the discourse around large infrastructure projects: would expansion of either railways or roads really “benefit” an area whose residents generally value its rural character?

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Consider the human cost of the GDF construction, which would go on for many years prior to the arrival of waste — years of 24/7 disruption, heavy traffic, noise and huge spoil heaps. Much of this work would need to be carried out by brought-in specialists operating on short-term contracts. Any real jobs that may ensue would probably not materialise for at least a decade. As local Labour leader Tony Howard told BBC Radio Lincolnshire in 2021: “You’re not going to convert people from serving ice cream into nuclear waste specialists overnight.” Nevertheless, the NWS is promising thousands of new jobs for an area plagued by high seasonal unemployment. Older locals remember similar promises of skilled jobs being made when the gas terminal was first proposed. They were never kept.

Few in Lincolnshire feel compelled to martyr themselves for the sake of national sustainability. Investing in nuclear energy is part of the Government’s 10-point plan to achieve Net Zero by 2050, but according to new UnHerd polling, Lincolnshire is apathetic towards this ambition. In Louth and Horncastle, the constituency that Theddlethorpe sits in, 30% of respondents agreed that the Government spends too much time on green issues (and a further 28% didn’t know). No wonder, given that a Government proposal threatens to destroy their environment rather than protect it. This scheme is in many ways just another example of the clumsiness of too many “levelling up” projects — a top-down, bean-counting, crassly reductionist exercise in national political management, in which local character, local feeling and even local realities are largely side-lined.

And in the meantime, uncertainty reigns. There is no deadline yet for the final decision, although the sites are supposed to be narrowed down to two in 2026. In an already economically depressed area, local businesses are in limbo, and growth has been stunted. What tourism-related enterprise would invest in a coastline where the number of visitors might abruptly and markedly decline? What food processor or retailer would actively seek out produce from anywhere near a nuclear facility? How can councils plan long-term strategies? What about residents who wish to improve or sell their houses? It is too easy to dismiss local objections as selfish NIMBYism, but some of today’s protestors will not even be around if or when construction starts. They are doing it for others, and for posterity.

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NWS is clearly aware that its plan possesses few obvious attractions. It states that nothing will be built unless there is community backing, formalised by a “Test of Public Support” — a poll or referendum. It has accordingly set up the Theddlethorpe GDF Community Partnership to make its case (chaired by a former leader of Nottingham City Council, with a reported salary of £750 per day). So far, it has papered the area with thousands of handsomely-produced newsletters, promising that at least £1m will be distributed to local causes. Given that eastern Lincolnshire is facing permanent transformation, this doesn’t seem like much.

Where is local politics, in all of this? Some councillors have not helped themselves, by claiming to have no view on the GDF, despite joining first NWS’s Working Group and now the Community Partnership. Indeed, county and district council officers were in contact with NWS long before the scheme became public knowledge, a fact that inflames local cynicism. One understands the need for confidentiality in some council business, and that councillors may be well-intentioned, but to many voters, the optics aren’t good. Locals may have the chance to air their views during this May’s local elections, as objectors plan to ask certain candidates to clarify their views of the scheme. But as one of the respondents to the GOTEC questionnaire reflected: “I honestly don’t think our opinions matter to the powers that be.”

Some say the Theddlethorpe scheme is a gesture towards “levelling-up” this overlooked part of England: a feint to obfuscate Whitehall’s underlying commitment to expanding the Sellafield site. If so, it is Lincolnshire councillors who run the risk of being out-manoeuvred, and becoming unpopular. As elsewhere in Britain, this vast infrastructure project simply highlights the naivete of some local politicians, the weakness of local government, and London’s contempt for communities of all kinds.

For this is a tale of many towns. An alliance of experienced politicians, full-time administrators and a rich and secretive industry take on volunteer activists who are largely without funds and unversed in the arts of persuasion. A glacial decision-making process, with tedious procedures and slippery language, wears down local opposition. There are not even events against which opponents can mount demonstrations. It would be appallingly easy for Lincolnshire locals, who all have other lives to lead, to lose sight of the scheme, while behind the scenes, in dozens of dull meetings, it builds up steam and ultimately goes through by default. That would be a black day for all of Lincolnshire — and a poisonous precedent for other areas in danger of being altered forever against their will.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

 ***

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This terrible crime electrified Lincolnshire, and gave rise to horrified headlines across the country. Floral tributes festooned Fountain Lane, and locals filed into St Botolph’s church below its magnificent early 16th century landmark tower to light candles and cry. While parishioners uttered heartfelt, inadequate platitudes, shopkeepers closed for the day, passers-by shook their heads, and a local man started a fundraiser for the family which has already attracted nearly £6,000. As a Lincolnshire Police Chief Superintendent said, people in Boston were “struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible”.

This is an awful new low in the town’s criminal annals, but it is not the first time, nor even the second, that Bostonians have struggled with the incomprehensible.

In December 2020, the body of 12-year-old Roberts Buncis was found in the woodland of nearby Fishtoft, a village previously noted only for being the attempted departure point of future Pilgrim Fathers. Roberts had suffered more than 70 knife wounds, in an attack so frenzied that the tip of a knife was embedded in his skull. An attempt had been made to remove his head and hand. His killer, Marcel Grzeszcz, then 14, had enticed Roberts to the wood under the pretext of giving him drugs to sell. It was, said another investigator, “one of the worst and saddest cases” his force had ever handled.

Four years earlier, in 2016, Boston had been called “murder capital of England” by the national press, reflecting statistics on murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to murder that outdid London or Manchester — there were 10 such cases, in a borough with a population of around 65,000, the equivalent to 15 per 100,000 people. Knife crime, imaginatively linked with inner cities, has become inexorably associated with an intimate red-brick fishing port in one of England’s least assuming areas.

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Why Stamford said no to modernity

By Mary Harrington

Lilia’s killing resulted in a swift arrest — of Lithuanian national Deividas Skebas, 22, who has now been charged with her murder. He is a fruit picker, despite being from what a former girlfriend described as an “upper-class” background.

Not the backwater it is often assumed to be, Boston has experience of Europe. Between 1279 and 1289, it was the biggest port in England, exporting three million sheep fleeces annually, and accounting for nearly half of all the nation’s customs revenue. The town had strong links to the Rhineland — the three crowns of Boston’s crest may be an allusion to Cologne, traditional burial place of the Three Wise Men — and older brick houses have Flemish detailing. The town’s history with Eastern Europe is however more combative. The future Henry IV led a crusade out of Boston in 1390 against the stubbornly pagan “Livonians” — the ancestors of Lithuanians — with Lincolnshire archers instrumental in the capture of Vilnius. But thereafter Boston fell largely out of exciting history. During the Civil Wars, Boston was so reliably parliamentarian it was never in the front line, and its Puritan sects could, in peace, enjoy their perennial pastime of accusing each other of backsliding.

Today, though the town is unwillingly drawn into equally ugly culture wars. Violent crime has increased markedly since 2004, coinciding with the arrival of disproportionately large numbers of Polish and Baltic field-workers who descended on Boston after their countries joined the EU in 2004 (and Romanians, after 2007). The rapid changes felt deeply disconcerting to many in Boston, a town with already poor healthcare and housing, and low educational attainment and wages. The population increased by nearly 16% between 2001 and 2011, creating an EU-born minority of around 13%. Vigorous workers, often with young children, piled into the tiny, tight-knit town with cash to spend after back-breaking days picking cabbages. A godsend to agriculturists, and responsible for rejuvenating ageing districts, they were also blamed for depressing wages, over-filling houses, burdening medical practices and schools, leading parallel lives in different languages, and filling late-night streets with alcohol-fuelled altercations. Sometimes old country feuds were imported, sometimes new ones invented, as criminals of different nationalities expanded across these fertile new territories.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Most arrivals were inoffensive, even beneficial — like unlucky Lilia’s family (her mother runs an embroidery and screen-printing shop). But a few got out of hand, and their escapades sensationalised. As misunderstandings and ultimately serious crimes mounted up, there started to grow a deep, if often surreptitiously-expressed, sentiment in Boston — an inchoate feeling of being ignored, or even despised by Labour, by “London”, by all elites, including Brussels. There were also powerful economic factors at play. Farmers who relied on European labour also disliked the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, and the trawlermen who creep with the tide down the Witham to the Wash bitterly resented fishing quotas. All too soon, as a Borough Council officer acknowledged last year, there was “significant negativity between our residents”. In one especially intemperate 2016 TV debate, a woman incensed by political reluctance to discuss immigration even claimed “all we get is murders”.

Local politics, somnolent for centuries, sparked into life. In 2007, the Borough Council was taken in a landslide by a group called the Boston Bypass Independents, campaigning mostly on transport but channelling all kinds of discontents. In 2008, a BNP councillor was elected, and in 2009 Labour lost its three remaining seats. Ukip waxed strongly in the town, with crammed public meetings; in 2012, it held its spring conference in Skegness, just up the road. In 2016, Boston delivered a 75% pro-Brexit vote, earning it opprobrium as ”Britain’s most Eurosceptic town”.

That vote may have been cathartic for the 75%, but for the 100% the consequences are unclear. The exodus of Europeans has caused short-term “critical” labour shortages, in farms and haulage firms, care homes and caravan parks, with crops sometimes left to rot and lorry-loads of goods left undelivered. Eastern Europeans are being replaced by workers from even further east and south, which may result in even less tractable problems. The United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust has already been found guilty of racism, and the county as a whole accused by one ex-resident of “intolerance of colour”, and called “the most racist county in the country”. Historic England has also started singling out Lincolnshire locations for links to slavery, one of many pressures “woking” up the long-bypassed town to the news that it too is in history’s firing line.

But in this proud county, angst-filled preaching may merely exacerbate existing resentments towards out-of-touch elites, and London liberal opinion. And in any case, such abstract thinking seems coldly otiose, in this torrid season, with its terribly real and now timeless symbol of a little girl playing hide and seek, in streets where the future of Britain is being forged.