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.

More from this author

The nuclear war for Lincolnshire

By Derek Turner

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.

Suggested reading

How the UK sacrificed its car industry

By Ian Birrell

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.

Suggested reading

Is this British company arming China?

By David Rose

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?”

More from this author

Why Grimsby was left behind

By Derek Turner

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?

Suggested reading

Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland

By Jacob Furedi

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.

Suggested reading

Why Stamford said no to modernity

By Mary Harrington

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.

Three years on, the Robin Hood Inn has closed. If you want a drink on this street in Boston, just south of the town centre, you’ll have to make do with the Eastern European off-licence a few doors down.

Surrounded by fens to the north and marshes to the south, Boston looms over a dank sea of flat expanses; an island town that has always been the exception. Once, it was the biggest port in England after London. Today, it is the fattest town in the country, the least integrated, the lowest paid, the most murderous, and the most Brexity.

According to new polling by UnHerd, Boston remains the capital of Brexitland, albeit not by its 2016 margin, when 75.6% voted to leave. Still, Boston and Skegness is the only constituency in the UK that does not think it was wrong to leave the EU: here, 37% of voters believe it was a mistake, while 41% disagree. Our polling also reveals it to be the most concerned about immigration: 72% believe “levels are too high”.

Todor arrived here from Sliven, Bulgaria, a few months before the 2016 referendum, looking for the “breadbasket of Britain” and its promise of jobs for those who work hard. “I came with my friends after reading about Boston on the internet. We lived out of town in a caravan and picked cabbages, down on our knees for 10 hours at a time.” Now 29, he works in a food-processing factory, packing flowers, broccoli and potatoes for £350 a week. He can just about afford to rent a bed-bug-infested, one-bedroom flat with his girlfriend and month-old baby. “My friends and I were the first to come to Boston from Sliven,” he says proudly. “Since then, another 2,000 have followed.”

Sitting in his coffee shop on the corner of the town’s cobbled marketplace, Moroccan-born Anton Dani points out these new arrivals. “They come on a daily basis,” he explains. “You can tell who is new and who is not.” He gestures to the small groups of young men standing around the square; they are smoking, staring, whiling away the time until they can register for work. Dozens of families are milling about the city centre, too. “Often you know they are new because they are very poorly dressed — and they are with children who should be in school but haven’t been enrolled yet.”

Anton grimaces when I ask about Brexit: he is a Ukip-then-Conservative councillor, and was the town’s leading campaigner for Leave and its Mayor on Brexit Day. “I don’t think it’s made things better… Now we have a lot of migrants from Bulgaria and many of them are gypsies.” Brexit, everyone here agrees, has failed to stem the number of migrants arriving — though what that figure is remains unclear. We know that between 2004 and 2014, Boston’s migrant population grew by 460%; and we know that there was a tenfold increase between 2011 and 2021. But these are only the people who have registered their presence — and as Anton explains, “there are a load of houses with up to 10 people living in them”. Whatever the true number is, many locals feel like the town is no longer theirs.

The problem with Boston, Anton says, is not that people from the EU have come to live here, but that there is no infrastructure to support them. The local hospital is overstretched; traffic is a permanent blight; at one primary school, translators had to be employed after it emerged many of the children couldn’t speak English. “Brexit is failing,” he admits. “If immigration is to work, you have to integrate. But we’re not demanding this from people.”

Back in 1900, a local journalist predicted that, within a century, Boston will “be served by elephantine emporia”, while “aeroplanes will wheel and pirouette around the pinnacles” of St Botolph’s. The church still dominates the marketplace, but there are few elephantine emporia. Instead, Boston has West Street — known variously as “Polak Street”, “Little Poland” and “East Street” — with its scattering of Eastern European shops, bakeries and job centres. And rather than pirouetting planes, you are more likely to see the speeding minibuses which transport workers to the nearby factories or farms each morning. To those Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian immigrants yet to arrive, this is the Bostonian Dream.

More from UnHerd Britain 2023

Labour is winning the Brexit revolution

By Tom McTague

But for many of the migrants who have settled, as well as those locals who have always lived here, that dream has soured. “There was nothing wrong when they first came, but look at the marketplace now.” Stan Turner, who is 85 and has lived in Boston all his life, nods towards a group of young Bulgarian men smoking in one corner. “They are intimidating. I always used to walk around but now I’m too scared.” Many locals I speak to say the same, and each has a story to hand: about gang-on-gang vendettas, about a friend being stabbed for not having a lighter, about Eastern European off-licences illicitly staying open beyond closing time. “We now tell those staying with us, particularly old people and women on their own, not to go out at night,” one hotel manager tells me.

Locals avoid the marketplace at night. It is empty when, at around 8pm, men arrive five-to-a-car and wait. They don’t prowl. They park up in the middle of the square in pairs, trading words and more with those in the vehicle next door. The atmosphere is charged; headlights are kept on. They don’t hide. The point, I suspect, is to be seen. They sit there, presiding over an unnerving restlessness that feels like it could tip into violence at any time.

It was shortly after 6pm on a balmy July evening that Lina Savicke’s daughter was stabbed and killed on Fountain Lane. “My two daughters were playing outside my shop here, when I heard my youngest scream ‘Mama!’, and then…” Lina pauses to wipe her eyes. “And then it happened.” There were people milling about. Dusk was yet to descend. Lilia was just nine.

There are rumours within the Lithuanian community that it was an organised hit, paid for by a disgruntled family member back home. “But at the moment, we don’t have a clue,” Lina tells me. I ask if she thinks it could happen again. “Yes… It’s dangerous here, especially at night. There is hardly any CCTV or police presence. It means you can do anything you like. This is what happens when a town falls apart…”

If Brexit was about taking back control, in Boston, the opposite seems to have happened. Since 2016, the year the town was named the “Murder Capital of Britain”, Boston’s crime rate has increased by 25% — yet last week, Lincolnshire Police, the lowest funded force in the UK, announced it was cutting PCSO numbers by almost half. Today, it is not uncommon for people to install CCTV cameras on their houses, even in the town’s more deprived areas, such as Fenside. The owner of one house there, flying the Union Jack, has reinforced his garden wall (“they kept ramming their cars into it”) and installed seven cameras. “I just want to keep my daughter safe,” he tells me.

More from UnHerd Britain 2023

Introducing UnHerd Britain 2023

By Freddie Sayers

Further up the road, I meet Nichola Williams. “I voted for Brexit,” she tells me. “It has nothing to do with immigrants who have jobs — I’ve worked with some fantastic foreigners here.” But, she continues, “you can go into town now and see others sitting around. We’ve had more murders and often it’s between themselves.”

This is borne out in Boston’s crime reports, though, as Nichola can attest, locals are hardly left unscathed by the anarchic cloud of insecurity and instability that the violence produces. “I lost one of my sons five years ago,” Nichola tells me. “He was only 32. He was the youngest and the cleverest and…” She tails off. I later learn he had mental health issues, lost his job working on the land, and started to drink heavily and take drugs. He was found by paramedics on a nearby riverbank in the middle of the day; a post-mortem report stated he had laid down and frozen to death after taking heroin and cocaine. “Then again,” Nichola adds, “I met someone from around here. You can’t say I made a mistake, but in many ways I did.” Is she blaming her son’s death on her decision to raise him in Boston? “Well… Yes and no.”

Unlike Lilia’s stabbing, the death of Nichola’s son received only a passing mention in the local press, but perhaps it is a more fitting symbol of Boston’s malaise. His actions keenly speak to the hopelessness and desperation that have taken hold in Boston in the past two decades. Ask anyone what they think of the town, and the standard response is “terrible”, “awful”, or “shit”. Ask why they think that is, and their answer feels fearful: a fear that their community is being dismantled, that the future looks bleak, and that all the institutions they once identified with — from the town’s defunct harbour to West Street in its prime — have been lost.

To some extent, Boston’s atomisation began well before the EU referendum. Perhaps it was sparked in 1970, when its direct rail service to London was canned, or, eight years later, when the medieval town was carved up by a dual carriageway. Or perhaps it started in May 2004, when the UK opened its labour market to Europe. Whatever caused it, by 2016, Boston’s decline was plain to see: in its extraordinary crime rates, especially when it comes to violent crime, and its sagging infrastructure.

Brexit was supposed to fix this. Forget taking back control of Britain; voters here would have settled for taking back control of Boston. Instead, immigration and crime continued to rise — and their town slipped from their grip.

This is where politics should step in, but, as Nichola tells me, “they’re all useless”. And to an extent, former Mayor Anton Dani agrees: “All politicians assume that people will forget things quickly. But the people here will not forget.” The legacy of this perceived betrayal is written in UnHerd’s poll results: in the fact that the root cause of Boston’s Brexit vote (its concern about immigration) remains strong, but voters’ belief in a political solution (Brexit itself) has plummeted. Politics was tried and failed.

“After Brexit vote, immigrants feel a town turn against them,” read one headline in The New York Times shortly after the referendum. Today, it is the locals who feel their town has turned against them — and many have given up on trying to win it back. That is the tragedy of Boston as Brexitland. It was supposed to be a Land of Hope and Glory, but the party only lasted one night.

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.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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.

You keep going, finally outside London’s blast radius, free from its cultural and economic gravity but not yet into the post-industrial North. Names on the motorway signs reek of Middle England. Grantham, birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and the Dambusters. Melton Mowbray, birthplace of the pork pie. This part of the world is about as Brexity as it gets: in 2016, in some parts of Lincolnshire, 75% voted to leave the European Union.

More from this author

So you want to quit the rat race

By Mary Harrington

If you’re more comfortable in the post-Blair Britain of social liberalism, buy-to-let portfolios, Eurostar minibreaks and ironic bunting, you probably don’t want to stop in Lincolnshire. You should stop in Lincolnshire.

Pull in at Stamford, a town preserved to an almost surreal degree from the depredations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries thanks to its near-feudal relationship to the nearby stately home, Burghley House. This colossal sixteenth-century ‘prodigy house’ was constructed by William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I. Today it’s still owned by the Cecils (confusingly, the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter), though the family themselves now mostly live in British Columbia.

Down the road, Stamford itself is almost wholly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century in its architecture, and permanently besieged by people filming the type of BBC costume drama that can’t decide between nostalgia and trying to cancel the past on the grounds of being old-fashioned.

BBC Costume Drama History, roughly speaking, covers an era that began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and lasted until the sexual one began (as Philip Larkin put it) in 1963. After 1963, Britain modernised, with a capital M, and since then anyone who demurs has been increasingly shoved to the margins. You’d be forgiven for thinking we had no history at all before the BBC Costume Era (BCE). But in fact the BCE is barely the tip of a huge, mostly submerged iceberg of Britain’s past, the vast majority of which lies under dark waters, in a time where people spoke strangely and really didn’t think like us at all.

Stamford in the BBC Costume Era was pretty dull, largely ignoring the Industrial Revolution and earning its keep mostly from North-South coaching traffic, farming and a malting business. Its more violent, colourful and contentious formative years lie further back.

The town gets its name from its position on the Roman-built Ermine Street. This ancient road, now mostly over-written by the A1, in those days crossed the river Welland in a gravelly water-meadow, giving it the name ‘stone-ford’. After the Romans left in around 400AD, Stamford persisted as a small settlement known for glazed pottery but not much else. The Vikings changed all that.

Suggested reading

Will Covid spell the end of city life?

By Barney Norris

When the Viking chief Ragnar Lodbrok was captured by King Aella of Northumbria in 865, legend has it that Aella executed Ragnar by throwing him into a snakepit. Whether this happened or not, Ragnar was definitely killed: his sons Hvitserk, Ubba, Bjorn Ironside and the superbly named Ivar the Boneless were so infuriated that they recruited an enormous band of Scandinavian warriors, known in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 865 as the ‘Great Heathen Army’. This horde piled into longboats and headed south from Scandinavia to wreak revenge on the soft Saxon southerners.

Unwisely, the then king of East Anglia, Edmund the Martyr, gave Ragnar’s sons and their army food and horses in exchange for agreeing not to attack his kingdom. This pusillanimous move did him no good in the long run: having conquered York in 866, Ubba and Ivar the Boneless returned to East Anglia, where in 869 they killed Edmund for refusing to renounce Christianity. By then the Northmen had a firm foothold in England, and in 874 they consolidated their political power across the East and Midlands.

The Great Heathen Army was always a coalition force, and the region was divided between their various factions. Stamford became a fortified Danish ‘burh’ — one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw — that is, the castle stronghold of a Danish horde who henceforth ruled the defeated Anglo-Saxon peasantry in the area according to Danish law and custom.

Stamford’s new Danish rulers built their burh on the north side of the Welland. Thanks to its position at the foot of Danish Mercia, it was of strategic military importance, and Danish Stamford remained a political hub in the East of England until 918. At that point, it fell to two of Alfred’s children, the formidable warrior queen Aethelflaed of Mercia and Edward of Wessex.

Rather than trying to rule Danish Stamford, Edward established his own parallel burh on the south side of the Welland, with Danes and Saxons facing one another across the water. One gets a sense that the atmosphere was probably somewhat bad-tempered to begin with. The antipathy must have waned over time, though, because by the Norman Conquest some 150 years later Stamford was booming. Its twin boroughs over-spilled their bounds on both sides of the river, suburbs spread out along approach roads and iron-smelting thrived in what’s now St George’s Street. It became, in its way, a happy story of integration.

Suggested reading

Is it time to move to Milton Keynes?

By Jonn Elledge

It didn’t last. There’s no record of the Norman defeat of Stamford’s existing population, but it can’t have taken long. In 1070, a mere four years after the Battle of Hastings, the Norman abbot of Peterborough took refuge at Stamford with 160 men when pursued by Hereward the Wake’s anti-Norman insurgency.

But Stamford’s brief prominence as a site of strategic military importance, for invaders first from the North and then from the South, gave way to an increasingly respectable-but-marginal status once invaders stopped coming. Out of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw, Stamford was the only one not to become a county town, and it flourished instead as a coaching stop, and a centre for the wool trade — an industry so fundamental to the medieval English economy that it funded the Hundred Years’ War.

Grown prosperous on the proceeds, in the Middle Ages Stamford was one of the biggest towns in England, with a castle, 14 churches and even (briefly) a breakaway university founded in 1333 by dissidents from Merton and Brasenose colleges in Oxford. In the 1840s, though, Stamford made a decision to side-line itself. Faced with the prospect of a railway hub, the people said thanks but no thanks. In this they were supported by then 3rd Marquess of Exeter, another William Cecil, who didn’t like the idea of his pretty town being ruined by the march of progress. The hub station was instead built in Peterborough.

Then in the 1960s Stamford retreated still further, with the construction of an A1 bypass. In doing so, it reached the end of the BBC Costume Era, having politely opted out of the March of Progress. From a pro-development point of view, this was the wrong choice. Stamford and Peterborough both had between 4000 and 5000 inhabitants at the start of the nineteenth century. Today, the population of Peterborough is around 200,000, while Stamford houses barely a tenth of that.

From a cultural and aesthetic point of view though, you can argue the toss. Peterborough today is a mess of ring roads, racism and ugly buildings, voted worst place to live in Britain for the second year running in 2020 and notable chiefly for being home to the UK Passport Office and a particularly unattractive multi-storey car park. Stamford, on the other hand, is quietly prosperous, with a thriving Civic Society association and an Urban Group dedicated to keeping the town clean, litter-free and friendly.

More from this author

Incels could become the new Vikings

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps shaped by its convulsive foundation in successive waves of invasion, Stamford’s bone-deep conservatism has, finally, become the town’s main stock-in-trade: in 1967, it became England’s first conservation area. Today Stamford covers barely more than two square miles, and yet it contains 446 listed buildings — a conservation density whose gravity pulls in tourists, down-sizers, retirees and restaurateurs as well as BBC location crews.

As the story we’ve been telling ourselves about modernity and progress starts to look increasingly rickety, it’s worth wondering whether Stamford was right to opt out. We might yet discover that larger but uglier — more atomised and therefore less liveable — urban areas could learn a thing or two from this prosperous small town about getting the balance right between economic development and grassroots civic life.

That’s if we get things right, and our small country can hold its communities together. If we don’t, we may yet find ourselves facing the more distant ghosts of Stamford’s past: the vengeful raiders, bull-runners, market-day massacres, religious schism, invasions and counter-invasions of those darker and stranger days before England’s BBC Costume era. I catch myself sometimes wondering how many of those older shadows are truly gone, and how many are just sleeping.