The seaside town on the front lines of boarded-up Britain

Grimsby's once-great fishing industry has given way to 'empty, abandoned' shops and houses - Lorne Campbell / Guzelian

Clouds overlook endless miles of flat fields surrounding a town that was once one of the UK’s most prosperous.

Grimsby sits on the edge of the Humber where the breeze has a cold sting. Down by the docks the smell of fish still hangs in the air, although there are few trawlers left.

Grimbarians pride themselves on looking out for each other. “The people are amazing,” says Karen Owen, 47, who is a carer for her husband.

Her 20-year-old daughter, Charlotte, agrees. “We love the community but if the town doesn’t start looking up soon, it will lose it.”

The boarded-up buildings, smashed shop windows and fly-tipping are hard to miss.

“I’ve been coming here all my life and I have just seen a massive decline in the town,” Karen says. “I have never seen it going up. It is such a shame. It’s just empty and abandoned.”

Grimsby became the centre of the general election last week when Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer were quizzed in a televised town hall debate there.

The new constituency Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes will be a key battleground on polling day – the Red Wall area swung blue for the first time in 74 years in 2019.

In town, locals are unimpressed with both Sunak and Sir Keir’s performances.

“Them two coming here, what are they going to do? They’re only doing it for their own benefit,” says John Tucker, a 78-year-old pensioner who used to work on the docks.

Does he not think it is good they come to Grimsby rather than going somewhere else? “I would have thought they could do better,” he shrugs.

Despite a renewed focus on levelling up in recent years, many locals in struggling areas such as Grimsby still feel left behind.

The clearest sign of its decline is evident in the population numbers.

The UK’s population soared by 5.9pc in the decade to the 2021 census amid a small baby boom in the early 2010s and rising immigration. It is estimated to have grown even more since to 6.8pc.

But while many cities have swelled, some towns are haemorrhaging young people.

Fifteen of the 193 constituencies made up of towns in England and Wales saw their populations shrink over the decade to the last census, Telegraph analysis shows.

Great Grimsby had the second-most pronounced decline, at 2.5pc, surpassed only by Gateshead on the other side of the River Tyne from Newcastle.

While such places are “generally outliers”, they share many characteristics, says Paul Swinney from the Centre for Cities.

“A lack of jobs will mean you do poorly in terms of retaining people but also in terms of attracting people. All that then impacts on population,” Swinney says.

Towns that had “a reliance on an industry at some stage, which has declined” and are “relatively isolated” will know these struggles, he says.

Many shrinking areas are in northern parts of England or Wales, and also include larger places such as Blackpool and Sunderland.

In contrast, the UK’s wider population has grown by two million in the last three years alone as a result of net migration.

There is not much sign of it in Grimsby. As many people around the country worry about levels of immigration, its absence here tells its own story.

“Immigration is perhaps one of the strongest signs of an economy that is doing well because there is a reason for people to want to go there,” says Swinney.

Industrial decline, ill health and worklessness mean the level of economic inactivity is higher here than the national average. The employment rate was 67.5pc in 2021 at the time of the census, compared with 71pc for England.

Since the financial crisis, Britain has struggled with anaemic growth and flagging productivity. Improving the fortunes of cities and towns outside London will be crucial to avoiding another decade of lost progress.

Even improving productivity in large cities like Manchester and Nottingham could make the UK the second-richest G7 nation ahead of Germany, research for the Centre for Cities has shown.

Raising employment rates would go a long way to improve living standards in Grimsby, parts of which have residents on the UK’s lowest incomes. The town falls within North and North East Lincolnshire, where productivity is 89pc of the national average.

A key challenge for the next resident of No 10 will be to create a rising tide high enough to lift the fortunes of these shrinking towns.

‘Horrific factory work’

Grimsby was once the home port for the world’s largest fishing fleet and the industry provided a route into well-paid work regardless of academic achievement.

Today, the town’s youth feel there is a lack of opportunities.

“There are a lot of factories around but the conditions are horrific,” says 20-year-old Callum Atkins. “They are legal but it is bad conditions. It is the only job you can get your hands on.”

He did factory work for a year. Covid disrupted his time in college and after two failed attempts at university, he is back to square one while recovering from a break-up. He dreams of one day starting his own game design company.

On a June weekday, Atkins and his two friends, who are both 17 and in college, are hanging out in the centre of town near St James Hotel.

The two young friends say they are biding their time before they can move away from Grimsby for university. One wants to go to Devon, the other to America.

Why leave?

“The thing about Grimsby is that it’s a good place to be, but there is barely anything to do,” says Anthony Haughey, one of Atkins’ friends.

The other, Oskar Siekielski, adds: “We have been waiting for the bowling alley to come into Freshney Place for like the past four years. It has never showed up.”

The council is working on turning vacant shops near the shopping centre into a cinema, but by the time it opens Haughey and Siekielski may already have left.

The one thing Grimsby has plenty of is food-processing factories. It is home to one of the largest concentrations of food manufacturing facilities in Europe.

Back in 1998 the BBC reported that these factories churned out more frozen pizzas than any other area in Europe.

But the prospect of standing over a conveyor belt in sub-zero temperatures as frozen fish fillets or vegetables roll by during 12-hour shifts fails to excite many young people in the area.

“I refuse to go to a factory, flat out refuse,” says Atkins.

Back on the high street, 20-year-old Charlotte Owen says: “There is too much factory work. A lot of people here have mental health issues. Working in a rundown, depressing-looking factory is not something somebody wants, but that is what the town is.”

Charlotte Owen, pictured with her mother Karen, is keen to return to work - Lorne Campbell / Guzelian

Through Universal Credit, Charlotte, who has been struggling with mental health issues, has been supported in joining a business administration course. Her mental health is improving and she is looking forward to working again once the course finishes in June.

For the first six months, she will be assigned a support person to help her navigate the return to work.

“I just wish this programme was not just for Universal Credit seekers. I wish it was for everybody because there’s a lot of people my age that could really benefit from it,” she says.

Young people who have struggled to find their feet in the job market after the pandemic can only access help like this if they claim benefits. It means those who are unable to rely on guidance from home and who had much of their recent education disrupted have limited support without going on the dole.

Rising worklessness has become an increasingly acute issue for Britain since Covid, with a surge in long-term sickness resulting in 700,000 people leaving the labour market.

Economists refer to the lasting damage to the jobs market from Covid as scarring. In a place like Grimsby, the battle to overcome it is more visible than in more affluent areas.

“Covid did hit the local economy quite significantly. I don’t think in many sectors it has fully recovered yet,” says Philip Jackson, the leader of North East Lincolnshire council.

The impact is clear on the high street. The latest figures suggest the town’s commercial vacancy rate was nearly three times the average in England, with more than one in four premises empty.

Shops that are open sell mobility scooters, vapes or are pawnbrokers. The shopping centre Freshney Place appears to be in better shape, however.

The council bought it in 2022 with public funding after it fell into receivership to revive the town centre.

While the local authority is happy to play a role in reviving the area, officials are cautious not to “fuel a dependency culture”, Jackson says.

“There’s a bigger role for our schools to take on there in terms of aspiration. Maybe in the past there has been a bit of a view in schools locally that there aren’t really any opportunities around here for people, so what are we educating them for,” he adds.

Vacant shops near Grimsby's shopping centre could be turned into a cinema - Lorne Campbell

Education is a hurdle for the town. Only 40pc of working-age people in Grimsby have academic qualifications beyond GCSEs or equivalent, compared with 56pc across England.

Many of those who do make it to university never look back.

“When younger people get to the point where they are about to go into the jobs market and, particularly if they are looking for a higher skilled job, it is difficult for a place like Grimsby because of its size and isolation to offer access to that type of work,” says Swinney.

The long-term decline in Grimsby’s population means that while a lack of housing is a constant source of frustration elsewhere in the UK, here it is available in abundance.

Rents have risen slightly in the past year but remain some of the lowest in the country.

Around East and West Marsh, the most deprived neighbourhoods down by the docks, many terraced houses are boarded up and appear abandoned.

“Unfortunately, quite a lot of them are absent landlords,” says Jackson.

“We get people from London for example who will bid at auctions for houses, really cheap. When they come up to look at them, they realise that they can’t get their money back by investing in them because property prices are so low generally.”

As a result, many tenanted terraced homes fall into disrepair or are left vacant after being bought for as little as £50,000.

In another manifestation of the area’s decreasing population, there had been a proposal to close three publicly owned nurseries because they were economically unviable, in part from a dwindling number of children.

The plan was scrapped after protests from the parents who do live in the area.

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Road to Reform

For all of its problems, many locals feel the town gets an unduly negative reputation.

Tabloid headlines describe parts of the town as places where “drug addicts steal bins” and “pensioners board up windows in fear of petrol bombs”.

“When you’re from here you have a different mindset than people coming in,” says 24-year-old councillor Oliver Freeston. “When people say Grimsby is awful I just don’t see it. I think it’s a good area. We just need more of the right investment.”

Freeston, who returned to Grimsby after doing a degree, is standing as the local Reform candidate after defecting from the Conservatives weeks ago.

Grimsby's Reform UK candidate, Oliver Freeston, is expected to take a chunk of votes from his Conservative rival at the election - Lorne Campbell/Guzelian

While Labour is projected to win overwhelmingly on July 4, he will likely take a chunk of votes from the Conservative candidate, Lia Nici.

She has been the MP for Grimsby for the past five years after a remarkable win in 2019.

“People will vote for Reform because they want to give the Conservatives a kicking,” she says. “But what policies have they got other than seemingly hating everybody who can’t track themselves back to Britain for the last 1,000 years?”

The latest detailed YouGov poll suggests Labour will receive 44pc of the vote, the Conservatives 27pc and Reform 16pc in the area.

Nici is still out campaigning in full force in the hope that she will be able to overcome the odds.

To stem the population decline, Nici’s big ambition if reelected would be to bring back a grammar school to Grimsby.

“We have really good grammar schools in Lincolnshire. What parents are doing is moving themselves into the catchment area or where there’s a bus route.

“We get the population leaning out and of course, once you lose them you don’t tend to ever get them back,” she says.

Fish and microchips

Grimsby was once the home port for the world's largest fishing fleet - Lorne Campbell

Grimsby’s experience offers lessons for how the next government can better help other towns with shrinking or stagnating populations.

“As a local authority, we put a lot of time and effort into bidding for pots of grant-funded money,” Jackson says. “It would be far better if the Government just said ‘this is your chunk of money for regeneration, it is up to you how you spend it as long as you do so sensibly’. [We need] more devolution.”

Boris Johnson’s government set out to narrow the economic and social gap between the UK’s regions under the banner of “levelling up”. However, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) warned on Friday that progress has been “feeble”.

“It has been a policy failure,” said Adrian Pabst from NIESR.

Far greater investment, faster dishing out of funding and handing more powers to local leaders is needed for it to succeed, the think tank said.

When the political parties released their manifestos, the Conservatives reiterated their support for levelling up. However, the main vehicle for achieving this policy – the UK Shared Prosperity Fund – would after three years be redirected to pay for making 18-year-olds do national service.

Labour, meanwhile, plans to retire the term levelling up but has promised improvements to infrastructure planning, addressing regional health inequalities and greater devolution. Notably, the party wants to build new towns.

Grimsby and neighbouring Cleethorpes have received two rounds of levelling up funding alongside other investment amounting to £280m.

The town will be part of the Humber Freeport, giving it favourable tax and customs rules. Meanwhile, the high street is being redeveloped to pivot from struggling retail to more leisure facilities.

“I have been here since 1965. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a time when various parts of the private and public sector are working so closely together along with government to try and move the area forward,” Jackson says.

“These things don’t happen overnight,” he adds.

One source of hope for the town is the growing renewables sector. It already employs around 2,000 people and is bringing jobs in areas like engineering and computer science.

The world’s largest offshore wind farm, owned by Danish company Orsted, is being operated and maintained from Grimsby.

A local success story is Myenergi, which has grown from two people to a 300-person operation with funding from venture capitalists.

Its core product, Zappi, is the first in the world to allow electric car owners to charge their vehicles with energy from solar panels.

Co-founder Jordan Brompton says she wants to help her hometown move from “the fishing and food industry towards becoming a green electronics hub”, a transition she describes as “from fish to chips”.

Hiring can be a challenge, however.

“It’s very difficult to employ engineers and coders, in particular for senior roles, because they all gravitate towards cities,” Brompton admits.

Myenergi co-founder Jordan Brompton says Grimsby could be a tech hub if the town can overcome hiring challenges - Lorne Campbell / Guzelian

Katrina Pierce, the development manager for the Federation of Small Businesses in the area, says the largest issue facing Grimsby is neither a lack of jobs nor people but a shortage of skills and confidence.

“The freeport alone is going to bring 600 jobs. There are at least 22,000 jobs that are needed in construction and engineering alone in the next three years,” Pierce says.

“What we find is very few people locally are aware of the very well-paid and meaningful opportunities that are in those sectors. Younger people are leaving the area, which is a critical issue.”

Overcoming this problem will be crucial to Grimsby’s success and reversing its decline.

Business groups such as the local chamber of commerce are also campaigning for reinstating a direct train link to London, which they say would help make it more attractive.

Since the last census, Grimsby’s population has recovered slightly by 0.5pc, North East Lincolnshire Council estimates.

Some of the newcomers are workers coming to fill roles in the growing renewables sector, while others are pensioners attracted by cheap housing, according to the council.

In town, several new arrivals say they have come to the cheap seaside town amid poor mental or physical health.

Still, the increase is too muted to make any real dent in the longer decline. Even when going back 40 years, Grimsby’s population is still lower today.

Back on the high street sitting on a bench with vacant shops on either side, Charlotte and her mother Karen say they hope the town will soon see better times.

“It was given the term Great Grimsby for a reason,” says Charlotte.

“It needs to be made great again,” Karen adds.

Additional reporting by Ben Butcher.

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