A UK town that was once the home port for the world's largest fishing fleet is now a shadow of its former self. Podcaster David Burnip discovered there’s still a thriving fish industry in Grimsby – it’s just all going on behind closed doors. Grimsby, in Lincolnshire, has been branded one of the UK’s roughest towns, with 167 crimes reported per 1,000 people in 2023. Figures for the first quarter of 2024 show that over half of working-age people in the town are unemployed.
The rapid decline of the town’s fishing fleet is largely to blame for that. In 1970 around 400 trawlers were based in the port, but by 2013 only five remained. But there is still a fresh fish industry in the town – it’s just a lot harder to find.
Martin, from Grimsby’s fish market, said on David’s Wandering Turnip podcast that while there are about a dozen boats still fishing out of Grimsby, they’re all specialising in shellfish, and all of the white fish for the thriving fish market is frozen and imported from Iceland.
Grimsby’s fresh fish market was once a huge open-air affair, but it’s now conducted in a hygienic indoor environment: “Based on some of the European regulations that were brought in back in the late 90s or early 2000s everything's behind closed doors,” Martin explains.
“We've got the chillers on, with ice on everything that the the standards are much higher and much better but what it means is that nobody sees it – it's not a visual thing anymore.”. It’s all a far cry from Grimsby’s heyday, when trawlermen would spend their free time undertaking epic pub crawls up and down Grimsby’s Freeman street.
