In a traditional brick smokehouse on Grimsby’s once-thriving docks, Patrick Salmon is keeping alive a working culture that was once part of everyday life in the town.
His artisan smoked fish, prepared in chambers darkened by more than 100 years of tar, is destined for some of Britain’s best-known chefs, including Tom Kerridge, Marco Pierre White and Raymond Blanc.
Yet there is little celebrity glamour in Mr Salmon’s own routine at Alfred Enderby, the traditional fish-smoking business he owns and operates. Now 62, he regularly works 12-hour shifts six days a week—and often puts in even longer hours.
After a lifetime spent working in Grimsby, however, he says he increasingly feels out of step with many people around him and has begun questioning why he continues to push himself so hard.
His business is based in East Marsh and Port, a Grimsby neighbourhood described in House of Commons Library figures as the UK’s leading area for worklessness.
Of the district’s 3,492 working-age residents, an estimated 1,700 are unemployed and receiving Universal Credit. That equates to 48.9 per cent of the local working-age population—almost one in every two adults below pension age.
Rubbish can be seen along roads and in public parks across Grimsby’s East Marsh and Port district, identified as the UK’s worklessness capital
Once a busy fishing port, Grimsby now has shuttered shops and residents who say the area’s sense of community has faded
The figures are estimates compiled at constituency level before being divided into much smaller areas known as MSOAs, which generally contain fewer than 10,000 residents.
East Marsh and Port records the highest rate, sitting almost 1.5 percentage points above the next-placed areas, both of which are in Blackpool.
The statistics do not suggest that everyone out of work is choosing not to work. Ill health is a major issue in this part of Lincolnshire, where roughly 30 per cent of working-age adults also receive benefits linked to health conditions.
However, Mr Salmon and other residents told us they believe a significant number of people who could work have never developed a routine of employment—and no longer appear motivated to seek it.
That sense of frustration was reflected during a visit to East Marsh this week, where signs of what is often called social cohesion appeared increasingly difficult to find.
On Freeman Street, once the bustling commercial centre of a fishing town powered by the wages of trawlermen, a security guard outside an independent food store described catching his second shoplifter of the day.
The woman had taken a block of cheese and a packet of washing powder. When she realised she had been noticed, she made only a token attempt to walk away faster and did not resist when the guard recovered the items.
The guard said he was relieved that no knife had been produced on this occasion. He planned to report the incident, although he questioned whether police would have the resources—or the inclination—to pursue it.
Not far away, a man who appeared to be under the influence of drugs was causing alarm in a public car park, waving a knife in broad daylight.
More than a dozen Humberside Police officers surrounded him, but he ignored repeated orders to drop the weapon even as an officer kept a Taser trained on him. The incident offered a stark illustration of why persistent shoplifting may receive less immediate attention from police.
On nearby Victor Street, where neglected terraced homes can sell for around £50,000, a man drinking beer late in the morning was asked why he was not working. His blunt response was that he “can’t be f***ed”.
During our time in Grimsby—a town some residents jokingly call “the end of the line”—we repeatedly heard claims about people who were capable of working but had no plans to do so. Some residents said petty crime had become the alternative for a number of them.
Back on Freeman Street where a vape shop and Turkish barber shop are the only signs of any recent economic activity, Wendy Aisthorp, 61, was just finishing her shift.
Supermarket worker Wendy Aisthorp said there is a shoplifting epidemic in the town and it becomes a ‘free-for-all’ without the security guard
She has worked at Heron Foods, the budget supermarket chain, for 11 years and has seen the problems of chronic joblessness at close quarters daily.
‘If the security guard isn’t in, it can be a free-for-all,’ she said. ‘People just help themselves.
‘I’ve worked all my life, brought my children up on my own and always paid my taxes.
‘But then you see people on benefits wanting everything for nothing. They’ve got no intention at all of getting a job.
‘Why do they have to work for something, when they can just take it instead?’ is what they seem to think.’
Parvaneh Ghanbar, 42, walking along Freeman Street for an appointment at the tanning salon, was equally frustrated.
‘There are jobs – people just don’t try hard enough to find them,’ she said. ‘There are a lot of people in this part of Grimsby who are more content not working, and claiming benefits.
‘There is a lot of drugs and alcohol abuse,’ she added. ‘Go down the back streets and you’ll see it everywhere.’
Parvaneh Ghanbar, 42, said there are a lot of people in Grimsby who are happy not to work and to claim benefits instead
Statistics show how deeply deprivation has become embedded here.
Government data suggests 87 per cent of children in East Marsh and Port live in low-income families, compared with 38 per cent nationally.
Some 58 per cent of pupils qualify for free school meals, more than twice the national figure.
The most shocking statistic is for the healthy life expectancy here – the age up to which a person can expect to live in good health. For males here it is just 48. Women fare just a year better. This is a full 12 years below the national average.
And one doesn’t need to look far to see signs of this widespread ill health.
Among the unloved houses of East Marsh, Chloe Revell, 20, was pushing her one-year-old daughter Ivy-Ann with her partner, Charlie Wright, 22.
The household receives around £500 a month in Universal Credit and Child Benefit.
Chloe, who last worked in an arcade before falling pregnant, said: ‘Because we’re on Universal Credit, they don’t make us pay [rent].
‘The job centre will pay that off. So once we’ve paid to get food in, the gas and electric and stuff, we’re left with about £200.
‘We make it last a month but sometimes it can be hard.
‘If the baby needs anything, you’re like, ‘Oh God’.’
Charlie Wright, 22, and Chloe Revell, 20, are two of the 1,700 working age residents who are unemployed and claiming Universal Credit claimants
Yet Chloe, who is originally from Nottingham, is adamant that benefits are not where she wants to remain.
‘I love working. I can’t wait to get back into work. I’d love to work in a nursery.
‘It’s good for your mental health. It’s good to get out of the house.’
Does she know people around here who could work but are happy not to?
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Definitely.’
Charlie is not one of these however, they say. He used to work on Grimsby’s docks but says that mental health problems had prevented him from working for the past three years.
Steve Dawson is a 70-year-old former Londoner who moved to Grimsby five years ago and is now so firmly resident that he bristles at the derogatory way that some outsiders talk about the town.
‘I find it lovely here. It’s like London used to be. People will speak to you, tell you to have a good day – they’re polite,’ he told us.
But Mr Dawson accepts that there are many who should be in work rather than being supported by the welfare state. He is also saddened by the number of red-brick Victorian buildings being filleted into Houses in Multiple Occupation.
‘There are rough sides to the place but I used to live in Brixton, so how rough do you want to get?,’ he asked.
‘My bugbear is all these kids on bikes and e-bikes. If they can cycle, then why can’t they work?
‘There are people who have Motability cars parked outside the pubs. Go inside and you’ll see them walking about and dancing.
‘And when they come out, they start wobbling. It’s just easy money.’
Disenfranchisement among the residents of Grimsby appears to have played out at the ballot box lately.
Once part of Labour’s famous ‘red wall’, the constituency of Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes turned Conservative for the first time in decades at the 2019 election.
While the constituency returned to Labour in 2024 – now represented in Parliament by Melanie Onn – Reform took a sizable 28.8% of the vote then.
Many shops are boarded up in East March and Port, where some 48.9 per cent of locals, almost one in two of all non-pensioner adults, are unemployed and on Universal Credit
And pollsters predict that if an election was called tomorrow, Nigel Farage’s party would now triumph here.
In the middle of the last century, Grimsby was the largest fishing port in the world. Its magnificent Victorian dock tower still looms over the waterfront as a reminder of a maritime golden age.
Seven hundred trawlers crowded its docks and around them grew an entire economy – net makers, chandlers, auctioneers and even a mortuary.
Deep-sea trawlermen who spent their sizeable pay packs on lavish nights out during their brief return to terra firma came to be known as ‘three day millionaires’.
Then, within little more than a generation, prosperity disappeared.
The three Cod Wars with Iceland culminated in 1976 with British trawlermen restricted from accessing fertile fishing waters.
Like the potteries in Stoke, the pit towns of Durham and Teesside, and Bradford’s wool trade, Grimsby’s main industry was decimated and unemployment surged.
Jon King, who runs Great Escape and the Blackball Cafe from buildings on the old docks, working with people recovering from addiction, said the town had struggled with a ‘collective grief’ over its lost past.
He is part of a collective of local people who are slowly turning derelict former docks buildings into creative hubs – the kind of slow-burning gentrification that has happened in cities like Hull and Liverpool.
Jon King, who works with people recovering from addiction, said the town had struggled with a ‘collective grief’ over its lost past
Jon, 41, said: ‘In terms of brand identity, the name Grimsby doesn’t help.
‘But the town hasn’t been kind enough to itself and the loss of industry has led to a collective grief.
‘Most families had a connection to the docks. People got into a mentality of forgetting the docks exist because they are hurt.’
He added: ‘It’s been drilled into people living here that ‘you can’t have’. We need to change the mindset because there is opportunity for people here.
‘The nation’s energy infrastructure is on our doorstep’.
One former fisherman asked whether he missed life at sea after finally giving it up. ‘Every day,’ he replied.
Perhaps the greatest paradox in Britain’s worklessness capital is that there is, in fact, plenty of work available.
Grimsby’s seafood industry still supports 7,000 jobs directly and another 10,000 in the wider supply chain. There are vacancies.
The town is also pinning its hopes for a more prosperous future on billions of pounds of investment in the offshore wind and green energy sectors providing the cash for regeneration.
The derelict 19th century Ice Factory, for instance, where crushed ice was once supplied for the town’s vast fishing fleet, is set to be transformed into a hotel, conference centre and offices with capacity for roughly 1,800 jobs.
Financier and philanthropist Thomas Shutes, 58, who is behind the ambitious regeneration plans, said there is optimism that better days are ahead.
He said: ‘When you talk to local people, they know the jokes about Grimsby being the end of the line and it’s ‘grim up north’ and all of that nonsense.
‘And it is literally the end of the line in that it is the most easterly point on the railway. But local people will turn that on its head and say ‘it’s the end of the railway line, but it’s the beginning of the North Sea.
‘So there is a sort of optimism.
‘Even when you go around the East Marsh, people go ‘well, it’s all very well for you to say it’s s***. It’s not to us – it’s our home, it’s where we live. We rather like it, thank you very much’.
‘There’s a kind of defiance about that, which in a way is oddly healthy.
‘People love their places. There needs to be more ways of linking young people into the exciting stuff that’s happening in this region.
‘They don’t necessarily have to leave, the jobs are here for them, but their training pathways are not.’
Grimsby will also serve as the hub for the Hornsea 3 project, which will be the biggest wind farm in the world and generate enough electricity to power 3.3m UK homes.
However, for locals in East Marsh the thousands of jobs that will be created seem perhaps a world away and out of reach.
Mr Shutes said: ‘These will be really high-paying, high-skilled jobs.
‘[But] when you’re in the East Marsh, what they’ll say to you is ‘What’s offshore wind ever done for me?’
‘My electricity bills are still too high, my schools are underperforming, my kids are not getting those jobs, so whatever’.
‘That’s the disconnect that needs to be worked out.’
Back to that smokery where Mr Salmon, still hard at work, says that lately he has been increasingly wondering why.
Labour’s hikes in the minimum wage, national insurance contributions, rampant energy bills and inflation have all squeezed his margins to their thinnest in years.
Mr Salmon, who employs seven staff, has had enough of working hard to pay for other people’s benefits.
And he particularly wants Andy Burnham to get a grip on the nation’s spiralling welfare bill.
He said: ‘There are people abusing welfare – we all know them,
‘We all know people who are taking the p***. I don’t understand why we pussyfoot around it instead of just addressing it.
‘I know people who have got family who’ve never worked and they say ‘why would you?’
‘It is not just Grimsby. There is nowhere in the UK that isn’t touched by this underclass of people that we’re just not dealing with.
‘There’s nowhere you can go where you haven’t got hooligans driving three abreast on a motorcycle without a helmet on and stealing bikes or mobile phones or whatever.
‘Things need to change. We need to just get less whimsical about everything, have a bit more guts and have a very, very hard look at welfare. Otherwise we will lose control.’
Mr Salmon knows something about trying to get the long-term unemployed back into work.
Patrick Salmon, 62, works 12-hour days, six days a week at the Alfred Enderby traditional fish smokers
He employed two local people in recent years who had previously been out of work for long periods and he even persevered when the initial transition back into regular employment proved difficult.
He did so out of a desire to help his local community – but now says the financial arithmetic of doing so again no longer works.
He said: ‘If the Government really wants to get people back into work, it should make businesses thrive instead of burying us in schemes and paperwork.
‘Just make businesses strong and profitable, then turn round and say: ‘Now go and employ somebody.’
‘If you did that, businesses like mine would be out there taking people on.
‘At the moment, we’ve got the cart in front of the horse and it is the horse that is pushing this thing over the hill.’
