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.
David explains: “Back when the fishing industry was prosperous here, everyone who’d been working on the boats would get off and for the three days that they had on land they’d come here with all their money and just go wild spending in all the pubs.
“Apparently what they used to do, because they had so much money at the time, they would just leave the taxis running outside the pub, go in drink a pint, then drive to the next one and drink another pint. There was serious money to be had here back in the day.”
Martin says it’s all a lot more low-key now, but some things haven’t changed. He continued: “(In the fish market) everything’s done on a shout auction basis.
“The method of selling is the same now as it was 60 or 70 years ago. The sales are done with a book and a pencil, and all of the buyers on here are all registered so they use paper tallies. It’s a very antiquated system but it works perfectly well.”
While Grimsby has certainly fallen on tough times since the early 1980s collapse of the fishing industry, the town is recognised as the main centre of the UK’s fish-processing industry. Some 70% of the UK’s fish-processing industry is located in Grimsby.
However, the bitter legacy of the so-called ‘Cod Wars’ with Iceland remains. Of the 18,000 tonnes of fresh fish sold in Grimsby fish market in 2012, almost 13,000 tonnes, mainly cod and haddock, was caught by Icelandic trawlers.
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