Just been watching a very interesting programme on BBC1 all about Lowestoft and basically the sad tale of a once thriving fishing Town that is now dead! My mum is a Lowestoft girl and she remembers the good old days when trawlers came into port and delivered their catches of fish by the 100s of tonnes each day. Now the fishing is all but over thanks in the main to the politicians and the EU quotas. Both parties blue and red have represented the town over the past 100 years yet neither it seems has the solution to solve the Town's deep problems of unemployment, urban decay and more worryingly loss of hope. Fertile ground for UKIP as indeed are many of the seaside Towns that have seen better days from Grimsby, Boston, kings Lynn, Clacton and the list goes on. There are no easy answers no magic wand and it is just very very sad that a town where I have lasting memories is in terminal decline and the politicians are just sitting back and letting it happen! Ipswich is going the same way! Thank god the football team is doing the Town proud.
I have no idea how it is now but I've lived in Lowestoft before in my early twenties and it was a ****hole back then. As you say JWM, a lot of rural/seaside towns are going to the dogs and it's a real shame. Many parts of England are just old and dreary now, but of course there are still many beautiful places too. It is a part of the island that I don't miss but I can't say that all of San Diego isn't without it's rough places. There are some really run down areas, more homeless than you've ever seen and listed in the top ten in the country for poor road surfaces despite being the second most expensive place to buy property now. Only San Francisco has a higher average house price. Online shopping is killing the high street and malls and town centres are swiftly becoming eyesores in England and across the US too.
Good post San Diego, my mum was born in Lowestoft in the 1930s in the depression and her dad was a fisherman after his dad and so on. Once we as a country joined the then EEC to later become the EU we gave up our sovereign fishing grounds as a condition of membership. Ted Heath was the most despicable bastard politician of them all for this act of treachery! Fishing fleets have dwindled to nothing with the loss of thousands of dependent jobs onshore yet no industry has come in to replace those jobs that were lost. The only growth industry in Lowestoft these days are the drug dealers. It's very sad and a damning indictment of the politicians from both the main parties. They can't even sort out a new bridge which the Town desperately needs!
Yep, no job prospects in Lowestoft that's for sure but definitely a lot of drugs. The whole of Suffolk is bad for getting employment really.
The difference being that the miners held the country to ransom with their unaffordable wage demands.
So the proportionate response is to lay to waste whole communities without any hope of them recovering?
I can give you a bit of inside on this. I left school in July 1968 and joined Talisman Trawlers as a trainee fish auctioneer. At that time there were around 120 trawlers belonging largely to Boston Deep Sea Fisheries and Small & Co. In those days ten or a dozen boats landed around 200 stone every day. A very significant proportion of this was unsold and was loaded into railway wagons and taken to Grimsby to be made into fertiliser and animal feed. So the idea that Johnny Foreigner nicked all our fish is just another Daily Mail/UKIP fairy tale.
