It’s ten years since the Brexit vote, and over the last few weeks I’ve been visiting towns along the East Coast. Some — Clacton, Great Yarmouth, Skegness — have already elected Reform MPs. Others are targets in the next round of local elections.
I worked in Redcar and Cleveland for a decade, in the NHS, and know the area well. I wanted to start with two contrasting images of Redcar: the rubble of the former steelworks, now the subject of rumour and scandal around the deals done by the Teesside Mayor’s office; and the new gigawatt battery installation at Net Zero Park.
But there is a problem with that framing. Redcar still has more industry than people give it credit for. It remains, in its own way, a working industrial town — just smaller, quieter, and far less visible than it once was.
Because all of that industry, old and new, is hidden away. Behind fences, private roads, security guards. Rather than being something the town presents to the world, it feels locked up, almost like a state secret. I felt like I was sneaking around trying to get even the most basic photographs.
On paper, Redcar has a lot in common with places like Clacton or Skegness. It is an end-of-the-line town, somewhere you don’t pass through on the way to anywhere else. There is no “somewhere else”.
When I worked there, it was — statistically — the least sexually diverse place in the United Kingdom. One person in the census ticked the LGBT box. A friend of mine.
It was also a solid Labour seat. When I first arrived, the MP was Mo Mowlam. One of the very few times in my life I have heard what sounded like the safety catch on an automatic weapon being released was walking into her constituency office. It set the tone.
The politics have shifted since then. Redcar returned a Conservative MP for a period, and is now back with Labour again. But the reasons for that volatility sit much deeper than party labels. The Council isn’t up for election until next year, but Reform are already looking to take over.
Redcar was built on industry, particularly steel. The steelworks survived until about ten years ago, but the industrial heart had been weakening long before that. What remained, by the end, was as much memory as reality.
After 1997, the national economy improved and opportunities expanded. But those opportunities were elsewhere. To take advantage of them, you had to leave.
And people did leave.
The brightest, the most ambitious, the most able — they went to universities, to cities, to wherever the opportunities were. Most didn’t come back.
What was left behind was not just fewer jobs, but fewer people. A hollowing out that is social as much as economic.
That is the context for the labour market. Employment rates are below the national average, and economic inactivity is high. But this isn’t simply unemployment. A significant share of people are not in the labour market at all — because of long-term illness, or because they left work years ago and never returned. Work hasn’t just become harder to find; for many, it has quietly disappeared from everyday life.
On the surface, that looks similar to places like Clacton or Great Yarmouth. But the underlying pattern is different. In those towns, inactivity is driven more by age and a seasonal, low-wage economy. There is still work, of a sort. In Redcar, the labour market didn’t just weaken — it thinned out, and for some disappeared entirely. This is not a seaside town in the usual sense. It is an industrial town that happens to be on the coast.
And yet, Redcar does not feel like a town that has given up.
There are museums and an arts centre on the seafront. A racecourse. Independent shops — more than you might expect — and enough of them to make an afternoon of wandering, browsing and eating a lemon top, even if on the day I visited it felt more like hot chocolate weather.
More than that, there was a sense of people being present. Cafés with groups talking, the arts centre in use, a town that felt, if not prosperous, then at least active. In some ways, it felt livelier than when I left nearly two decades ago. There are even some public sculptures, although these look like totems to an aquatic elder god, appropriate given the number of goth and witchcraft shops the town now has.
When I visited Clacton the first person who spoke to me angrily demanded that I delete all the photos I had taken. I was baffled until I realised that she was worried she might be in the background carrying out the activities of day to day life, something that might threaten her disability benefits
When I visited Redcar the first people who spoke to me were an old couple walking along the seafront. They stopped and chatted, watching big ships sail up the Tees. We made jokes about whether any of them might contain oil. Everyone I met was like that.
Redcar may not be on the road to anywhere. But it does feel like a place that is trying to go somewhere. A town that understands its problems and is at least attempting to deal with them, rather than simply looking for someone else to blame.
That, in itself, is not nothing.
