Great Yarmouth was described by Dickens as a kind of paradise. David Copperfield lived there in an upturned boat with Peggoty.
Proof, if it were needed, that the town has not only seen better days, but better centuries.
Now it is something else entirely. The archetypal decayed seaside town: slot machines, one-armed bandits, and not much else. It is easy to be cynical about a place like this. It is much harder to love it.
Suspicion and absence
Great Yarmouth is suspicious of outsiders to the point of hostility. That is a problem in a place that still depends, at least in theory, on tourism.
It is not just immigrants. It is anyone who is not from there.
There is a constant complaint about lack of integration. But it is difficult to see what people would be integrating into. There is very little public realm. Very little shared social space. Very few places where people mix.
Lives here feel narrow, private, self-contained. Closed off to anything new.
That matters more than people think.
The long drive east
These are end-of-the-line places, but sometimes it feels like the end of the world.
Once you leave the M1 at Nottingham and turn east, everything slows down. The roads twist and narrow. People drive at whatever speed they feel like, usually well below the limit, as if in no particular hurry to get anywhere—or perhaps in quiet resistance to the idea that anyone else might be.
The landscape flattens out under a grey sky. Damp, cold, and unwelcoming.
Opening times for anything at all seem almost arbitrary. Museums, cafés, shops—open on the first Monday of the month, perhaps, but which month and which Monday is not entirely clear. It feels as though East Anglia operates on its own calendar, governed by rules that are either lost or deliberately obscure.
You begin to understand why during the Cold War this was once a good place to hide things.
Work, and who does it
What struck me most in Great Yarmouth was the imbalance.
There are plenty of people working. You see them everywhere—in food processing, hospitality, care. They are not just visible, they are essential.
But they are overwhelmingly not local.
At the same time, there is a noticeable absence of working-age British residents in those same roles. That is an easy observation to make, and an easy one to misinterpret.
The data tells a more complicated story.
Great Yarmouth has high levels of economic inactivity. A large share of the population is either retired, in poor health, or otherwise outside the labour market. Like Clacton, it is significantly older than the national average, and less healthy.
Coastal towns like this have, over time, become places people move to at the end of their working lives, not the beginning.
Set against that is a migrant workforce that is almost entirely of working age and overwhelmingly in employment. They are not replacing local workers so much as filling roles that the local population is no longer in a position to take.
So the reality is not “locals don’t work and migrants do.” It is that two different populations occupy two very different positions in the same fragile economy.
Brexit-era politics framed migration as the problem. In places like this, it has often been more of a sticking plaster.
Perception and reality
Great Yarmouth has very few asylum seekers. The local council successfully resisted the use of seaside hotels for accommodation.
That does not stop the perception.
Every foreign accent, every non-white face, is easily folded into a narrative about small boats and government spending. The numbers are small, but the visibility is high enough to sustain the story.
In a place where many people are economically inactive, it is easy to see immigration as a zero-sum game. Money spent elsewhere is money not spent here.
Again, whether that is true is less important than the fact that it feels true.
What was lost
These towns were not always like this.
Great Yarmouth was once a major destination for working-class holidays. In the 1950s and 1960s it received millions of visitors a year, arriving in waves organised around factory shutdowns and “works weeks.” Whole communities would decamp to the seaside together.
The infrastructure—guesthouses, theatres, piers—was built for that world.
Two things broke it.
Cheap package holidays abroad, and the collapse of the industrial system that organised those collective breaks. When factories closed, the holiday patterns went with them.
By the 1990s, the old system had gone. What replaced it was smaller, more individual, and much less predictable.
And places like Great Yarmouth struggled to adapt.
Who left
When the tourists stopped coming, people started leaving.
The late 1990s and 2000s created opportunities—education, new kinds of work—but to take advantage of them you had to move. To a city, to a university, to somewhere with jobs.
Many did.
And they did not come back.
What was left behind was older, less healthy, less mobile. A population less connected to the modern economy, and more dependent on the state.
Dependency
The numbers are stark.
In both Clacton and Great Yarmouth there are more non-workers than workers once you include retirees, the long-term sick and the economically inactive. Clacton is the more extreme case, but Great Yarmouth is not far behind.
These are places that depend heavily on money flowing in from elsewhere.
That shapes politics.
Hostility to immigration is not really about numbers—both towns are still overwhelmingly white. It is about perceived competition for resources.
But there is a deeper contradiction.
The parts of the UK that generate the most tax revenue—large, diverse, economically active cities—are the same places that tend to be more open to immigration. The places most hostile to it are often those most dependent on those tax flows.
The politics
Great Yarmouth’s MP is Rupert Lowe, a figure whose background is not obviously aligned with the town he represents.
Like Farage, he comes from wealth and privilege, via public school and the City. His career there was mixed at best, before a move into football ownership and then politics.
His politics, like Reform’s more broadly, are clearer about what they oppose than what they would actually do.
“Remigration”—the idea of removing people already in the country—is not a new idea. It has a long history on the far right. It also runs into immediate practical problems in a place like Great Yarmouth.
If migrant labour disappeared, large parts of the local economy would simply stop.
The mood again
There was little visible enthusiasm for Lowe on the ground. What you encountered instead was a more general cynicism about politics.
The only person I met who said they had voted for him was a Bangladeshi restaurant owner, who did so largely because his customers liked him.
Even he seemed unsure about what that support implied.
No Future?
Great Yarmouth, like Clacton, is not an anomaly.
It is what happens when an economy fades, a population ages, and the connections to the wider world weaken. People turn inwards.
The politics that follow are not surprising.
They are, in many ways, inevitable.
I dont think many of these seaside holiday destinations are doing well. Blackpool is terrible now, its a shame I have good childhood memories of days to Blackpool. The only seaside town from the top of my head that seems to be doing OK is Brighton, although I’m sure there are others.
15 years ago I was in Prestatyn with my wife for a little break. My dad insisted we check out Rhyl for a night out, as it was brilliant when he went. So we did. What a shit hole. Took us 30 minutes to find an open pub, although we did pass about 10 boarded up pubs on the way – It was almost eerie, unsettling, you could tell that 10-20 years ago the place would have been buzzing.
My mother-in-law likes to book little family get aways every now and again, this year shes paid for a lodge near the Scottish Border on some holiday park. Its nice to get away for a few days, but when you factor in the cost including accommodation, food, a meal out or 2, stuff for kids, and nights out with 7 quid pints of sub-par draft, you could easily get a last minute deal abroad.
Whenever I go somewhere touristy in the UK, I always feel like I’m being ripped off, already expensive UK prices ramped up more. I can see why the likes of Yarmouth, Rhyl, and Blackpool are dying. Why go to some windswept seaside resort, or holiday park with expensive prices and god awful entertainment when you can go somewhere warm, at a similar price point, with new things to see and do, with beer that hasn’t had its alcohol % cut in half because of ‘health trends’, pools, nice beaches where the sea isnt a sewerage dumping ground, different foods and so on.
I often thought that English seaside towns tended to see some of the heaviest Leave votes in 2016 because they hoped a rock-hard Brexit would make it more difficult for Britons to go abroad for their holidays. I’m now wondering if some people in those towns would either want to vote Reform on the grounds that global warming may actually be a good thing for them, or vote Green in the hope of new punitive taxes on air travel?
I’m not sure, I was always under the impression that locals don’t like heavy tourism, that said its surely preferable to run down towns. I think since package holidays have become a thing, especially 80’s and 90’s era people have realised you get so much more for less when going abroad. I went to Blackpool with the lads in 99, just for a day and a night, but spent £150 while I was there. The following year I went to abroad for the first time with the lads to Benidorm for a week, flight and hotel was about £250 and this was before the Euro came in – for the entire week I spent about £200 this includes every meal out (breakfast, lunch, dinner), a few trips and of course lots of drinking on the afternoons and nights – I lived like a king for a week and memories that last a lifetime.
Of course such value does not exist since the Euro came in, at least not in Spain anyway, but its still cheaper going abroad than it is staying in the UK. My dad has booked me and him for Portugal in May, 4 nights, all inclusive, 5 star hotel, private transfers, it cost £850. You just can’t find similar stuff in the UK, and even if I we could find a deal that included all meals and unlimited drinks for £850, would I rather go to where ever that place is, or Portugal – for me its a no brainer, especially since I value my Vitamin D.
I don’t see how we restore these towns, other than flights becoming massively expensive or European countries becoming more expensive than the UK. Even within the UK things have changed, people opt short breaks, glamping, spas, rural cottages, festivals, wellness retreats and others.
My thought on “what if punitive green taxes made flying unaffordable for most people?” is examined in more detail by Alon Levy in Holidays by Train, where they considered what tourism would look like in a Net Zero world where driving and flying are unavailable for most people, but high-speed rail is more developed than today.
It suggests that Italy and the South of France would be winners as they are closer to the economic heart of Europe, while Spain (even mainland, but especially its islands) would be a loser due to their greater remoteness that would make for longer travel times even by high-speed rail.
Southern Spain will have tourism problem in a few decades anyway as rising temperatures and desertification make it less attractive. Brighton is doing lots better, but it has diversified, it has all kinds of leisure activities, it is much bigger, has a university, football team, much better transport links, more affluent diverse population. Even if climate change made GY warmer there isn’t anything to do, the tourism facilities are poor, etc. The overwhelming impression is a place which doesn’t really like outsiders, and which just wants to be left alone to do it’s own thing without the need to change or adapt. Sadly that’s not possible, particularly for a place which is entirely dependent ecomomically on the rest of the UK to subsidise it
Would you say that the Blackpool pattern of sucking in retired and disabled people from other parts of the country (no doubt attracted by the surplus of accommodation, even if much of it is poor quality), applies to most of England’s seaside towns?
No, they don’t want outsiders moving there!!!