Thanet boasts the biggest fishing industry in the south-east. So why do most of its chip shops only serve frozen fish?

On a clear day, you can see as far as France; the coast of Pas-de-Calais glimpsed across the milky green water, beyond the thicket of masts in Ramsgate harbour, and the handwritten sign advertising local skate, cod, plaice, huss and sole.

Alongside Broadstairs and Margate, Ramsgate is one of the principal towns of Thanet, a former island on the east coast of Kent that once served as a destination for wintering Vikings and a granary store for Calais, but in more recent times became known as a seaside resort – attracting daytrippers and holidaymakers down from London to paddle the waters and breathe the sea air.

For the last few years, Thanet has once again been in a period of transition. In 2011, the arrival of the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, along with the introduction of the high-speed train from London and the revival of the Dreamland amusement park, brought fresh life to an area that had found itself in economic decline.

Today, Thanet is a curious mix, the long-established knuckled up against the new, a place where, at its most polarised, Ukip members might brush up against DFLs – newcomers who have moved Down From London, bringing with them art galleries, seaweed fragrance emporiums, wine bars, sushi restaurants, coffee shops, record stores and music venues, to exist in parallel with the amusement arcades and rock shops and the whirr of motocross on the sands.

That the area’s economic and cultural revival might also be tethered to a culinary renaissance is to be expected – the model, after all, lies a short stretch along the coast in Whitstable, a town that since the 1990s has earned a reputation as a gastronomic destination: its annual oyster festival in July is supplemented year round by numerous fish and seafood restaurants and the Michelin-starred The Sportsman in nearby Seasalter, recently named best in the UK.

For Thanet, however, the creation of an equivalent culinary scene has proven more of a challenge. Though it boasts the busiest fishing industry in the south-east, over the years there has been a faltering connection between the sea and the land. “People don’t know what fish is unless it’s got Bird’s Eye on it,” says Michael Penn, a former fishmonger. “I can’t see that changing.”

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Three years ago, Ramsgate’s last wet fish shop closed down. “When I was 13, there were eight fish shops in Ramsgate,” says Penn, now 71. A fishmonger for 40 years, for the past decade, since his own shop closed, he has helped out on Cannon’s seafood stall, selling cockles and crab and fresh cod on the harbour.

There is a smattering of stalls like Cannon’s around Thanet, but the area’s sole remaining fishmonger is Fruits de Mer in Broadstairs. Jason Llewellyn began working in the shop when he was 11 years old, and at the age of 17 he bought out the business. Thirty years on, he supplies most of the major restaurants in the area, presiding over 18 day boats, fishing the waters off Folkestone, Whitstable, Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs.

It is hard and dedicated work, beginning at 3am at the large store where the fishing boats land. “We sort what we want for the shop, and the rest is all graded and sent out,” Llewellyn says. “I’m back at the shop by 4am, listening to answerphone messages from all the restaurants.” At 5am the shop opens for trade. “We’ve only a small shop, but between £2 and £3 million of fish pass through here every year,” he says. “We get a massive variety of fish – gurnards, brills, turbots, lobster, crab, lemon soles, Dover soles, John Dory … Today we cooked 1,000 crabs and lobsters out the back.”

These days, most of Llewellyn’s catch is sent abroad – Boulogne collects fish from him every day – or dispatched elsewhere in the UK. On the morning we speak, he has received a special order from Buckingham Palace requesting line-caught bass for the weekend. Little of the haul remains in the area.

The local fish shops have lost out to the supermarkets, Penn tells me, and those who do buy fish are more accustomed to frozen. Many of Cannon’s customers no longer recognise the fish in front of them. What they want to buy has changed too. “We used to sell the cheap fish,” he recalls. “I remember having 12 stone of local herring in the window. Now you can’t even sell a stone of herring. Now you sell upper class fish – prawns and trout.”

It’s always been our argument that it’s sustainable down here – there’s plenty of fish out there Jason Llewellyn, fishmonger

Though they may not be buying herring, Llewellyn has been heartened by a change in customer in recent times.

“It used to be older couples coming into the shop – and midweek it’s still locals,” he says. “Saturdays used to be quiet but that’s our busiest day now. You get a different clientele – young couples, professionals throwing dinner parties. The cooking programmes have changed how people feel about food.”

Llewellyn is also the main supplier for the local restaurant trade. Among them is Hantverk & Found in Margate, opened a year ago by Kate de Syllas. De Syllas had cheffed for a number of years in London, but seeking a better work-life balance she began to consider moving out of the city.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate de Syllas, Hantverk & Found restaurant, Margate. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Observer

For years she had been a regular visitor to Whitstable, where she owns a beach hut. “I’d come to Margate a few times and really loved it and seen the possibilities of it – wandering around town and thinking, ‘It’s great but where d’you go for something to eat? Where do you get fresh seafood?’ And obviously Whitstable doesn’t really need anything else.”

The restaurant itself is tiny. A small, glass-fronted premises in the heart of the old town, it can hold just 12 diners upstairs and 12 downstairs, with two chefs squeezed into the minuscule kitchen. Though she is part of the new breed of restaurateur in the town, her customers tend to be a mixture of long-standing locals as well as those down from London. “I think some people might think that we’re the fancy fish restaurant, but you can get lunch here for under a tenner, and dinner if you wanted to,” she says. “I could put my prices up, but I want it to stay accessible.”

Much of De Syllas’s move to the coast was fired by her ambitions as a chef. “By the sense that maybe I’d feel a bit more in touch with suppliers and ingredients down here,” she says.

But there were unexpected hindrances too. She began researching suppliers before she moved. “I knew there was a small day fleet working out of Broadstairs, and obviously Hastings was that much further, and Hythe. And there is the shellfish industry in Whitstable, but there is a lot of dredge from Whitstable harbour.” More surprising was the realisation that in Margate itself there was no wet fish supplier.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kevin Castro, the last commercial fisherman in Margate. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Observer

There is one surviving fisherman in Margate, Kevin Castro, who returns from the sea to sell fish on the harbour arm, but unless he has surplus catch De Syllas rarely buys directly from him. “Kevin obviously has a reputation in Margate,” she says, “and I think it’s nice that people from the town go and buy a fish off him – that’s kind of the last access to wet fish apart from Morrison’s for people in the town. So if I, as someone who probably buys the most fish in the town, march onto the harbour arm every day to pick up masses of fish that would kind of take away from that.”

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At 53, Castro has been fishing for nearly 40 years. Unlike many fishermen he was not entering a family business – his father was a painter and decorator and his mother ran a gift shop. “When I was really young I loved going to the harbour,” he says. “The first time I caught something I was eight years old, I caught a pouting off the pier, and I made my mum cook it. By the time I was 14 I used to go out on one of the small netting boats. When I was 15 I was practically full-time; my teachers realised it was what I wanted to do.”

Castro used to employ two crew members, but today he fishes alone. On the day we speak he has been out all night fishing for cod. “But the cod have disappeared now,” he says. “I’ve had quite a bad year with cod. I had a good year last year, 40-50 stone a day all through May. But it’s looking a bit bleak this year. The government keeps saying the codding quota is increasing, but not for us – they may have stayed out in the deep water as we’ve had a warm winter. I haven’t seen any lobsters for three or four days either.”

The unpredictability of the local fishing industry has, of course, a direct impact on its restaurateurs. Crucial to De Syllas’s restaurant is the idea that the menu should be local and sustainably sourced. “You do have to make compromises – I’m not going to pretend that you don’t,” she says. “But as far as possible, we use what’s local and in season, and I think we do that pretty well.”

Over the three decades he has owned Fruits de Mer, Jason Llewellyn says that legislation has changed the fishing industry here massively. “It used to be that whatever our boats caught they could land,” he says. “Today they’re having to dump all the fish like skate and bass they’ve caught back into the sea.” He sounds weary. “Fishing isn’t looked after in our country compared to the continent.”

The local fisherman are hindered, Llewellyn says, by strict EU quotas. “It’s always been our argument that it’s sustainable down here – there’s plenty of fish out there,” he says. “You’ve got French boats, trawlers, can land it, but we can’t.” If there is a problem with overfishing in the UK, he adds, it isn’t down to the day boats. “It’s not the little boats you see close to the shore, it’s the big trawlers, who can land as much in a week as we can in a year. Roughly 95% of boats fishing the south coast are all under 10 metres, but we get a tiny amount of the EU quota.”

Llewellyn was shocked by the outcome of the EU referendum. “If I weren’t in the fishing industry probably I wouldn’t have voted to leave,” he concedes. He is optimistic about the future. “It can’t be any worse than what it’s been.” This is despite the fact that they will still be bound by international agreements, and that for many years it’s been the UK government rather than the EU that has meted out the quotas – granting the bulk to larger corporations. “Hopefully we can now set up our own rules,” he says, ”our own conservation rules, even if it means a reduced number of fishing days a month. Everyone’s pushing for change, but it might take two to three years. But everyone’s got to be a bit more positive instead of griping. They have to work together now.”

Between 2004 and 2014 the number of fishermen in the UK declined by 12% to 11,845 – though demand remains high: in 2014, UK fishermen landed 756,000 tonnes of seafish (including shellfish) with a value of £861m, a 21% increase in quantity since 2013.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Traditional fish and chips. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

“The better fishermen are the ones who survive,” Llewellyn says. “You can’t beat going to sea. It’s hard, but if you’re that way inclined there’s nothing like it.” Even those who have abandoned the trade still stay close to the shore. Tony Thatcher, for instance, who gave up commercial fishing several years ago in favour of pleasure boating – “taking tourists on day trips out to see the seals” – or catering to the part-time fishermen who head to this coast to fish the harbour arm or venture out a little further into the Channel.

If the community is to be reconnected to the fishing industry in Thanet, there will need to be a shift in attitude for both consumers and cooks. “People don’t buy enough fish,” says Adrian Mowl, chef-owner of the Royal Harbour Brasserie in Ramsgate and its sister restaurant Fish & Beer in Broadstairs. “They don’t make it a priority. It’s not like Spain, say, where they’ll allocate a large proportion of their weekly budget to fish.”

And when people do think of eating fish beside the seaside, it is often in the form of fish and chips – though most of the fish and chip shops in the region no longer serve fresh fish. “I supplied at least 50 fish and chips shops in Kent – Maidstone and Gravesend and Tonbridge,” says Michael Penn. “And from what I know, it’s all frozen. There’s no one to sell them fresh fish now.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Royal Harbour Brasserie, Ramsgate. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

“It’s funny how often people come in expecting that we’ll have fish and chips on the menu,” says de Syllas. “There’s plenty of fish and chip shops in the town, and so if you want fish and chips you can go and get fish and chips. I’d just have a permanent fryer with chips going. And I do not want that.”

She tries to balance her menu to be a combination of the familiar and comforting, and a little adventurous too. “A fishcake or mac and cheese – it’s lobster and crab and the pasta’s cooked with porcini and there’s a panko and parmesan and truffle crumb.”

Already her ambition may be outgrowing her tiny restaurant. Later in the year she plans to open a crab-shack-style stall down on the seafront, near the Turner. “Somewhere, very casual, doing what we do well here – whole lobster, whole crabs, lobster rolls, crab sandwiches, oysters, oysters, oysters, short, sharp, really good quality wine list.”

There’s something pleasing about her plan; that spot on the sea’s edge where she hopes to sell lobster rolls seems a perfect mid-point between the old and the new worlds here – somewhere between the bright new hope of the Turner Contemporary and the place where Kevin Castro still sells his catch.

It is precisely the kind of venture that might just bind the sea once more to the shore here in Thanet; a fresh flicker of hope in an industry that will need more than just optimism if it is to survive. “I’ll stay fishing, I’ll stay in it,” Kevin Castro tells me. “I’ll get by. It’s just sad when you go out and you haul in your nets and find they’re empty.”