There was a time, when Clare Cooper was a child, when she thought Great Yarmouth was “a magical world”. Her family, from Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, came twice a year to the East Anglian seaside resort, in May and October, and she would plead with her parents: “Please can we go on the boats?”

She meant the rowing boats and pedalos and gondola-style vessels on the boating lake and a network of waterways running parallel to the town’s long sandy beach, built between the wars as a charming if not remotely realistic pastiche of the canals of Venice.

In truth, by the 1970s and 80s Great Yarmouth’s Venetian Waterways, like the town itself, were struggling to maintain their holiday cheer. Industry was failing and holidaymakers scarpering, as with so many other British destinations, in favour of somewhere cheap and warmer.

The waterways run parallel to the town’s long sandy beach. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

In recent years the waterways fell into an even sorrier state. The canals and ponds were partly drained or were silting up, the concrete balustrades were broken, the once award-winning ornamental flowerbeds were ripped out and grassed over.

Next week, however, thanks to a £1.7m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and with the help of Cooper and scores of other local volunteers, visitors will once again be able to take to rowing boats in Norfolk’s answer to northern Italy, or amble through two hectares (seven acres) of restored ornamental islands and walkways.

“As soon as I saw this was being done up, I thought I’m going to be [involved] whatever,” said Cooper, rising from her knees where she was scraping tiny weeds from between the slabs of a paved path. Despite having moved to the area only in 2016, she had such affection for the waterways that she volunteered straight away. Yarmouth, she said, “is getting the great put back into it”. When she brought her father last week for a preview, “he cried his eyes out”.

Clare Cooper has volunteered on the project in the town she thought of as a child as ‘a magical world’. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

To those behind the project, it is particularly fitting that volunteers – who have planted a third of the almost 20,000 new plants in the waterways’ flowerbeds – have been core to the restoration project, while the contract to operate the boat hire and restored 1920s cafe was won by a social enterprise that aims to help unemployed people back into work.

That’s because while the Venetian Waterways have had periods of glamour in their nine-decade history, the story of their origin is a reminder that the economic lives of seaside towns like this one have long been vulnerable.

Once the largest herring port in the world and a smart resort in the late Victorian period, Great Yarmouth’s fishing industry collapsed after the first world war, and by the early 1920s thousands were unemployed. In 1926-8 the waterways were built explicitly as a job creation scheme, giving a livelihood to hundreds of men and creating another tourist asset for the town out of the ruins of wartime (in some cases literally – the flowerbed borders, for instance, were made from the repurposed roadway of a local wartime aerodrome).

By the 1930s the attraction was illuminated and classical music played from a tannoy, attracting visitors in their thousands. But the second world war, and the huge social changes that followed it, set off a slow decline.

Attractive as they are, nobody expects these gardens to draw visitors to this resort on the scale of its inter-war heyday. For all the grand plans for its gardens and marina – Graham Plant, the deputy leader of Great Yarmouth borough council, boasts of a £24m project for the seafront – the scale of the regeneration challenge for the town is clear. New industry dominates the skyline – this is the centre of eastern England’s offshore wind industry – and its relationship with tourism has changed.

Visitors now prefer to stay in holiday parks out of town rather than the historic, sometimes outdated, guesthouses in the centre, making the resort these days more of a day trip than a summer holiday destination. Which made it even more important, said Plant, that sites built principally as tourist draws were now valued above all by the community.

“This is not just to be looked at on a postcard, it’s to be looked at by the people who can appreciate it,” he said. “It’s great when the tourists come here and they see something lovely, but the people here have to have something nice to look at as well.”

And while a bright if blustery August day by the sea will usually raise a smile, the appreciation of residents for their restored “little Italy” is certainly striking.

“I’ve watched this place with sadness when it was in decline and then with interest over the last winter as it was being restored,” said Yvonne Walsh, who is originally from County Offaly in Ireland and who moved with her late husband to one of the streets adjoining the waterways.

“Sometimes Great Yarmouth gets a bad press, but I think it’s a little hidden gem,” Walsh said, attempting to control her two small border terriers on the boating lake’s bridge. If only they could restore some of the old houses, she said, or reopen the Victorian Winter Gardens (for which a separate lottery bid is already under way), “I think it would be lovely, and people would start to come back”.

She added: “Especially with all the crap you have to go through now to travel. Who wants to be in an airport when you have this on your doorstep?”

• The Grand Reopening of Great Yarmouth’s Venetian Waterways takes place on Tuesday 20 August.