Emily Chappell was awake with worry when the email she had feared finally arrived. As a Thomas Cook employee with 15 years’ service, she had spent the weekend trying to reassure holidaymakers that they would not be stranded as the tour operator teetered on the brink. Now her own moment of abandonment had come. Her job was among more than 1,000 in the Peterborough head office doomed in a message informing workers that the 178-year company had collapsed.

“It was like a bereavement,” said Chappell, 48. “It was our life. I know what a bereavement is. I’ve lost my mum and my dad. It was like your identity has been ripped away.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former Thomas Cook employees Emily Chappell and Stephen Cook in Peterborough city centre. Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian

Elsewhere in Peterborough her colleague Helen Cross hadn’t been able to sleep either. She saw the email at about 3am. “To know that it was all gone was devastation,” she said.

Thomas Cook’s collapse looms large in this election campaign. The former family business moved to Peterborough in 1977 to be part of the medieval city’s expansion in the third wave of postwar new towns. Now the optimism of that era is over, crushed in part by debt and greed. The company couldn’t support loans taken on to acquire high street shops in an internet age, and its last three chief executives’ salaries didn’t help keep costs down, totalling £35m in 12 years.

Everyone in Peterborough knows someone who has worked at “Cooks”. It offered low-paid call-centre work, steady middle management and highly paid senior jobs. It also offered pride and a sense of belonging – that intangible idea of identity running through today’s politics.

Lisa Forbes, the town’s Labour MP, worked there in the 1990s planning customers’ round-the-world itineraries. She said its downfall had triggered “deep sadness”.

The collapse has exposed those made redundant to a harsher economy. Some have taken zero-hours contracts in bowling alleys and multiplex cinemas. Precarious zero-hours labour has spread through the city in recent years, particularly at distribution warehouses such as the vast Amazon depot by the A1139.

People who hoped for jobs for life are facing the hostility of the benefits system. Families fear eviction if mortgage and rent payments are missed. It’s no wonder GPs are prescribing antidepressants to some of those out of work.

“It feels like we are going down a horrible route that isn’t about aspiration, it’s about survival,” said Cross. “We need to give people hope again.”

Ady Mowles, 60, a debt collector and chairman of the Peterborough United supporters trust, said: “Life in Peterborough is static. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I don’t think we know where we are. I don’t think we have an identity any more as a city.”

Today in Focus Shifting identities in Peterborough Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen https://audio.guim.co.uk/2019/11/27-65672-191128.TIF_Peterborough.mp3 00:00:00 00:32:07

Since the 1990s the Peterborough parliamentary constituency has swung between the Conservatives and Labour. In 2016 the area voted 61% to leave the EU, but this election’s candidates are being judged not just on Brexit. Voters worry about sharp rises in rough sleeping, a shortage of police officers, poorly performing schools and a weakening sense of identity, which some attribute to the city’s high levels of immigration from eastern Europe, and others blame on declining living standards.

The election is set to be a repeat of the race between the three candidates who contested June’s byelection, which was triggered by the conviction of the previous Labour MP, Fiona Onasanya, for lying to a court about a speeding fine. Forbes, the incumbent, is being challenged by the Brexit party’s Mike Greene, a local millionaire businessman, and the Conservatives’ Paul Bristow, who came third last time.

Labour will hope for a repeat of the pattern next month, while Greene will hope the slump in his party’s national polling will not be reflected locally. On Tuesday when Nigel Farage spoke at a rally in the town, it was reported that only around 100 people showed up.

Peterborough is representative of many towns and cities in middle England. It is not a poor place by UK standards, but over the last five years median annual salaries have stalled and they are now £2,000 below UK average. Austerity means annual public spending per person fell by £262 between 2010 and 2018, slightly less than average. Issues such as fly-tipping, a function of council cuts, are particular local gripes.

It has often been said that this election is one of the most unpredictable in years, but describing Peterborough residents as floating voters doesn’t adequately explain their confusion. Some Labour leavers are switching to the Conservatives, while Conservatives who don’t trust Boris Johnson are lending their vote to the Brexit party.

Mowles, for example, said he abstained in the EU referendum because he felt ill-informed. On reflection he would have voted remain but he believes in honouring the leave vote. He doesn’t like the Conservatives, can’t vote for Corbyn because “as an ex-serviceman” he considers him “a terrorist sympathiser”, and won’t back the Liberal Democrats because they want to overturn Brexit. He probably won’t vote at all.

The question of the city’s identity is unlikely to be solved by the election: after all, that identity has been contested ever since the population was doubled by new town planners nearly 50 years ago. But it is nevertheless a high priority for many who still struggle with the effects of immigration. Several people complained about the number of foreign voices they heard in the town centre. Greene, the Brexit party candidate, is hawking the idea of a language school for immigrants. Peterborough’s population increased by 16,500 between 2011 and 2017 to 202,000, with almost half the increase the result of immigration. Nearly 16% of the population now come from other EU countries, and others from Iran, Afghanistan and Africa.

Tensions are not high but that doesn’t mean relations are always smooth. There was a race row at the football club last month when Ivan Toney, a black player, asked fans to change the words of a chant about the size of his penis. Some fans seemed confused that anyone would take offence, labelling them “snowflakes”.

Large parts of Peterborough’s economy rely on immigrants and perhaps the most vibrant part of the city is the Lincoln Road area where cafes and shops specialising in Portuguese, Afghan, Baltic and Polish food jostle for trade. Life has been getting harder for many of these people too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zoe Bunter: ‘How long is it going to be until someone dies because of the cold?’ Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian

Tomasz Pavel, 27, came to Peterborough from Poland in 2009. After years of warehouse work he was fired over an alcohol problem, and for the last year he has lived in a tent secluded among willows by the River Nene not far downstream from Thomas Cook’s former HQ. As midwinter approaches it is a cold and wet existence.

“Every morning I go to town, wait for the soup kitchen, wait till it gets to 9pm, go back to the tent and try and sleep,” Pavel said.

Zoe Bunter, a charity fundraiser who lives nearby, came across his well-hidden polyester home while dog-walking. She is among many voters distressed by the amount of rough sleeping in the city.

“We’ve had three frosts already,” she said. “How long is it going to be until someone dies because of the cold?” In the last two years seven homeless people have died in Peterborough.

Last week three other tents were flooded when the river broke its banks, their occupants nowhere to be seen. Jimmy, 32, a Kenyan, and Louie, 48, who said he was from the Sahara, were camping on slightly higher ground.

“I came here for a better life but look, there’s nothing,” said Louie pointing to his sopping belongings.

“His body is very weak,” said Jimmy, brushing his teeth with a cup of rainwater. Louie hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for 48 hours as he hunkered down in his tent to avoid the rain. “People from the council see these things and then don’t fix them,” Jimmy said.

The council admits it is “under enormous strain” due to rising homelessness. Last year 2,355 people presented themselves to the council as homeless, up 50% on the previous year.

But a solution from history could be staring Peterborough in the face. Under the new town project, thousands of new council homes were built in edge-of-city townships such as Bretton and the Ortons. Now, after the right-to-buy selloff of huge numbers of these homes, one in five people rent from private landlords, and the council reckons rising use of “no-fault” evictions is one of the main causes of homelessness. Plus, last year only 100 new homes built in the city were classed as affordable, representing 11% of all completions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul: ‘A home would make a massive difference to my life.’ Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian

“It’s terrible,” said Paul, 47, a homeless father of four who has been on a housing waiting list for almost a year. “Like the old [new town] development corporation, there needs to be a big influx of social housing otherwise it’s only going to add to the problem.”

Paul suffers from a terminal lung condition but slept in his car when his relationship broke down and now lives in temporary accommodation.

“[A home] would make a massive difference to my life,” he said. “I could ease the burden with my ex-partner and I could have my kids over and give her free time. I could buy things for my life – simple things like a washing machine.”

Labour has promised to return council house building to levels not seen since the end of the second world war, and the Conservatives have said they will help affordable housing tenants to buy their homes. So who will he vote for?

“I never vote,” he said. “We were led to believe our vote could count but it never does.”

• This article was amended on 22 November 2019. An earlier version sited Amazon’s main depot along the A1(M). It is eastward, near the A1139. (Amazon has other units by the A1.)