My parents moved to Fleetwood on the coast of Lancashire in the years when the British fishing industry was beginning its dramatic decline. In 1976 the North Sea trawlers had lost the rights to fish the Icelandic waters where the majority of Fleetwood’s cod was caught. Cod fishing had been vital to the town’s economy, and remains part of its identity: a person from Fleetwood is a “cod head”– a term used as an insult by our neighbours but as an endearment by us. The supporters of Fleetwood Town FC are the Cod Army. The town’s biggest manufacturer is Lofthouse, makers of Fisherman’s Friend lozenges, which were first concocted in Victorian times to relieve the colds that deckhands would catch from working days and nights in the freezing wet.

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My parents, originally from Gloucestershire, had moved to Fleetwood for their first teaching jobs when I was two years old. They found it forbidding at first, living at the end of a narrow peninsula surrounded by water on three sides. “It was so empty,” my mother told me. “Walking along the prom when we arrived in November was like looking out at an old painting of a storm. It felt like we were completely cut off.” When I started school, my new friend Mike asked me: “Why do you talk like Prince Charles?” (I had rhymed grass with arse.) At which point I started to speak like a northerner.

I grew up with the sea at one end of my street, with a view across Morecambe Bay towards the mountains of the Lake District. When the tide was in, the sun on the water under a clear horizon, I would feel energised and free – although on an overcast day in winter, with the tide so far out you can’t see it, the landscape can look empty, bleached, abandoned.

There is almost nothing left of Fleetwood’s fishing industry now, and the area, like many northern towns, has high unemployment and voted to leave the EU, driven in part by the promise to “take back control of our waters”. Last year, two wards of Fleetwood featured separately in a list of the 10 most depressing places to live in England, based on GP figures for people being treated for depression. I had left the town a month after I turned 18 to go to university in Birmingham, and stayed away. Even so, I bristled with defensiveness at the idea of my hometown being some kind of hell. I’ve always hated lists of crap towns compiled by people who live in cities, and while this list, published by the House of Commons library as an index of mental health problems, had nobler aims, I wanted to remind myself what living in Fleetwood feels like to the people there, and what life might be like if I had stayed.

My mother still lives in the town, and my sister not far away, and every couple of months I go back to see them. Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the way the high street has grown quieter, the pubs emptier or shut. What was Marks & Spencer when I was a child is now boarded up. A year ago, a cannabis farm with a crop worth £3m was discovered above it, tended by two enslaved Vietnamese men.

In November, I took my bike on the train from London Euston, changed at Preston and rode seven miles from Poulton-le-Fylde to Fleetwood down a busy A-road in the rain, lorries juddering past me on the long stretches without pavement. Fleetwood has been without a train station since 1970, although when the town was built by the architect Decimus Burton in the 1830s as a new port and resort for factory workers, the rail links were an integral part of the plan. Burton’s North Euston hotel, still in operation, was named to make it explicit that Fleetwood is a destination for people arriving by train from London, on their way to Scotland. (Queen Victoria stayed there in 1847.)

Londoners rarely stop here now, and towns like Fleetwood have become a symbol of the broken links between the metropolitan and the regional: the gulf in wealth, the suspicion of each other’s motives. On the day after the EU referendum, when Fleetwood, like much of the north, voted to leave, I was travelling up, and though I’d voted to remain and was feeling dismayed by the result, I was appalled to watch people I knew posting memes about how London and Scotland should join forces to form a new country and leave all the leave-voting racist morons to their fate.

I had written to Mike, the friend who pointed out my southern accent at primary school, that I would be back home for a bit to write about the town. He replied: “I think sometimes it’s lost hope, but then I walk the dog along the beach and remember why I live here.” I wandered over to see him at the house he lives in with his partner and her son, on the street where I grew up.

My last two years living in Fleetwood were chaotic and miserable. My father left our home on this street for another woman, and I distracted myself by working all hours in a kitchen under two volatile Glaswegian chefs, while paying insufficient attention to my A-levels and getting drunk every night with Mike and the lads. The town was precociously alcoholic; we had all been drinking on the beach since we were 15 or younger, and the pubs served us as soon as we were 16. At the last minute, I applied myself and got the grades I needed to go to Birmingham University. Our tight group split into those who left and those who stayed.

Mike did what many of the men in the town who didn’t go to university did: joined the army, and was posted to Northern Ireland. You meet a lot of men who served in Northern Ireland in Fleetwood, and who were troubled by Jeremy Corbyn’s sympathy for the IRA. Mike was the fastest sprinter in the area, but developed knee problems and had to leave the forces early. For a while, he and a friend ran a business providing courses for army leavers, but new accreditation criteria put an end to that business, and since then Mike has worked in Asda. He was promoted to manager, but then the company made the manager position redundant, so he was back to where he started. “So I just have to work more shifts,” he told me.

That sort of stoicism is what I think of when I think of Fleetwood. Resignation rather than revolution. There is an excellent Granada documentary about Fleetwood called A Life Apart (1973), which shows the older generation of fishermen telling the younger that their attempts to gain better conditions and pay are doomed. The ICI chemical factory, a few miles away, employed a lot of the men who left the fishing industry, but that was demolished in 1999.

“You can’t replace the fishing industry and ICI with a big Asda,” said Mike.

Fleetwood has always prized itself on its sense of community, which derives in some part from the days when men relied on each other during dangerous excursions to the North Sea, and when women supported each other during the long absences of their men. Most of my sister’s friends’ husbands still work away: on the oil rigs or on construction sites down south, and return at weekends, if they can. These working patterns favour a certain type of person, accustomed to suffering. The town’s most successful athlete is Jane Couch, the first British female licensed boxer and a light-welterweight world champion several times over. She is the daughter of a trawler deckhand, a “decky”, and her mother’s second husband was a decky, too. She called me a cod head approvingly after learning that I grew up on Darbishire Road.

Couch described growing up in the 70s. “We had an amazing childhood, though we didn’t have any money. It would run out while you waited for the men to come home. But you could just knock on and ask the neighbour for a fiver, or milk or whatever. Fleetwood was just like one big family. I could walk into any of the houses on our side of the street without knocking. Three of the families on my side of the street were fishers. The others worked in the industry, in the factories or making the nets, or filleting the fish on the docks – we were all connected.”

Couch’s voice was full of happiness remembering this, but she admitted that life was hard. “Women had to be tough because they had to bring the kids up on their own. And then when the men came home, they were pissed up all the time for their three days off, and the women would have to put them to bed. And then make sure they don’t miss the boat back out there.” She remembers dragging her mother’s second husband out of bed because the taxi was outside waiting to take him on the ship. “He’d be screaming, ‘I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go.’ And nine times out of 10 he’d go, but sometimes he wouldn’t. And then he’d be out of a ship and the money would run out. It’s just a terrible existence.”

The men did a 100-hour-minimum working week. And it was dangerous, too. I talked to an ex-fisherman, Phil Thomas, who started in 1969, and he told me how hard it was. “A trawler is a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week slaughterhouse. Before the cod wars, you’d be on the north side of Iceland, one of the most dangerous places in the world. If anyone says to me you’re going to hell, I say: ‘I’ve been to hell.’ In winter, the ship would freeze over an inch every five minutes, and you’d have to hack the ice away with an axe or you’d capsize. In 1968, three ships from Hull got lost there in one night. It’s just hell on Earth.” Couch’s friend Bozzy was lost overboard, and her gran’s husband died in the Red Falcon disaster of 1959, when 19 men from Fleetwood were lost at sea just after they had radioed to say they would be home for Christmas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fleetwood was once the third biggest fishing port in England. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Because of this uneven way of life, it has always been a boozy town, quick to boil over. We always expected other lads to pick fights with us. A few of us had indie haircuts, which were seen as a provocation. Couch was a barmaid in one of the main fishing pubs from 14. “Working in the Kings was where I learned to fight. It was coming towards the end of the fishing, but it was still quite rough in there. The landlord was a taxi driver. He’d pick them up off the ship and drive them straight back to the pub.”

Fleetwood has changed, and not just because of the decline of fishing, Couch thinks. “Back then, it was only people from Fleetwood who lived here. You might have had the odd one from Blackpool or Manchester and Ireland. There’s loads more now. You used to be able to walk down town and recognise every single person.” And the village mentality can make people suspicious of outsiders. The town is overwhelmingly white – about 98% according to the past two censuses – but it was the accents from other regions that seemed to arouse suspicion rather than the small number of Syrian refugees who live in the town now. “My mum, when she talks to people,” said Couch, “she’d normally know them or know their father or mother. She won’t talk to them if she doesn’t know them. ‘I’m not talking to him.’ But Mum, you’ve got to, I say, because they’re living here. ‘But you don’t know who you’re talking to.’”

Cat Smith, the Labour MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, kept her seat with a margin of 2,000 votes in the December election. Lancaster is a university town on the other side of the bay with twice Fleetwood’s population, and Smith held on in spite of some anger in Fleetwood about her closeness to Corbyn and the perception that Labour wanted to reverse Brexit. EU fishing quotas are blamed by many for exacerbating the decline of the fishing industry, and so much of the conviction of the town’s leave voters seemed to come from the belief that the EU served the centre, not the regions. There was a strong feeling that those on the edges “haven’t been listened to and no one is fighting for them”, said Rachel George, a town councillor who switched allegiance from the Labour party to the Brexit party in 2018. Every Saturday during the campaign, the Brexit party had parked its stall right outside Cat Smith’s office on Fleetwood’s high street. When I visited, they were advertising an event with Brexit party MEP June Mummery about how to restart Britain’s fishing industry.

Smith said she understood the anger that is still felt in the town about the decline of fishing. The town has suffered, she said, but she spoke of its resilience, too. “It has a closeness and sense of community that a lot of towns the size of Fleetwood wouldn’t have. Everyone knows everyone.”

When they first moved there, my parents didn’t know anyone. Their neighbours’ lives were difficult and many of the children they taught were angry. I remember a big stone shattering our living-room window one afternoon and someone shouting “Bodser!” before they ran off. (My father’s nickname among some pupils was Bodser Brown, after a character from a book by Robert Westall he taught in his English lessons.) But one evening, a woman knocked on the door and invited my mother out to the Young Wives club, and through this my parents made friends.

My parents stayed, but leaving – going where there’s a living to be made – was the aspirational narrative I took from my parents, who had no generational roots in the town, unlike most of my friends’ parents. But this isn’t something to congratulate myself for. Since I left, I’ve always enjoyed living in the cheapest, multiethnic parts of cities – Balsall Heath, Lewisham – for my own selfish reasons, in order to pursue writing and creative work that doesn’t pay a lot, and to enjoy culture and nightlife. It seems obvious to me that a greater claim for altruism might be made by those who stay put in the towns – those for whom family ties and place are more important than the individualist pull to the city.

People need each other when times are tough, but communities struggle to survive without the shared work that once brought them together. Mark Spencer has been a doctor for 28 years. He was working long hours as a GP in town, but everything he saw in his surgery and in the public health data told him that the state of the town was getting worse and worse.

“The town had particular problems with mental health, as well as with addictive behaviour,” he told me. A lot of this seemed to him to be caused by isolation. “Humans need a sense of purpose, they need a home and they need to be loved,” he said. “For a long time, people in the town have been looking back at what we’ve lost, and that bereavement has lasted 40 years. We’d been treating them and then sending them straight back to the conditions that made them ill.”

Spencer’s solution was, he said, “to listen to the residents” and help them take responsibility for setting up groups and activities they felt there was a need for. He founded Healthier Fleetwood five years ago, which supports locals setting up their own initiatives: a singing group, a woodwork club, various support groups. In a place with the lack of purpose that low employment brings, and with such underfunding of local services, the volunteer sector is vital. Since Spencer started his programme, admissions to A&E from people registered with GPs in Fleetwood have fallen – a 10% drop in each of the past two years.

Fleetwood Men’s Shed is a support group for men who have experienced mental illness. When I got to the hut where they were having a meeting one morning, a group of about 15 men were busy making tea and coffee.

At that point, the organisers, Tony O’Neill and John Tyler, arrived together. They were gruff but welcoming. O’Neill sat down and apologised to the group for an incident a couple of days ago when he smashed his phone against the wall and “went walkabout”.

“I’ve got all this pent-up anger inside me at the moment,” he admitted to the group.

“You’re not handling it very well,” said Tyler. “Listen guys, together we’re strong. Individually we’re just a man.”

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People murmured in assent. A lot of the talk had been about a new “hub” that Men’s Shed were about to move into – who was a good and cheap plasterer, who was available to pick things up and give people lifts, paint walls and help get the place shipshape. O’Neill cheered up in the face of this activity. “Let’s get this hub open and get into the new year,” he said. “2020 is our year! 2020 is Fleetwood’s year!”

I saw several of the men again at 3pm on Saturday, when Fleetwood Town FC were hosting Tranmere Rovers. When I was a child, only a handful of people watched the club, but it has had a meteoric rise since 2004 when it was taken over by Andy Pilley, a local businessman who set about rebuilding the stadium, investing in players and training facilities, and overseeing six promotions to the third tier of English football. Before he made his fortune as an energy provider, one of Pilley’s first jobs was as a market trader in Fleetwood, selling football shirts. In February 2004, he was invited to become part of a “financially distressed” club. “The gate was 80 people when I first watched them,” he told me, “and 60 of them might have been the players’ family. The pitch was like the surface of the moon and we were close to closure.”

Now Pilley is the biggest employer in the town – there are 500-plus working for his companies and the club. The day before, I’d toured Fleetwood’s new training facility in Burn Naze, right next to the site of the disused ICI chemical plant. I’d watched Joey Barton, the head coach, put the team through set-piece drills.

Afterwards I spoke to Billy Crellin, a 19-year-old goalkeeper who grew up minutes from the ground and was preparing to make his first-team debut in the league. His friends are still in the town, one a plumber, one working on the docks, one a scaffolder. As a young boy, Crellin used to jump over the back fence to watch games.

Twenty minutes into the game, Fleetwood were 1-0 up from a free kick, and the Cod Army were singing: “Billy Crellin, he’s one of our own.” Half of the crowd behind the goal – “the Ultras de Cod” proclaimed one banner – looked as if they were still at school. A young lad beat a drum and the fans sang: “We’re walking in a Pilley wonderland.” Fleetwood won 2-1 and Crellin was awarded man of the match on his debut.

Afternoons like this can provide a focal point for a town’s pride. But football and community projects can’t fix a town’s underlying problems on their own. “If I didn’t have a personal affinity with the town, I would never have started a business here, with the terrible transport links. The main road here in here is gridlocked every morning. There’s no train station. Maybe if some investment had been spent on transport links we wouldn’t have lost the P&O ferries. There’s all the talk of the northern powerhouse, but it can’t just be about Liverpool and Manchester and Leeds.”

Fleetwood was built outwards from a hill, known as the Mount, with streets filled with large townhouses radiating out like bicycle spokes. One of the grandest is Bold Street, which runs from the foot of the Mount down past the police station and closed hospital, past the surviving amusement arcades to the terminal for the ferry across the estuary to Knott End, a little town on the way to Lancaster. Bold Street is notorious in the town for poverty and addiction; a man was found murdered in his room there last October. Houses have been bought cheap and chopped into flats. “Everyone says they’re all terrible who live down there,” said Hilary Craig, who manages Mustard Seed, a charity that runs a food bank and cooks a communal meal for people from the flats every Monday night. “But most of them are very nice and polite. It’s a scandal, the accommodation down Bold Street. Several come to us every week because they can’t make a meal where they live.”

Craig runs one of the town’s three food banks from a shop that used to sell “terrible country and western records”. I was there from open till close in the second week of January. People queued up from 11am in hats and furry-hooded parkas. The sandwiches disappeared quickly, because so many people’s electricity had run out and wouldn’t be topped up again until the next time their benefits came through.

Some volunteers at the food bank once used the service themselves. Others are regulars at St Peter’s church, whose vicar, John Hall, takes on a big role in coordinating all the many volunteer organisations that are keeping the community alive, and who has been instrumental in a successful bid to buy the hospital in order to turn it into a community centre. One volunteer told us he keeps a Naloxone kit in his fridge, for reversing the effects of an opiate overdose. “No one takes heroin in my house,” he clarified, “but you never know what you might see outside.” They hand out the kits at Inspired, the local addiction service, and another volunteer described administering them to people overdosing when he worked on the ambulances. “They’d be outraged when they came round,” he said. ‘“What are you doing? I spent 30 fucking quid on that!”’

Later, a young man with an estuary accent came into the food bank for the first time, rocking on the back of his heels. I thought he might be drunk, but came to see that he was unsteady with anger and exasperation. “I’m confused about what’s going on,” he said. “I’m on universal credit, zero hours, there’s no work.” He told a story of not being paid for six weeks, of the hole in his roof he couldn’t get fixed, of his mother who would be 66 today, but died last year after breaking her pelvis in four different places in hospital – “tell me, how did that happen?” – about how she should still be alive, about the rash on his face because he’s so stressed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The North Euston hotel in Fleetwood. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Over and over, I heard about the problems with landlords who make their money by renting specifically to those on benefits. Ged Taylor lives just off Bold Street, and told me the tenants on benefits are at the mercy of the bad landlords. “Who’ve you got?” shouted another volunteer when he overheard us. Taylor told him. “He’s the worst one,” said the volunteer. Taylor told us about the water coming through his double-glazed windows. “He owns most of the properties on my street. In my bedroom, the wall is literally crumbling because of the damp. You ask him but you get the impression: if you don’t like it go and live somewhere else. But where would I or anyone on benefits find £500 to put down on a new bond? He knows we can’t, so he gets away with it.”

Those streets should not be awful places to live. They are good Victorian buildings. One side of the short street opens up to a view of the sea, the North Euston hotel, a lighthouse. Taylor is ashamed to tell people where he lives: “People think you’re on heroin or crack. I don’t want my daughter coming over to see what happens there. There are people kicking off all day long.”

I was constantly struck by people’s openness, the honesty of those who had had to get past the shame of asking for help, and who now wanted to help others. Stewart told me about the first time he came in, and showed me a photo of a big man sitting on a bike on Fleetwood beach, wearing a chef coat and colourful trousers. “He took me in the back and asked me what was up. I was at rock bottom and I fell apart when I was talking to him; he let me admit I needed help.” Stewart looked back at the photo. “He took his own life a year ago.”

I kept hearing about suicide, and so I returned to talk to Tony O’Neill at a weekly “veteran’s breakfast” that Men’s Shed cook for residents who’ve served in the forces. The night before had been his daughter’s birthday. Every birthday had been really hard for him since he had found out, during a battle with his ex-wife over access, that he wasn’t her biological father.

“It finished me,” he told me. “I’d left the army with a heart murmur, I’d gone through leukaemia, lost an eye, but this was the end for me. I ended up at the end of North Pier in Blackpool looking at the tide. I was going. I was gone. The security guard came down and talked to me nicely. He didn’t say: ‘You’re not doing that,’ but said: ‘Gimme your story.’ I didn’t want to give him my story, it wasn’t a cry for help, I was going to do it. But he said to me: ‘Just give me a bit of your story, because when you’ve done it, and the police have finished with me, I’ve got to go home to my five-year-old daughter and explain what happened to me today.’ That brought things home to me – that I had a responsibility to my daughter, whether she’s my genetic daughter or not, she’s still my daughter.”

That was in 2016, a year when there was a spike in male suicides in Fleetwood. After he’d been talked down by the security guard, O’Neill decided something had to be done about it. It’s something I heard over and over again: we have to do something, because no one else is going to. It took O’Neill until 2018 to find the help he needed to launch the group, and it was then he realised there was one big contributory factor to the suicides: “People living on their own and not seeing anyone. Social isolation.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the last traditional trawlers working out of Fleetwood. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Much of the volunteer activity in the town is aimed at addressing this. Talking to O’Neill, and to Dave Smith, who plays a big role in the group, I was struck again by an emotional honesty I hadn’t associated with men in the town in my memory. “People are losing the fear of speaking out,” said Smith. “It’s OK to say: ‘I’ve felt shit for 12 months.’ They would never have had the courage, but when they see others come forward, they realise it’s OK to say: ‘I felt a bit down and I was crying.’ Times have changed. We’re not in the Victorian era any more. We’ve got emotions and it’s OK to talk about them. Whereas years ago it would be ‘Man up. Get a grip.’”

There are good reasons that Fleetwood made the list of depressing towns. Poverty and isolation breed desperation. But in these smaller communities, it’s harder to say “this isn’t my problem”. Smith told me about every person who had been sleeping rough in the town recently and what he’d done to get them into temporary accommodation – often someone’s spare bedroom – while he tried to get them into the housing system.

Before I caught the train back to the city, I walked down the hidden path behind the amusement arcade, past the decaying landing gear where P&O ferries from Ireland used to dock. I didn’t see a soul there, and I found various signs advertising the Samaritans. The tide was out, and there was a small boat marooned in the sand. It was eerie to be alone in a place that would have once been so busy, looking at the ghosts of what had been. Many of the people in Fleetwood feel abandoned and unseen by the rest of the country, but they are still here and not willing to give up on the place.

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