Growing up in coastal towns: exploring the impact of place on young people’s life chances

Coastal towns have come to the fore in recent UK policy debates, as some of the most deprived neighbourhoods are now in coastal areas.

These debates often raise concerns about the future of young people in these towns, largely because of the limited educational and employment opportunities in these communities. 

In the first pilot project (June 2021- January 2022), we explored the following questions:

1. Are there place-based inequalities between coastal towns and the rest of the UK, and how do these inequalities impact on the young people who grow up in coastal towns?
2. How are youth aspirations shaped by their experiences of growing up in a coastal town? In light of these experiences, what are the solutions they would propose to improve their coastal communities?
3. What data can we use/ generate to better understand these issues?

In the follow-up project (April- October 2022) we expanded the focus of our research to include more inter-generational perspectives. The research questions for Phase 2 were:

1. What do young people aged 16-25 and older people aged 60+ living in coastal towns in North East (NE) Lincolnshire see as the challenges for young people (past and present) of growing up where they live? 
2. What opportunities and solutions do participants believe could help young people overcome these challenges? 
3. How can co-production methodologies facilitate intergenerational dialogue on these issues and develop shared intergenerational understandings of the issues faced by young people in coastal towns?

In these projects we adopted a co-production approach in collaboration Young Advisors (a national charity), Youth Action (based in North East Lincolnshire) and 6 members of Young Action who joined our team as Young Researchers.

Together, we developed a range of place-based methods of data production and piloted these through a series of research activities, including focus groups, walking interviews, and in-depth interviews.

We included the views of both young people and older people who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, to take a look at how coastal youth life chances have changed over the generations.

• Dr Avril Keating

• Rachel Benchekroun
• Professor Claire Cameron
• Dr Stephen Jivraj
• Francesca McCarthy
• Dr Emily Murray

We generated a rich body of data from these research encounters, and we are preparing a number of publications to share these findings. 

In the interim we have prepared an 'Emerging Findings' report, which sets out our preliminary thoughts and findings:

• Benchekroun, R., Keating, A., Cameron, C. and Curtin, P. (2022) Growing up in coastal towns: Intergenerational perspectives from NE Lincolnshire. Emerging findings report. Published online: 14 November 2022.

One clear message from the report is that young people in North East Lincolnshire feel that there are not enough things for them to do, or places for them to go. These feelings of boredom and exclusion are compounded by:

1. their sense that their towns are in economic decline, and
2. the fact that there are too many places in the towns that do not feel safe.

A second key finding is that many of the young participants felt that they have to move away from the area in order to access higher education and/ or high-skilled work.

Data from the older residents helped us to understand that this mobility imperative is relatively new. They told us that when they were growing up, there were far more (and better) employment and leisure opportunities for young people in the area.

The findings contributed to the development of a new mixed method project, funded by the ESRC (2023-25).