Hope comes ashore in Grimsby

This article originally appeared in the UCL Policy Lab Magazine.

It can feel like the default mode of British politics in recent years is division and despair. The debate is stuck in a doom loop, a cycle of intractable problems and faltering systems.

This is why speaking to the two people leading Our Future’s transformative work in Grimsby, Emily Bolton and Jason Stockwood, is such a joy. It is a chance to break away from the doom-scrolling and charts of crisis, to glimpse and imagine a country alive with possibility.

Emily is passionate about the need to break out of the negativity and build something for the future: “The project is about building a better future. And so, for example, if we look at housing, we are working to support building the houses of the future in a model of the future.

“So, everything is about building the future. And that doesn’t mean that today’s issues don’t need to be fixed, but it does mean we can try to break out of that cycle.”

Grimsby is a special place. This part of North Lincolnshire is flat, and the skies go on forever, where the Humber Wash meets the fens and the North Sea beyond. The town, so long the home to the English fishing fleet, has been hit hard by changes to the industry and a shift in economic fortunes

Lab’s Ordinary Hope project wants to learn from, as we seek new ideas about how to tackle the entrenched disadvantages that blight so many communities in the UK today.

Key to the early success of Our Future has been working in direct partnership with the local football club, Grimsby Town, drawing on its enormous power as a civic institution trusted by many.

It is a role about which Jason Stockwood, a local Grimsby lad, hugely successful business leader and now owner of the club, was passionate about. He understood the unique role the club could play in bringing the community together.

“Football seems to express the whole range and scope of human experience,” he says. “Football clubs cut across politics and culture. Of course, there are lots of things wrong with football, but there is something about people coming together for something we care about collectively, in a sense of solidarity and community.”

Wherever you look at the moment, you can see football providing the country with a space for national reflection. Playwright and UCL Policy Lab Hon Professor James Graham’s most recent play Dear England uses national men’s team manager, Gareth Southgate, to tell a new story of the country, questioning its past, present and future. 

Graham makes us realise that storytelling and bringing people together at an emotional level has far too often been considered secondary to the ‘serious’ work of technical policymaking. It is a theme which appears over and again in UCL Policy Lab Director, Marc Stears’ work too, including as the centrepiece of his recent book, Out of the Ordinary.

Grimsby and Our Future offers another rebuke to the outdated model of policymaker that Stears’

work critcises. Bolton and Stockwood show us that Westminster does not always know best, not because those working in Westminster do not care, but because people all over the country want to play their own part in reshaping the future.

In this way, the experience of Our Future also offers a way out of the division of the present. It reminds us that when you bring people together - be it community groups, national politicians, or local government – they often agree on far more than you might imagine. Making progress, is all about break down the old barriers that stop us from working together.

“People feel like policies are done to them,” says Stockwood. “You know, there’s no sense of, like, let’s have a conversation about what the town needs.”

This does not necessarily mean that the direction of national policy is unimportant, but that we need that alongside local community voice and involvement.

“I think you need both. I think you do need a large- scale centralised government industrial strategy. But that alone doesn’t feel connected to what a community wants, then the probability of its success is significantly diminished because people don’t buy into it. And it’s so obvious to me, and I’m careful not to talk about top- down and bottom-up, it’s more about one coherent story rather than hierarchical thinking.” Jason says.

Grimsby’s story is a prime example of the post-industrial decline faced in towns and cities around the world. The loss of the fishing industry led to regional economic decline, widespread unemployment and a loss of cultural confidence too.

This has led to a fundamental change in the way of life in the town as the identity and one of the backbones of community connection disappeared. The region still faces the interlinked challenges of intergenerational poverty, high unemployment, and widespread distrust

in institutions. Five wards in NE Linconshire are in the top 10% in the country’s Index of Multiple Deprivation, with two in the top 1% in England.

But a sense of purpose and hope has come with the project, a purpose grounded not in abstract slogans but in the everyday work of renewal.

“None of these communities have come here overnight. And so changing this isn’t the work of a, 15-year budget, a 15-month budget period or even a five-year parliament. It is the work of at least a decade if not decades. We must be creative about how we can sit outside government spending cycles to deliver long-term change.” Emily says.

Walking around Grimsby and meeting people involved with the project and you quickly see how it has infused many with this optimism and sense of possibility. But you have to remind yourself of size of the task ahead. As Bolton says, this isn’t a two or even five-year project; it has taken decades to get here and it’ll take decades to rebuild. But you do not doubt the community is up for it. Emily Bolton and Jason Stockwood are just two of the committed players on the team.

Stockwood does not shy away from the challenges, but is clear about the joy of collaborating on this kind of shared vision: “Working with Emily in the friendship we have in the partnership and wisdom that she has that I’m learning from... [and] the depth of the relationships

to a place I love dearly, reconnecting with my town, with my tribe, with my people, my friends, my family, and a lot of new people as well. It’s been so rewarding for me.”

For Bolton, the work has played a pivotal role in her recovery from long COVID: “I certainly think that this work on a personal level has been critical to my recovery,” she said, and this recovery has gone hand in hand with rediscovering hope for the community and the country beyond.

“Whilst there are awesome people in Grimsby that we work with that I love dearly, I don’t believe that this is unique,” she said. “Brilliant people exist up and down our country. It’s possible to create this collective change, and I genuinely believe it can happen in more places than Grimsby.”

I leave my chat with Emily and Jason with a sense of place on the move, engaged and emboldened to create a better future. And there are lessons for the UK on mobilising institutions, communities and ideas to build something better.

The next day as we walk around the town and stroll along the seafront talking to people about the project, I am taken back to my visits here as a kid. Growing up in the East Midlands, I’d come to this part of the coast for weekends away. It was a magical place that felt like an escape.

Being here now, far from the grind of political point-scoring, you cannot help but have a similar feeling.

There’s something special brewing on this edge of England, where the sky meets the sea, and the possibility of something new comes ashore.