Great Yarmouth is stuck in the past But can Rupert Lowe make a difference?

The bookies standing trackside give me a look, the novice punter, a fiver in my hand. The tall one, grey-haired, speaks up. “I’ll give you a good price on that one,” he says. “Two-to-one.” I put my money on Loverly Jubley, down for the 19:06 at Yarmouth Stadium. It’s a bitterly cold night, and a huge cloud is drifting over from the North Sea to our right — but the greyhound track feels eerily quiet. At its peak, the stadium held 5,000 spectators. These days, though, I reckon barely 30 watch from inside on the ground floor, one or two swooping like gulls to place a bet before the bell, with a hardy half dozen braving the stands outside.

In a sense, the desolation at the dogs tells its own story of Great Yarmouth. Famed for its Golden Mile seafront and sandy beaches, visitors first flocked here with the coming of the railways in 1844. Its port once overflowed with so many herring trawlers you could walk across the river by boat. Harry Houdini would perform daring feats of escape from the stage of the Hippodrome. These days, comics still play for laughs at the Britannia Pier, and tourism remains big business, but this is a town battling decline.

The numbers are stark. One study noted Yarmouth had been left reeling by twin upheavals — a 220% increase in EU migration since 2004 and the austerity years — with the borough council fearing it might run out of cash. Today, the borough is listed as the 32nd most income-deprived local authority in England, while 34% of its children live in poverty. Little wonder locals took their chance to poke the powers-that-be in the eye over Brexit, with seven in ten voting to leave the European Union.

And, in July 2024, Great Yarmouth again turned on the establishment, electing Reform UK’s Rupert Lowe as its Member of Parliament. Over the past fortnight, Lowe and his party have tumbled into turmoil amid a very public spat between him and Nigel Farage, involving a Met investigation and social media-fuelled claims and counter-claims. Yet beyond the bickering, in its economic struggles, and the way that blends with rising fears over migration, Yarmouth is a warning to politicians of all parties of the political consequences of ignoring those who feel left behind.

For a novice MP, Rupert Lowe has been remarkably outspoken both inside the Commons and on social media. His calls for mass deportations for foreign criminals, and his attack on the “madness” of paying universal credit to refugee households, have attracted delight and derision in equal measure. Whether he’s been politically effective on the ground is a matter some of his local opponents are willing to dispute.

Yet many of those I meet in Yarmouth admire their MP’s trenchant style. “He isn’t afraid to upset people,” one market trader tells me. This 37-year-old has far less time for Lowe’s former boss, dismissing Farage as a “snake” who’s “shat his arse off” in fear of competition. Nor is Lowe’s manner the only draw here. Speaking in rapid bursts while replacing watch batteries, my trader says he likes how Lowe mixes with the locals. While he never saw Brandon Lewis — Yarmouth’s former Tory MP — he’s spoken to Lowe three or four times. That seems to set him apart from Farage, who’s more likely to be fundraising for Donald Trump in Mar-A-Lago than hobnobbing in his Clacton constituency.

And not only that. When Lowe won his Westminster seat in July, the multi-millionaire former businessman promised to donate his salary to local good causes. It’s proving a popular move locally. One of the first to benefit was Great Yarmouth Town FC. A few days after my trip to the dog track, I pass by the home of The Bloaters at the Wellesley Recreation Ground where a group of boys is training on a newly installed artificial pitch. I get chatting to their watching mums and, though she didn’t vote for him, Caroline explains Lowe sorted out an issue she had with local Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. “You get the impression that he cares,” she says.

Rachel, for her part, asked Lowe for help with housing. “I’ve had horrendous issues with mould and water coming through the electric circuits,” she says of her two-bedroom privately rented home. The local housing team are aware of the problem, Rachel concedes, but tell her they simply have nowhere to put her. As she pauses to vape, she reflects for a moment beyond her own struggles. The 31-year-old is increasingly frustrated by what she sees as the unfairness of the system. “I’ve tried everything, Citizen’s Advice. Then you walk through the town and see Romanians given flat keys, and you think ‘what’s going on here?’” Cassie, another mum, agrees. “This is where a lot of people kick off with Rupert because they say it’s being racial. But it’s not. It’s more like we need to help people we have got here first rather than everyone.”

And if that hints at another source of Lowe’s popularity — he took his seat with a majority of 1,426, pushing the Tories from first place into third — it’s certainly true that Yarmouth is familiar with migration. That’s obvious far beyond the raw numbers. In the old days, workers from Scotland came to work as the herring boats arrived. As fishing stocks dwindled, the Sixties saw the arrival of a Greek-Cypriot contingent, many setting up seafront restaurants with names like Columbia Tonyponis Taverna and Othello. During the New Labour era, meanwhile, a lively Portuguese community developed. Great Yarmouth has Bernard Matthews to thank for that: the well-known Norfolk turkey producer opened recruitment offices in Lisbon. Because of its colonial history, others from the Portuguese diaspora in South America, Africa and Asia were also entitled to come under freedom of movement rules. These days, it’s Poles, Lithuanians and Romanians who predominate, with newcomers making up nearly a fifth of the population in parts of the constituency.

If it sounds like a multicultural melting pot, the trouble is the communities don’t mix. And quite aside from the question of housing, some locals suggest the influx has sparked other problems. “The issues with the Romanians at King Street are bad,” says Cassie, referring to one of Yarmouth’s main thoroughfares, its dilapidated Georgian townhouses flanked by charity shops and takeaways. “I hate going down there. It’s quite intimidating.” It’s people congregating in large groups around the town centre that locals seem to find most unsettling, but there are other issues too. In September 2023, to give one example, a former Romanian soldier was arrested for drunkenly firing an air rifle at bottles on the beach.

All the same, Yarmouth is far from a town where migrants run wild. “There’s a very strong perception that Yarmouth is overrun with immigrants, but it’s actually more complicated than that,” a Tory councillor tells me, speaking anonymously. “An awful lot of people seem to think it’s people who have come off the boats, but that’s certainly not true. But there have been quite a lot of migrant workers in the hotels who were working for the agricultural companies.” Those workers are often bussed over an hour away to work 12-hour shifts in chicken factories or to pick and pack fruit and vegetables. Many are put up in former seaside guest houses repurposed as houses of multiple occupation, and with nowhere else to go when not on shift they gather in town instead.

Interesting, too, is how locals distinguish between different migrant groups. One good example is Paul Howlett. He runs Jack’s Flower Stall on Market Place, a business first established by his great-grandmother. Though he’s sceptical of Romanians in Yarmouth — “shoplifting is a problem” — the greying 53-year-old grandfather is full of praise for the “good following” he enjoys from Poles and Albanians. “They are about 70% of our trade,” Howlett adds, “because they still use the markets.”

This blend of commerce and culture hints at something else. For if immigration clearly worries locals, these concerns can’t be separated from the broader economic picture. Since 2019, the town has secured more than £300 million of investment to improve its prospects by transforming rundown homes and derelict commercial warehouses into new business districts, enterprise zones and living quarters.

Yet the benefits may take years to be felt — and right now many feel the outlook remains as dark as the sky over the dog track. Perched on a mobility scooter and wearing an Ipswich Town bobble hat, Neville has watched the area languish. A market trader for 47 years, he recalls a town whose wealth was built on fishing and offshore oil and gas.

Tourism mattered too. “There were so many people here it was untrue,” Neville recalls. “It would start from the first week of July, which was Glasgow Scottish weekend, through to the last horse racing meeting in the second week of September.” Yarmouth was especially popular among coal miners and steel workers, who saved up their wages to splash out in the summer. Neville evokes the boarding houses and holiday camps they filled. But though visitors still bring in millions to the local economy, for Neville it’s no longer the same. “It’s all gone,” he laments, blaming package holidays on the Med for the decline.

So what does lie ahead? In some ways, the past may yet hint at Great Yarmouth’s future. In 1837, Garwood Burton Palmer opened a linen and drapery shop which grew to become Palmers: reputedly the largest independent department store in the UK until its closure in 2020. Today, though, the former four-storey store is being reimagined as “The Place” — a £17 million project encompassing a library and registry office, as well as an education hub delivering courses from the University of Suffolk and the nearby East Coast College.

The idea is to keep young people in the newly minted university town by giving them access to better training and skills. That makes sense: a quarter of people in Great Yarmouth have no formal qualifications, and the numbers with higher educational qualifications is one of the lowest in the country. Staying local also means they’ll spend more here too. Over at Jack’s Flower Stall, certainly, Howlett has first-hand experience of these pressures. He may run a fourth-generation family business, but there’s unlikely to be a fifth. Though he’d love his two daughters to join him, they’ve moved away to work in finance and the NHS.

At least the local area is being improved. Great Yarmouth Market recently received a £5.2 million overhaul, and today you can enjoy Thai food and jerk chicken alongside your Cromer crab, chips and mushy peas. Around £6 million is also being spent on doing up the surrounding area, with new pavements, lighting, planting and seating. That’s shadowed by other investments. One example here is a third crossing across the River Yare. Another is a redevelopment of South Quay to support offshore businesses. That’s twinned with action elsewhere. Two years ago, the authority secured a High Court injunction banning asylum seekers from being housed in seafront hotels, while on 20 March it agreed to establish a new Public Spaces Protection Order to tackle anti-social behaviour. Among other things, the new rule will allow police to deal swiftly with drunk and disorderly behaviour in the town centre.

Such moves may please Rupert Lowe: in November he submitted a written question to Home Office Minister Angela Eagle asking if other areas with hotels housing “irregular migration” should be encouraged to do the same. Not that Great Yarmouth’s MP always looks so aligned with the local council. In October, it unanimously agreed to build 4,350 new homes over the next 15 years. Lowe, for his part, said he’d fight the plans, arguing that the real problem was uncontrolled immigration.

Whatever happens nationally, and despite his bust up with Reform, Lowe seems to have won favour for now among many I speak to. They feel untroubled about him becoming an independent — though they’d also quite like him to patch things up with Farage. A recent decision to postpone May’s county council elections means there’s no way to test whether Lowe was the first wave in a broader anti-establishment surge, but some suggest to me that, on a turnout of 56%, a large chunk of the Tory vote sat on its hands in 2024.

All the while, some here suggest Lowe could secure his long-term political future by joining the Conservatives. Two local sources point out that when he stays in the constituency, he’s a guest of Lord Agnew, the former Conservative Treasury and Cabinet Office minister, who also backed Kemi Badenoch as party leader. “Reform aren’t going to take him back,” the unnamed councillor adds. “Personally, I’d be happy to have a conversation, but some of my colleagues might need a bit more time.”

Back at the stadium, my fiver proved ill-spent. Loverly Jubley was squeezed into second just before the finish line. Despite myself, though, a sense of Del Boy optimism takes hold, and I wonder if a fiver on Lowe to join the Tories might be worth a flutter instead.