![]() Grimsby Town Football Club is a microcosm of everything resilient and humorous about the town, while also acting as a convenient parallel of its decline. If the residents of Grimsby are proud of anything, it's our football team. Local cult band Orphan Boy's lyrics paint the perfect picture of a pocket of the country a million miles away from the nearest A&R man: "Got a daytime job in a night-time bar / Got no money and he won't get far / But there's no one here and there's no family / And there's no pocket money but he likes it like that." The auditorium bills have since been monopolized by tribute acts, pantomimes starring forgotten SMTV: Live presenters and the odd touring 8 Out of 10 Cats panel member. The Pigeon Detectives were on the receiving end of a barrage of piss-filled cups when they played the town in 2008 after announcing it was "great to be back in Yorkshire" (Grimsby is not in Yorkshire). Kasabian played the auditorium once, which felt huge, as did Pete Doherty. Turgoose's sunken-eyed, glazed-over childhood stare provided a window into the psyche of the town he had come from.Īs Turgoose so often points out in interviews, there has never been much going on in Grimsby-but, again, you make the most of it. ![]() It wasn't until Tommy Turgoose made Shane Meadows give him a fiver to audition for the lead in This Is England that the town got a taste of positive cultural exposure. We made the most of it because that's all we had nobody famous wrote poetry about our town, it never inspired any notable paintings, and nobody "big" came from the local area, bar national anti-treasures Roy Chubby Brown and Ian Huntley. We made the most of trips to the nearby seaside resort Cleethorpes we made the most of the Fair World arcade, with regular visits to ensure our Silent Scope high scores were still intact. We knew Grimsby wasn't the best place to live-visiting family members as far away as Skegness confirmed this-but we all just got on with it, because that's what you do when you're a child. School trips were swimming and The National Fishing Heritage Centre. We sang about fish at football matches, bands practiced in old warehouses on the docks, and tales of adventures were recounted in corners of pubs. My friends and I never experienced those North Sea glory years ourselves, but growing up there were constant reminders. The Cod Wars of the 1970s-and further EU-driven quotas-combined with dwindling fish stocks signaled the end of a working class culture that was ingrained in the town's identity. The town's woes began with the fall of the fishing industry. A town whose beauty and softness has been sand-blasted away by a never-ending chorus of Nelson Muntz "ha-has" from the outside world, leaving nothing but the stern interior of passion, pain, and loyalty. ![]() It feels like the town is the punchline of a relentless national joke. Plenty of towns across England have suffered from the decline of industry rising poverty (the town's East Marsh ward is one of the poorest in the country and was the subject of Channel 4's Skint) lack of investment and the resulting drug, alcohol, and crime problems-but few others seem to attract the same kind of derision as Grimsby. As kids, we were taught that the town was named after "Grim," the Viking fisherman who founded it, but it may as well have been named after what immediately comes to mind: the synonym for "bleak."ĭescribed by its former MP as "a tough, taciturn, and unemotional town, inured to suffering because of the death of fishing and the inadequate level of support and spending it gets from government," Grimsby is the sort of place where you'll leave the train station and be instantly confronted by a flock of pigeons pecking away at dog shit. Grimsby, as much as I love it, has the dubious honor of being the most appropriately named place in the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |