Paper short abstract:

Drawing on life histories with older residents in a deprived seaside location in England, this paper explores how memories of a once flourishing fishing industry play a central role in the encounter with more recent landscapes whose transformative effects in the life of residents are still unknown.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on life histories conducted with older residents in Great Yarmouth – one of the 20% most deprived districts in England – in the early 2000s, this paper explores how memories of the once flourishing fishing industry are a way to make sense of a present characterised by uncertain transformations that bring a sense of decline and abandonment in this seaside location. Adopting a spatial and material approach to memory and heritage, I look at how these memories constitute the promise in the midst of ruin, the mushroom that emerges in devastated landscapes (Tsing 2015). In these oral accounts, residents speak of the herring season as “vibrant”, “magnificent” and “a sight worth seeing”. The lively imagery of the quay is accompanied by a description of drift netting as a precise and rhythmic activity and of herring itself as a beautiful fish, “gentle in the way it didn’t damage the net with its soft gills” and exported all over the world before the 1960s. Now, instead, there is a sense of abandonment, and local government initiatives are seen as “swimming against the tide”. Great Yarmouth’s former fishers witness themselves as heroes in a town that they consider to “have missed the boat”. I argue that, rather than being part of the past, their spatial memories are placed at the centre of the indeterminate encounters that constitute place, transcending other landscapes – from gas to, more recently, offshore wind industry – whose transformative effects in the life of residents are still unknown.