Tracing the coastal trades of our ancestors

You shall have a fishy…

The 1907 music hall song ‘I Do Like to Beside the Seaside’ was as popular as the pursuit it depicted and Reginald Dixon’s signature tune when resident organist at Blackpool Tower (1930-1970). Northern millworkers flocked to the seaside – boarding houses accommodated them, arcades and piers entertained them, restaurants and tradesmen fed and serviced town and holiday maker alike.

However, the coast has more to offer than candy floss one week a year. With 19,491 miles (31,368 km) of UK coastline, many made their living from it.

Fishermen

Fishermen required boats which required maintenance plus sails, ropes, nets, merchants, processors and a market. Victorians ate Fleetwood fish in Manchester. The world’s largest fishing port in 1900, Grimsby, still exports fish globally.

Until the advent of the railway, fishermen couldn’t sell their catch far from home. Their customer base was restricted to locals or how far a cart travelled before fish spoilt. For many coastal communities, fishing was a subsistence activity with farming more important but if land erosion turned agrarian areas into the coast, occupations diversified and vice versa. Conceived as a seaside resort in 1831, Fleetwood’s holidaymakers jumped ship (sorry!) to brazen Blackpool while Fleetwood morphed into one of the UK’s most significant fishing towns. It even imported fishermen from nearby