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Hello, I'm Luke Brown and I'm a novelist who in 2020 wrote a long read for The Guardian

from cod wars to food banks.

How a Lancashire fishing town is hanging on.

I wrote this piece because of the list that came out shortly before which named my hometown Fleetwood twice.

The top ten most depressing place to live in the UK.

It was a list based on how many people were being treated with antidepressants there.

I was surprised by the fact that we were on the list where a post-industrial town with a lot of problems.

Our sense of community was based around the fishing industry and when the fishing industry left the town,

a sense of community suffered.

Many seaside towns suffered with issues of poverty.

But I didn't think that would tell the whole story.

My memory is in a place and my knowledge is in a place from going there for a five times a year.

Maybe I want to interrogate that question a bit more and find out what it was like to live in the town now

and what people were doing to cope and adapt to its changed status in the world.

I wrote the piece at the end of 2019 at the start of 2020,

where Boris Johnson was finally election campaign based on Brexit and divisions between London and the regions

were being exacerbated and the collapse of the Red Wall.

People kept saying to me, is how they feel isolated and forgotten on the end of the country.

Both forgotten by London, but also forgotten by each other really because there was no industry connecting people anymore

that people were suffering from social isolation.

...