Introduction
This post looks at the downfall of Boston as a thriving town centre. But will start with a fable about an elephant that has ancient Buddhist origins.
A group of blind men had never encountered an elephant before and each one felt different parts of the elephant and pooled their findings. The elephant wandered off not realising that it had been described as a leaf, a snake, a wall, a tree trunk, and a rope all somehow stuck together. So is the case with the deterioration of Boston. There are many individual factors but they need to be looked at with the whole to understand what has happened.
In my writings under Marsh Fen and Town I described various towns in the Fens of South Lincolnshire that had similar traits such as bypasses, supermarkets outside the town centre and an increasingly dormitory nature such as Holbeach, Long Sutton, Bourne and Crowland. Boston both shares some of these aspects but due to its history, location and topography combined with its largeness is substantially different. It also shares other features that are common throughout the area, such as ineffective policing and high levels of migration in a short period. In looking at some of these issues I will describe different first hand experiences to help illustrate my points from other locations such as Spalding and Peterborough. I am highly aware from prior posts that I will invoke criticism, but see this as healthy as each reader should retain their own critical thinking, but at the same time consider the experience of others as we all see the world through different windows.
The Past Origins and Formation
The shapes of a town are formed by its origins and its history, but how a town is used is determined by people. Too often people look back with nostalgia at Boston town centre and harken back to various key attributes that contributed to the life of the town: when Boston had a Marks and Spencers and a Woolworths; the glory days of the Gliderdrome playing host to Billy Fury and The Equals; the Odeon hosting Bucks Fizz; the Wednesday cattle markets; the large fairs in the market place; how the town was busier when traffic ran through it. Some go back even further in time to the history of goose and sheep fairs, or when the fish were sold on the stones. Nostalgia and history is great. But as I look back I will also look at the traps and hazards that helped create the realities of today.
However, we do have to note that nearly all the past activities and businesses I mention above have in common that they brought people into the town centre of Boston. In this way we can understand where we are today.
The formation and growth of Boston
It is important to understand how Boston formed and grew tucked into the side of The Wash on the East coast of Britain and surrounded by marsh and fen it was in a relatively remote location. Being on the East coast of Britain Boston joined other towns such as London, Hull and Newbiggen-on-Sea in developing as significant ports from the twelfth century onwards and was an equal to, and at times in terms of activity a larger port than the others I have mentioned.
However, thanks to a French bloke called Norman in 1066 the dominance of England was set to serve London and the south east. This continued despite long wars at different times with France and Spain and much of Europe in their struggle for dominance. This helped maintain the importance of East coast ports further North as they traded at various times with Holland, the Baltic and the Hanseatic League - mostly Northern and Eastern Europe whilst at the same time providing for the Capital with food, fuel and raw materials.
As a port Boston has always been problematic in that its entrance was prone to silting from the River Witham that flows into the tidal Haven and the docks have limited access. This meant that at times when access was restricted adjacent Fishtoft and Freiston shores were historically used for loading goods or barges would transfer goods from boats moored in the shelter of Boston Deeps in The Wash. Engineering of the waterways improved this. The leaders of Boston jealously guarded the importance and the maintenance of the docks in Boston to the extent of successfully opposing a proposed pier and railway link at Freiston Shore (see connected post from Marsh Fen and Town).
As a crossing point for the River Witham Boston was also a land trade route. What is often overlooked is that both the Witham and the later South Forty Foot provided navigable trade routes before the age of the railway. When it came to bridging the Witham this could conflict with navigation as it effected the scour of the waterway as well as the passage of traffic on water. The importance of the road bridge was recognised. Traffic is the lifeblood of the town. Throughout its history the bridge over the Witham has had great importance, certainly since the twelfth century, and has been rebuilt many times. To discourage interruption of trade activity during some of the builds the town leaders ensured a free ferry service was available.
Thus we see Boston develop as a centre for importing and exporting; access to the Witham and waterways behind leading to Lincoln and what is now the East Midlands, with roads and rail over time. Wool, grain, wood, stone, cloth, sugar, salt and fish all helped pay for the development of the town. By the fifteenth century trade with Flanders was so significant that investment from Flanders sought to keep waterways open by financing and providing expertise for sluices. Trade generates income and investment.
So, Boston was a port, a traders town. It was also a fishing town with a thriving fish market. This was enhanced in Elizabethan times by the permission of the Queen in allowing migrants from the Netherlands to live in Boston, with them bringing their methods of fish preservation in barrels that could even be performed whilst a boat was at sea extending what we now call "shelf-life".
The area around Boston was rich grazing land of marshes and fen that was over time drained for arable use. Markets for wool, livestock and fowl developed. Thus we see Boston become a thriving market town amongst all its other activity.
The twentieth century development of Boston town - the actions with consequences to this day.
Each change in Boston is of its era, but what was good or bad yesterday need not be good or bad today as I will try and illustrate.
Nowadays the popular historical perception of a market town is with the holding of weekly markets. Whilst this is true of certain perishable consumables such as butter, cheese, eggs and some fruit and vegetables it is a misleading view. The same goes for the fish market. Fish were sold on the stones as the catches were landed. In the case of livestock markets various livestock were typically sold at seasonal fairs throughout the year. It was the advent of the railway to market towns in the 1840's that saw the growth of regular weekly livestock markets either in the streets or in purpose built market stalls. In Boston this was somewhat later than in most towns in the region, when in 1903 Mr. Ben Simons of Sutton-on-Sea and Willoughby set up a branch of his auctioneer business in Boston and applied to hold a weekly cattle market in Wide Bargate. This was initially rejected by the Boston Corporation on grounds of lack of demand, however Mr. Simons disproved this by getting local farmers to pledge the sale of a certain quantity of livestock in Boston each year.
This enabled the market to start and grow rapidly with, in the early days, a regular attendance of over forty farmers crowding into the Red Lion every Wednesday for lunch. Thus we see the immediate knock on benefit to an unconnected business in the town centre. The market grew with up to five auctioneer firms using the market at its peak in the 1920's when 800 fat pigs, 250 cattle and 200 stores were penned in the streets. As health and welfare issues became more of an issue covered markets were sought and Spalding beat Boston in achieving this just before WW2. This combined with a post war change in local agriculture to arable that would accelerate in the 1970's made local livestock markets unviable.
The benefits of a thriving market and port town transferred to the town centre of Boston and was reflected in a wide and diverse range of businesses. Note businesses, not just shops, grew in the centre of Boston of a wide and varied nature. All these businesses both benefitted from and helped increase the flow of people and the town centre enjoyed peaks of activity in the 1920's (at the height of the livestock market's activity) and in the 1960's as people became more mobile. Night life was rejuvenated in the 1960's as the rebuilt Gliderdrome became a key attraction to the "Absolute Beginners" generation of afluent and mobile teenagers and young people with cars and motor scooters invigorating night time Boston.
It is important to realise that this activity of people at different times of the day for multiple purposes helped enable the town centre to thrive and become increasingly attractive to visitors whether local or from afar, for pleasure and business. But how did this change?
It is hard to imagine that when I started working for Barclays Bank in 1986 it had three branches in Boston town centre all within easy walking distance of each other. Solicitors, accountants, insurance brokers, estate agents, banks and building societies all mostly had their offices in and around the town centre. There was a mixture of small family businesses and large national shops such as Woolworths, Marks and Spencer, and Boots. The largest shop to dominate the town was the popular department store Oldrids owned locally by the Isaac family since 1915.
How this town centre slumped to its current state in early 2025 may be a surprise as I describe how changes over time stored up problems for the present. I am loathe to say that Boston is a failed town centre, but rather "Its good in parts." Boston has been the subject of massive population growth in a very short period - much of it unregistered on statistics and therefore under-recorded. At the same time it has seen a moving away of activities from the town centre and this has created even more visible signs of a slump. Whilst some of these causes are common to other towns in the UK the combination is possibly unique and has been created over time without open minded adaptations to compensate for change.
The pursuit of largeness, reduction of diversity in the town centre and the increase of strangers.
To understand the following I ask the reader to understand the definitions as follows:
The pursuit of largeness - this takes two forms, the preference of people for larger stores to the expense of undermining smaller ones and over time eroding the diversity of town centre; but also the pursuit of growth of population.
Reduction of diversity - is the reduction of a diverse range of business in the town centre, retail, professional and other. Also reduction of diversity of town centre use - retail, leisure, industry and services.
Increase of strangers - in a market town like Boston, or any of the other towns in Lincolnshire, you run into people you know at work, neighbours, or went to school with, or see socially, your children's teachers, people you have bought services off, people from neighbouring towns and villages. This is not the same in cities where largeness and choice reduce the familiarity of people you know. Indeed, cities are well geared to cope with this as it is part of being in a city with more people are more strangers. Over time some towns evolve into cities and this may be so with a future Boston, but in the meantime the increase of strangers over a very short period has affected people's feeling of familiarity, secureness, community cohesion and even safety.
All the above conspired to reduce the traffic of people and the decline of Boston's town centre.
Large stores and out of town development: If you look at a directory of Boston at different periods you see in the 1920's through to the 1950's a wide range of diversified businesses in the town centre. Whilst Boston as a whole retains a wide diversified range of businesses this is not so in the town centre. The 1960's saw a rebuilt Oldrid's department store thriving in Boston town centre and acting as a magnet pulling people in from the surrounding area. People had to pass other retail businesses to get to it. It was an asset to the town providing local employment and contributing back to the local community economically and socially. A feature of such large family businesses of this era is that they had high degrees of self sufficiency, this meant that the business employed its own joiners and maintenance team creating a wide range of opportunities for service staff and skilled trades people. Where it didn't have in store expertise for a task it would favour local businesses first. In addition the owner's cared enough to participate in running the town for the benefit of all. This kind of local support mostly only happens with local family owned business.
With Oldrid's as a large retail draw attracting people the traffic of people attracted national retailers, or those already present in the town sought expansion. Boots, Woolworths, Marks and Spencer, Wilkinsons, and national chains with smaller shops also slotted in. This is fine, but larger chain retailers and department stores create a problem for town centres in that they can afford to pay more for space and financially crowd out smaller local businesses over time reducing retail diversity and consumer choice. This often results in more banks, building societies, estate agents, solicitors and accountants in a town centre as they can afford the location. This is positive to a degree and it has not been unusual for retailer's such as Marks and Spencer to be courted by local authorities because of their perceived pulling power. All these businesses have employees from the area and these employees add to the diversity of use of the town centre. Employees, customers and clients in the town centre will use other services in the town centre, whether other retail shops, cafes, pubs, banks etc. However, unlike family businesses that are ensconced in the town, larger retail chains are more fickle and likely to withdraw from towns in preference of the greater populations of cities when the economy down-turns.
Smaller businesses, especially those that are longer established with freeholds, have a greater resilience and staying power in a town like Boston and tend not to be crowded out by rents, but over the decades, the popular support of larger businesses saw these become fewer. It is especially in retail that this is observed as the diversity of retail outlets contracts. To understand the importance of the diversity of smaller outlets if you visit Louth in mid-Lincolnshire and Boston in south-Lincolnshire you see the difference. The former has a more active, but not without some contraction, town centre with a more diverse range of business.
Diversity of use of a town centre also applies to time and Boston used to be more active in the evenings. In the past activity was over longer periods as retailers were open longer hours. In the 1950's through to the 1990's Boston had more people going to pubs, cinema, entertainment in the town centre area. This reduced as we entered the 21st century and the increase of strangers occurred.
The 1970's saw the opening of the inner relief road, John Adams Way in Boston and the closing off of through traffic and pedestrianisation of the Market Place area and Strait Bargate. There is no doubt that this was and is deemed more pleasant and safer for pedestrians. This is the case but it is not without a cost. Pedestrianisation of a town centre favours larger retailers who can influence when deliveries take place. Smaller businesses do not have the same ability as they rely upon the distribution networks of others. With some businesses it can exclude them from taking deliveries unless they have a separate out of town site to ferry delivery in from. It also excludes the convenience of being able to park closer to a premises to carry a heavier purchase to your car. The convenient quick call in from a vehicle is lost. However, the convenience of the internet and Amazon would follow in future years.
It also has to be noted how pedestrianised space is used - people by and large remain to the sides leaving what was the area for traffic mostly free of use. Could at least one way traffic for smaller vehicles be reinstated at 20 mph to help alleviate the congestion that easily occurs on John Adams Way in the 2020's? Contrary to popular belief, vehicular traffic does not necessarily move elsewhere when an area is pedestrianised, rather many people find alternative methods of transport or avoid that journey. Now if Boston had a highly usable joined up reliable public transport system this may be the case, but in my lifetime (born 1967) it never has. Try using public transport to get from Spalding to Boston hospital and its highly likely you will end up using a more expensive taxi.
As we enter the 1980's there was increased out of town development with Oldrid's Downtown being developed on the western, A52 side of Boston. Supermarket out of town shopping quickly followed with Tesco on that same side of town and Asda just outside the town centre on the northern side close to the Maud Foster drain. Housing and shopping become designed for car owners and from the late 1960's a steady switch from cars as a luxury to a necessity was made. The 1980's saw a the start of a steady progressive diversion of people from the town centre. Many professional offices moved to out of town sites. Even Boston United, once within easy walking distance of the town centre moved out of town.
In the 1940's canning factories were in the town of Boston, close to the town centre with Beaulah's at Tawney Street and Bargate. The food industry forty years later developed factories and pack houses out of town. Workers at these primarily accessed them by car - this further moved the traffic of people away from the town to these out-of-town rural sites. Cars do not cause traffic, people do. What adds to this is the fact that working hours and location means that no public transport is easily available to the various sites and cycling to the sites is not easy on poorly maintained and traffic laden rural roads. A contrast to this is Spalding, where although the food processing factories are out of town , most notably between Pinchbeck and Spalding, they can be accessed easily by bicycle and are in a walkable distance from much residential housing, but, like Boston, the traffic of people tends not to pass through the town centre and public transport is poor or impractical.
Perhaps the largest draw of the traffic of people to Boston is the Pilgrim Hospital and it too is away from the town centre to the north of the town. This has two fundamental faults: the first is understandable due to its size, that is, the location of the Hospital. If it had been placed closer to the town centre it would have increased activity and benefitted from better access from public transport, or even stimulated better public transport to the town centre. When it was developed many health services and cottage hospitals existed in towns away from Boston, such as the maternity wing in Boston. Indeed, my niece in 1995 was one of the last babies to be born at Spalding maternity.
The second fault is that the public transport links to the hospital that covers an ever larger catchment area is crap. This forces more car traffic along John Adams way not by choice, but by medical necessity of patients and economic necessity of those that work there.
As we entered the 90's Boston began to see what would become a decline in it's town centre led by largeness and strangers. When Boston had a greater mix of town centre businesses it was able to draw people into its nooks and crannies. The passageways had thriving businesses as well as large volumes of people walking from one location in the town centre to another. These in turn created the policing by people - not vigilantes, but people that cared enough to take action or report any wrong doing or difficulty , from damaged pavements, to assisting a person fallen ill, to challenging bad behaviour. This was possible because the number of people that cared were invested in the town. It was also possible because people had confidence that if the professional services of the police were required, the local known police would support them. In addition the "smallness" of the town community meant people were familiar with each other, if not by name, by site and habit. (see the various town posts under "Marsh Fen and Town most notably the Bourne one in connected posts). People with businesses in the town centre and their employees added to its friendliness, familiarity and security - effective guardians of the community. Police activity would be supported by a network of persons if required. For a private person to act he or she must feel that they have investment in the street and/or will get support from others if required.
Again, I find myself referring to Louth, one of the towns in Lincolnshire to retain its familiarity and support of community. In 2013 two armed robbers were thwarted by members of the public in a smash and grab raid, "While they were inside trying to effect the robbery the people of the town banded together and the motorbike they intended to use for their escape was pushed over by a passer-by and the keys taken." It is my informed opinion that such local action would be less likely to happen in both Boston or Spalding such is the lack of community cohesion and lack of confidence of professional police support.
Even though I would, in the past, visit Boston with days or weeks apart from each visit I had a familiarity and comfort of people I would see regularly in different parts of the town. This is often taken for granted and people do not realise until its lost. In my old home town of Spalding it would typically take me three hours on a Saturday to walk from one end to the other because of the vast number of people I would see that I knew and would chat to. Boston was similar to a lesser degree for me. Nowadays I can walk one end of Spalding to the other on a Saturday and will be lucky to meet one familiar person, worse still I will hear substantially little English being spoken creating a further barrier of familiarity. It is a fact that in itself this is not bad, but it is also a fact that it does matter as it re-enforces the dominance of strangers in the town. You also see that if language is perceived as a barrier people do not challenge poor behaviour. The policing of people breaks down and fear starts to take hold with all its phobias including xenophobia. The little contacts that people develop when they visit a town centre regularly over time, such as buying a newspaper, going to a vegetable stall or a nod to a regular dog walker matter. But with a lesser diversity of shops and businesses this becomes harder to maintain.
The interaction of strangers in a City is different and people tend to be better equipped for coping with strangers. I will illustrate this with two separate challenges of bad behaviour by Portuguese youth, one in Peterborough, the other in Boston:
When I worked in Millfield, Peterborough I was crossing the road in front of my office at the pedestrian crossing. As I reached the other side and stepped onto the pavement in front of a cafe a youth rode his bike into the back of me. I turned around, held his handle bars and told him to get off his bike. His response was ridiculous.
"You're only telling me to get off my bike because you're a racist."
"What do you mean? You're the same as me."
"I'm Portuguese and you're a racist."
"How the fuck do I know you are Portuguese? Get off your bike. You deliberately rode into me."
He continued the tirade of me being racist switching from English to Portuguese observed by three old men sipping coffee sat outside the Portuguese coffee shop (the best coffee on the street). I turned to them and asked, "Gentlemen, you have been watching us can you tell me if I have been a racist?"
The eldest of the men stood up, walked over to the lad, slapped him around the ear, had a brief altercation in Portuguese and sent him on his way. I thanked him , bought them all another coffee and asked him what he said.
"I told him if he didn't wish to behave he could return to Portugal. But, he went on, he told me he was born here. Idiot."
Millfield had its faults, but it also had a selection of people of all nationalities, creeds and languages who were used to the strangers.
Now contrast this with my experience in Boston one evening. I was collecting a KFC from the Market Place where I parked as council workmen were clearing away the market stalls. A group of lads were playing football, whilst a mild nuisance in the street, on the face of it they were doing no real harm. But as I walked back to my car one of them was kneeling down concentrating on trying to get a plastic strip through the window seal. I tapped him on the shoulder, "Hold on, I'm trying to get into this car," he said without looking up. At which point I grabbed his head and knocked it against the side of the car and kicked his knees away from under him. The lads playing foot ball looked up and started walking towards me, but so did the two nearest council workers with metal poles from the market stalls. The youths backed off and the would-be thief crawled away uttering Portuguese interspersed with the words "fucking bastard".
Talking to the workmen they explained that in the early evening these Portuguese lads ran riot in the market place and it had become such an issue that when packing up the stalls they worked in pairs. They said that police had spoken to them but they gave the, "no speaky English" routine and the police gave up.
Now at this time Boston Market Place had the benefit of surveillance cameras, whilst, I am told, but cannot verify, the police did nothing. The truth is that peace, law and order is not kept primarily by the police, but rather an intricate network of voluntary controls and standards enforced by the public, the people living and working on the street. The police merely do professionally what is incumbent on everyday people. But this requires people to be both present and invested enough to have eyes on the street and to act. In the old familiar town this was easier, but with more people as strangers, unfamiliar and language as a barrier, sometimes intentionally, this was harder. With less activity and people about in the evening in Boston this added to this. Furthermore, is the ridiculous trend to replace the presence of professional police with soul-less CCTV and you create an unfamiliar place where people feel less safe and secure and bad behaviour becomes unchecked.
The town centre of Boston deteriorated over subsequent years. Early evening and I could see drive-by drug dealing and a descending of safety as rival gangs, sometimes of different national origins, clashed unchallenged and I stopped calling in for KFC on the way home from visiting Lincolnshire's farmers.
Now it would be reasonable to expect that the massive influx of immigrants mostly from Eastern Europe might help revive the town centre, but these migrations by and large had a negative effect as the local English population felt the strangeness of unknown people speaking multiple unknown languages and less safe. There is a particular quirk of European migration that many of the shops (note NOT all) established by incoming migrants are similar to one another in appearance - small Euro-marts or supermarkets full of foreign European branded goods. Sadly they are also an avenue for illegal and counterfeit goods. Every so often Trading Standards close a few down. When you check the names of the proprietors you can frequently see multiple Companies or names repeated across different towns. When I worked for a Bank I and others would pass details of closures to colleagues who would see if there were accounts that could be closed down under money-laundering rules. Whilst not my role, I was informed that the connections were far reaching. Open borders had a price to pay and towns like Boston paid it with an increased flow of illegal merchandise. The only thing that slowed this was the pandemic, with Brexit having little effect to date. The problem is that the legitimate first generation immigrant businesses "get tarred with the same brush" as the illegitimate and trust between people is lost.
Comparing Boston to the Millfield area of the City of Peterborough, it too saw European immigration displacing previous generations of migrants, but being a City, having a longer history of migration, it was better able to cope with changes. But Millfield did lose much of its social glue as European migration dominated - no longer were deck chairs outside shops on a warm summers evening with various shop-keepers and locals chatting.
The Disconnect Between People and Police in Boston.
Boston also, in common with many towns in Lincolnshire, suffered a disconnect of policing with the community. Up to the mid 1980's it was common, even the norm, for police to live in police houses. These were located within the community and spread throughout larger towns. I remember my Uncle with his young family being moved to his first police house in Boston on a housing estate. As such he was ensconced in the community and got to know what was happening and who was about. This style of policing was reflected throughout the towns of Lincolnshire where police would walk into shops and chat with the community learning from its eyes and ears. The reward was a greater connection with the public and a greater feeling of safety. My uncle knew where he could get a cup of tea and cade a cigarette whilst on duty. The estate that he initially lived on was regarded as "rough" by my parents, but in reality was just working class people with the day to day challenges and problems that normal folk have. This is not nostalgia - it is what we have lost. The consequences of this is a public tolerant of crime and bad behaviour, fearful of lack of police support and an increase in unreported crimes and people prepared to exploit this.
However, their is a great difficulty caused by the apparent invisibility of police caused by a change in how resources are deployed. March 2024 saw the deployment of two "street rangers" to increase community safety. Now I will be the first to admit that these are two more pairs of eyes on the streets, but they are in no way as beneficial as a fully engaged relationship between the police and the public in Robert Peel's vision of "the police are the people and the people are the police." These rangers have little more power than a member of the public and do not compensate for either police invisibility or lack of everyday connection with the public. They are effectively a sop created by officials, local and national government to have the political appearance of "doing something whilst trying to spend as little as possible." In that sense they may be better than nowt.
The simple fact is that Lincolnshire Police has gone through decades of underinvestment and effective reduction of resources against a growing population. In 1974 after losing Humberside area, Lincolnshire had 1174 police officers and a population of about 502,000 people. A ratio of 1 to 428. In 2022 Lincolnshire had a police force of 1165 police officers and a population of about 775,000. A ratio of 1 to 665. Added to this are several other factors such as: a much larger transient and unrecorded population than ever before especially with the food and farming industry; the increased roles of the police filling in gaps of problems caused by under investment in social services or mental health support; the increased road traffic in the county. Add to this the increased bureaucracy that each Police officer has to deal with and you start to understand how the break down in relationship between police and public has happened - the job is trying to be done on the cheap.
Society has changed and increasingly we have a public that is disengaged from their responsibility and are more likely to film a crime and post about it on social media than they are to report it to police. The simple fact is that if there was a proper daily face to face engagement between local trusted police and the people then more crime would be reported and the policing by the public would increase. Boston has, like most Lincolnshire towns, spiralled into an increasing quagmire of unreported crime and inaction. Like a broken window or fly-tipped rubbish it enables more windows to become broken and more rubbish to accumulate on that spot - only in this case it is crime and public order and perception of safety that reduces. People are more likely to report something face to face to a known officer or a locally manned police station than they are online or by phone.
Whilst the growing trend for street wardens and PCSO's is considered valuable they are effectively watering down and devaluing the role of the police officer. Indeed for proper community engagement to be effective the police force of Lincolnshire would need to increase its numbers of police by 50% and would require increased support staff. Furthermore, other services such as Social Services, Mental Health, let alone the tools of judiciary such as magistrates and courts would need matching investment.
This, in common with other towns, has contributed to the downturn of Boston town centre.
The Limits of Finance and the short-changing of Boston
We can now add to this massive underinvestment in the locality in every area that the national and local government are expected to contribute. It is an oft repeated trope that Migration benefits economies. In the case of Boston and neighbouring South Holland it has provided a great deal of labour for a growing food packing and processing industry as well as some of the more labour intensive aspects of agriculture itself. Boston took on one of the largest population growths caused by migration seen outside of any City in the UK. With that and the associated industry should have been a great benefit to the Treasury. Yet consistently without fail, regardless of the colour of government, from Tony Blair onwards the area has been short changed. I discuss this in earlier posts connected to this, "Migration in the Fens Two Great Lies" and "The Short Changing of Spalding".
Local authorities have the problem that many of its costs and responsibilities are determined by population and its primary method of tax income is determined by property. There is a mismatch requiring funding in one form or another. Some activities such as car park charges, planning regulation can incur a fee income, but not all these activities are cash positive. For example, car park income is reliant upon our old friend "footfall" in the town and this in 2025 is still quite low. The taxes and fees charged by local authorities are regulated and even limited by central government. Central government adds grants and funding but often much of this is ring fenced. Local government has to balance its books each year and often granted money has deadlines to be spent or returned resulting in wasteful spending for fear of losing it. You also have the ridiculous situation of different authorities competing to the detriment of each other for the same funds without concern for merit. You currently see this where a regional Northumbrian Conservative council is understandably fighting against the funding of money to repair an arterial roadway in Gateshead for fear of losing out. The merits of the repair and the need to spend the money is unquestionable.
Worse still is the simple fact that central funding is politically weaponised. Areas of a strong political colour usually lose out when their opposite colour is in power and when their own colour is in power as the votes of those areas are taken for granted. Mayoral funding and allocation of funds is seen as a remedy. Sadly, in my opinion, few mayors have the qualities of Andy Burnham of Manchester in my opinion "placing region before politics" and I fear the quality of politicians bidding for these positions is so low that this may get worse.
In Lincolnshire there is a particular difficulty in that investment is largely perceived to be Lincoln centric. Boston's population growth, whilst acknowledged, has tended to be subject to undercounting with such issues as transient people and multiple occupancy as well as poor census collection clearly issues that can be seen by walking through the residential areas. I am a big believer in observation and listening to sense check knowledge and statistics.
All this results in Boston being underfunded in a County that is largely underfunded. To make this worse we now risk placing our Drainage boards into a funding crisis. Local authorities are, understandably, not happy to increase payments to drainage boards. Just the basic activity of flood prevention, whether maintenance of drains or the usage of pumps consumes energy. Much of this cost is born locally despite the fact that much of the water is from the Cities of the Midlands and central England. Recent years have seen the double whammy of increasing energy costs and increased usage due to wet weather. That the burden is unfairly weighted downstream is an issue, but without the spend and future investment Boston may as well not bother to try and improve.
Defensive spending to protect what Boston has; investment in all sectors of law and order from social services, local authority enforcement, police and judiciary; innovative improvement of public transport; innovative improvement of footfall in the town centre of Boston. All these will protect and cure Boston of its slump. How these are achieved is the challenge. Perhaps the ultimate solution will be for Boston to become a city.