While Grimsby isn't connected to the Mayflower story, I had
a curiosity about it given that I live about 40 minutes from Grimbsy in
Lincoln County Ontario. Following dinner at the Pig and Whistle, my co-host
Garry offered to take me over to Grimbsy. Garry worked for the Port Authority for
a number of years and is an absolute fountain of historical knowledge about the
North East Lincolnshire.
Garry took me for a drive around the fish docks and without
having been there, there is no way to imagine the scale of the operations. While
there are no homes, the docks are the size of a small village. The fish docks were
built in 1857 from land reclaimed from the Humber Estuary. The docks were built by the Manchester,
Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (later the British Transport Commission).
Grimsby
used to be the largest and busiest fishing port in the world with a fleet of
over 400. While this is no longer the case, the fish docks in Grimsby still
process 1,000,000 pounds of fish per week. That’s right, 52 million pounds a
year.
Today the docks at Grimsby are a major port for both the
import and export of cars with more than half a million cars being handled
annually. The docks serve as a dry dock for vessel maintenance and also as a
support centre for the maintenance of off shore wind farms.
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