The bell hangs where it always has, above the ice-house door, its rope worn smooth by four generations of auctioneers' hands. At five each morning it rings the fish market open, and the merchants press in around the boxes of ling and cod, and for twenty minutes the quay sounds the way it has sounded since 1936.
But the boats are fewer every season. Where thirty trawlers once landed, there are now four, and two of those are for sale. The auctioneer, David Renshaw, is sixty-eight and has no successor. "The bell doesn't need me," he says. "It needs fish."
What happens to a town built around a sound when the sound stops? This is the first of a series of dispatches from the quay, recorded over one winter, as the market decides whether to modernise, consolidate, or close.
The merchants speak of electronic auctions in Grimsby and Peterhead — screens instead of bells, bids from buyers who have never smelled the ice-house. The catch is the same. Everything else is different.
