A year ago my Essex home town was abuzz at becoming a city – now a ‘toxic’ culture war has taken over

It is a little more than a year since Southend-on-Sea became a city, sealed with a visit from the Prince of Wales. A lot has happened since – the prince is now a king – but locally it is hard to tell if much in my Essex coastal home town has actually changed. “We became a city out of a tragedy,” says Liberal Democrat councillor Carole Mulroney, referring to the fact that Southend achieved city status after the murder of David Amess. The Conservative MP for Southend West was killed on Friday 15 October 2021; by Monday, Boris Johnson announced that the Queen had agreed to honour one of Amess’s long-term campaigns, to make Southend a city.

Sitting in the council chamber on that cold March day when the future monarch provided a ceremonial rubber stamp, I struggled to work out what this would all amount to. It initially sparked a great burst of energy, but reality kept getting in the way. A community organisation trying to revive a former amusement park and music hall, the Kursaal, stepped up its campaign, only to discover the building is owned by the UK arm of an American investment firm with a 200-year lease and no break clause, meaning no one but the pigeons gets to go in. Last summer a planned music festival to celebrate the new city, which promised acts including Damon Albarn and Africa Express, was postponed due to “logistical challenges”.

Perhaps it was a case of too much too soon. “It really came as a bolt out of the blue,” says Mulroney. “Normally you would be preparing to become a city, drawing lots of people into it to put together a really good package and stuff like that.” Colchester, for instance, became a city later, in May 2022, after going through the traditional bidding process. Add to this the perennial existential crises that seem to rack English seaside towns, and it becomes clear that city status was never going to be a magic bullet.

Southend grew from nothing at the end of the 19th century, thanks to cheap train travel and an exodus of cockneys from east London. The new city still has much to attract the day tripper, in the form of its mile-and-a-third-long pier and breathtaking estuary views. More boutique B&Bs and Airbnb rentals have popped up in recent years, and the pandemic helped solidify demand: in 2020 the Daily Mail used the swell of the crowds on the beach to illustrate on its front page the easing of lockdown restrictions, and summers are usually packed with tourists.

Yet scratch the surface and the new city’s urban fabric, like much of Britain 13 years into Conservative rule, is wearing thin. A place once famous for its nightlife now goes quiet in the evening. While council-run or Arts Council-funded cultural spaces such as Focal Point gallery, Metal and Twenty One hold the line, many independent places struggle – a cherished music venue and pub, the Railway, closed its doors in 2020 and is yet to find a new landlord. Southend United has been in freefall, plummeting out of the Football League and finding itself on the brink of collapse recently, after being summoned to pay a £1.5m bill. Parts of the city centre have become bywords for deprivation, and the already very visible local drug problem in certain parts of town has worsened, while promises of developer-led regeneration have been kicked into the long grass.

After Brexit, Southend was sometimes visited by journalists hoping to find the “left behind”. But Southend as a whole was not left behind, just its poorest inhabitants. The wages of City-commuting residents have long been higher than those of local workers. Money floats down the Thames from the financial centre, resulting in areas of extreme wealth and big houses. “Southend lacks civic pride,” says Philip Miller, a Nigel Farage-supporting local businessman whose company, Stockvale, runs seafront entertainment including the Adventure Island theme park, the sea life centre, and many other venues for food and recreation.

But what exactly is civic pride? A report by researchers at the University of Southampton, which looked at Southend among other places in the UK, reflected interviewees’ suspicions that “the rhetoric of hope and pride” in the Conservatives’ levelling up agenda suggests “changing feelings is higher on the policy agenda than instituting meaningful, lasting material change”.

Southend has always voted Tory nationally, but area disparities mean that at a local level its politics are much more diverse. One factor in the feeling of inertia is a mini culture war that has broken out between the ruling coalition of Labour, Lib-Dems and independents, and the Conservatives and independents who form the rightwing opposition. From the local grasslands strategy (the administration favours rewilding, whereas the Tories see that as a cost-saving exercise that deprives residents of manicured verges) to farcical arguments over “phallic” public art, point-scoring often takes precedence. The council’s “toxic” nature was called out in a recent report by the Local Government Association, which quoted stakeholders as saying political decision-making is “clunky” due to its “caustic and divisive” nature.

Related: With weeds on the forecourt, a deserted Southend airport looks to the future

Beyond the local politicking is another factor: the lack of government funding that is at the heart of so many problems faced by local authorities. For instance, most of the council’s budget goes on care (for adults and children), which leaves little over for all the other things that councils have to do – and so they increase parking costs for visitors and plan more car parks, flying in the face of environmental pledges.

There are some green shoots. To its credit, the council had already bought the local Victoria shopping centre, filling empty lots with a mix of community projects such as a Brazilian arts and dance club, a gym, a sexual health clinic and an independent climbing centre and coffee shop. The owner of a cafe off the high street I spoke to points to recent events, such as the LuminoCity light show and the City Jam street art event, and the opening of the IronWorks, a multipurpose cafe and arts space, as the kinds of community projects that Southend has long needed. The council is earmarking funds to “green” the high street, and make it a nicer place to be.

But, until funding starts flowing again from Westminster, beyond the gimmick of levelling up, and to a local authority that isn’t distracted by a local culture war, it’s hard to see anything fundamentally shifting. In the mean time, a city struggles to be born.

• Tim Burrows writes about society, culture and place