“It is nice to see something happening for once,” says Jack Vincent, a Grimsby resident, as he considers a wave of change finally arriving in a town that had become a byword for deprivation.

In June, King Charles visited the Lincolnshire coastal town, celebrating the opening of a youth centre in a previously derelict Victorian warehouse building and a Care charity community drop-in centre in a vacant bank on the high street. Scaffolding also shrouds one end of the town’s shopping centre, part of which is being converted to house leisure facilities including a cinema and a food market.

“It is getting better and we have got the new cinema coming,” says Vincent, who is in town with his partner and two young children.

Jack Vincent, 35, says: ‘It is nice to see something happening for once.’ Photograph: Paul Marriott/The Guardian

Linda Hooper, 75, who also lives locally, agrees: “They are generally making it nicer and there’s a good shopping centre.”

Once the world’s largest fishing port, Grimsby has been…