Stephen Fry leads celebrities in campaign to save Cromer's crab factory

It's a tale of crabs, celebrities and a passionate revolt in a small north Norfolk coastal town. Stephen Fry, Matthew Pinsent and Alan Titchmarsh are among a growing number of stars joining the fight to save Cromer's famous crab processing factory from closure. Its owners want to move the work to Grimsby and Scotland.

Signs of protest now dominate this picturesque town. Posters calling for the rescue of the Cromer Crab Company, owned by Young's Seafood, are stamped in the windows of pastel-coloured homes. Protesters in crab outfits occupied the high street last weekend. Shops and mock-tudor tearooms sport bright red crab logos – a sign that they are collecting names for a petition that is already 6,000-strong.

Fry, who grew up in Norfolk, catapulted the campaign into the national spotlight by tweeting "Nooooo! Youngs to take Cromer Crabs out of Cromer? Inconceivable. Sign petition… Keep It Cromer", to his three million followers. Pinsent and Titchmarsh followed suit, retweeting news from @keepitcromer. Activists are trying to win the support of Jamie Oliver – Young's produces a Jamie Oliver seafood range.

The only people who don't seem optimistic about the campaign are the company's workers. Standing under a bus shelter outside the factory on their lunch break, employees say that despite the firm's 90-day consultation period, the plant's closure is a fait accompli. "You can't fault the support we've got from the town, but it doesn't put money on the table," says one worker who has worked at Young's for five years and didn't want to be named. "They [company directors] can do what they want – what can guys on the factory floor do about it? They've counted the cards, dealt them out and now we're just waiting for them to turn them over."

The Cromer Crab Company is the largest private-sector employer in the town, and some 230 jobs will be lost if it closes. One employee, a middle-aged manager who has worked at the factory for several years, supports a family of five. If he can't find a job almost immediately, he says they will lose their rented home because his landlord won't accept benefits. "Bedsits are fine when you're single but I'm not looking forward to fitting a whole family in there," he says.

The workers are well aware that the company is struggling. Opened in the 1970s by two locals, the plant began by processing local crabs on a small scale. As work expanded, more of the unprocessed seafood started coming from abroad. Today, less than 2% of the company's turnover comes from Cromer stocks. The bulk comes from processing prawns imported from Asia, which the company sells to supermarkets. Half the workforce is now from Eastern Europe.

Young's says the erosion of the pound against the dollar has left it in an uncompetitive position. Chief operating officer Peter Ward, who is leading the consultation, said the "best scenario" was to close the plant and consolidate the work elsewhere: "We didn't put this proposal on the table without recognising the gravity of it. This is nothing to do with the performance of the workforce. It's the external factors … We have to be sustainable."

But the political heat is increasing on the firm. Norman Lamb, who is the MP for the constituency and parliamentary private secretary to Nick Clegg, says Young's is missing a trick: "They are sitting on a potential gold mine here. We're living at a time when the whole market trend is towards local, high-quality food. We just had an event in parliament about Norfolk produce – Kettle Chips [made in Norwich] have become an incredibly powerful brand. Cromer Crabs could offer the same."

Lamb's senior position in government may explain David Cameron and Nick Clegg's recent commitment to support protected EU status for the Cromer crab. Like Melton Mowbray pork pies and the Cornish sardine, they want any crab labelled Cromer crab to be caught and processed locally. Young's says it is prepared to make this concession but given that only 2% of the food it processes is sourced locally, it is unlikely to save many jobs.

The more gloomy among the workforce have already left the factory to get a head start in the search for alternative work; others are simply trying to fit in as many shifts as they can before Christmas. Discussing the closure, many fear they will have to move away to find employment, and warn Cromer could end up a "ghost town".