Killing time playing pool at the West Rhyl youth club, friends Sienna, 19, and Jake, 26, are unanimous when asked what a tour of the north Wales seaside town should look like. “The first place I’d show anyone is ‘Crackhead Circle’,” Sienna says.

The small public garden behind the town hall and a paved area by the closed home bargain store Wilko in the adjacent high street host several strung-out characters on a cold February afternoon. Police cars crawl through the area every 15 minutes or so as part of Project Renew, a year-long crackdown on gang activity and drugs.

On the seafront, a row of Victorian hotels look out over the milky-green Irish Sea, but their glamour has long faded; the dilapidated buildings now serve as emergency accommodation for the council.

Sienna waves at a group of people gathered on the steps of the Westminster hotel as she walks past. Her family moved around a lot before coming to Rhyl a few years ago. They lived at the hotel when they arrived.

She is a gifted athlete, but a basketball injury that required major surgery on her leg interfered with her education, pursuing sports and entering the world of work.

“It has been difficult to settle down here,” she says. “I don’t think it’s that dangerous, but you have to be careful by the bus station.”

Rhyl West has topped deprivation tables in Wales for decades. Drugs and violence are significant problems in the once elegant holiday town; the ward has a crime rate of 197 for every 1,000 people – about 2.5 times the average for Wales. The violent crime rate is 88 for every 1,000, or more than double Wales’ average.

The town’s young people, like so many others in coastal communities in England and Wales, leave school and often find themselves faced with few opportunities for work and little chance of finding somewhere affordable to live.

“My mates who have jobs are all working part-time in shops or deliveries or tourism,” says Sienna. “Almost no one can afford to move out from their parents and get their own place. They can’t afford to leave either.”

Sienna has a fiance in Northern Ireland but she does not have the money to see him very often. “We haven’t figured out how we can be together yet.”

But there are tentative signs that the tide may finally be turning for Rhyl.

Project Renew is working – in January, North Wales police said crime was down 14% on a year ago – and everyone the Guardian met agreed there is less drug use on the street.

Years of construction work on the promenade finally finished last summer, the nearby Queen’s Market food hall, waterpark and cinema have all been recently revamped, and a neighbourhood board has been put together to decide how to spend millions allocated through the government’s Pride in Place funding.

Pride in Place, Labour’s answer to the Conservatives’ levelling up strategy, has awarded hundreds of places, many of them coastal, with £20m. The proviso is that local people, the MP, the council, businesses and community organisations must all work together on how best to spend it.

Gill German, MP for Clwyd North, is keen that young people in Rhyl are involved in that process.

“The youth service consulted 600 young people about what they need,” she says. “They [the young people] still don’t think the beach belongs to them – they think it’s for tourists – so we need to try to make sure they start feeling the benefits of living by the sea and those wellbeing factors [associated with that].”

Researchers from University College London recently travelled up and down the English coast talking to local people for their Coastal Youth Life Chances project and concluded that one of the things that would make a difference to young people in seaside communities would be to include them in planning and decision-making.

“We’ve managed to get more young people on Our Rhyl [the Pride in Place board],” says German. “Hopefully that will start connecting them to the growing opportunities [in Rhyl].”

Rhyl is unusual in that it is youthful in comparison to most UK coastal towns. It is also an outlier in that the unemployment rate in Denbighshire is 4.8%, lower than the UK average of 5.2%, even though coastal areas tend to have more people out of work.

“Our issue in Rhyl is getting people into work,” says Melanie Evans, of Working Denbighshire. “Many young people lack the basics, such as knowing how to talk to people in a workplace or an office, or how to dress. Those are skills we are teaching.”

In 2017, Working Denbighshire consolidated more than a dozen funding streams from the Welsh government and Westminster into one pool, making it simpler to coordinate services and channel money to where it is needed most.

The results are clear. In 2021, Project Barod was launched – Barod means “ready” in Welsh – offering one-to-one mentoring support in helping find work or training, workshops to help build confidence and skills, such as cooking classes and beach clean-ups, as well as classes in reading, writing and maths.

When participants are ready, they can access subsidised work experience, and the project also supports people struggling to hold down a job, and those who want to retrain.

“Our thinking was: if you’re going to keep doing the same thing, you’re going to keep getting the same results,” says Evans. “We needed to do something different to break the cycle of poverty.”

The number of people in education or training after support from Working Denbighshire in the first half of the 2025-26 financial year was 163, up 233% on the department’s target of 70, with 38% of those helped aged 16 to 24, by far the biggest demographic group.

By his own admission, Luke, 19, did not enjoy school, and had no idea what he wanted to do when he left. After quitting a job he hated at a clothes shop, he was referred to Barod by the jobcentre. Over the past year the programme has helped him study for a roofing qualification and find work as an apprentice.

“I’m still very shy. Talking to people and paperwork and exams and stuff can be overwhelming,” he says. “I never imagined I would be doing this though. Eventually, I want to run my own business and work for myself.”

At a Barod pizza-making class at Use Your Loaf, a community bakery, the small group are being shown different ways to stretch and toss dough by the baker, Steve Baxendale.

Florence, 25, cracks a shy smile as she throws the thin circle in the air, specks of flour spotting her glasses and apron. Health issues have prevented her from applying to university yet, although a degree in cognitive science is still the goal.

“I’ve been going to workshops like these for a couple of years now,” she says. “They help with confidence.

“Making something or learning something new gives me a sense of accomplishment, and it’s sometimes easier to tackle the things I need to do when I feel I’ve already done something right.”

For all of Rhyl’s recent successes, some teenagers and young people are still falling through the cracks. Jay McGuinness, a social worker who trains Sienna and Jake at the Rhyl Youth Boxing Club, says one part of the job is walking around the town centre in the early evening and getting to know the young people hanging out there. The aim is to build enough trust that they might then engage with the youth centre.

“We’re a non-profit, we’re not run by the council, and it’s really tough working with short-term funding and budgets,” he says. “That lack of certainty makes it harder because the young people can’t rely on us.”

For Sienna, taking part in a scheme such as Barod still feels out of reach and sparring at the gym is the highlight of her week. Recently she has started thinking about training to becoming a youth or social worker herself.

“I don’t think about the future too much,” she says. “It’s one step at a time.”

• The Against the tide series is a collaboration between the Guardian and the documentary photographer Polly Braden