The battle to reclaim Epping
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Today, what happened after the battle over the Bell Hotel?
Well, I think Epping has a lot of the hallmarks of the Essex that I know, the Essex of aspiration, of people moving out of East London.
Tim Burrows has literally written the book on Essex. It's called The Invention of Essex and it's available in all good bookshops, as they say. Recently, he's been spending a lot of time in one particular part of Essex, just north of Greater London.
You know, instead of moving by the estuary, which is the Essex Iron U, they moved by the forest. And it was to go somewhere leafy, but also it's quite, you know, a historic place.
On the face of it, Epping is a small 13th century pretty market town. But Tim found that there is a lot going on beneath the surface.
It's affluent. I mean, if you go to the estate agents, you're looking at semi-detached houses with not much change from a million pounds, you know, the obligatory gales on the high street. But it's not the whole story. Like a lot of places in the UK, it is suffering under the cost of living crisis. But just, you know, in the past year, it's been known for something else. And watching that from afar sort of intrigued me.
That something else that Tim is talking about is the anti-immigrant protest that kicked off in Epping last July, outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, quickly spreading across England.
Tommy!
Here we go.
What started as a local response to an asylum seeker sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl quickly snowballed into a global battle, where even the richest man in the world felt he needed to issue a call to arms.
And Elon Musk replies, every village in Britain will become epic unless the people of Britain take action.
So one year on, how has the small community managed to recover from the protests that divided it? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, the battle to reclaim Epping. Tim Burrows, welcome to Today in Focus. Great to have you here.
Thanks for having me.
So you've told us about Epping as a place, but what about the people who live there?
It's definitely still, you know, predominantly white British, but it's definitely also part of, you know, the London mix. I mean, certainly I talked to people who'd moved there, who felt comfortable about moving there, who weren't white or weren't from the UK originally.
I'm British Bangladeshi. I wasn't born here, but I've pretty much been British since birth, really. My parents were.
So Aisha is someone I spoke to in Epping who moved there 12 years ago with her partner. She'd grown up in the east end of London. Her family had come from Bangladesh and they felt comfortable moving to Epping.
And then we came to Epping like everybody else for a bit more space because it was a bit cheaper.
And they had a happy life there. She commuted back into London for her job as a teacher. It's that funny thing of being English, maybe, is that the biggest compliment you can often make is, you know, everyone keeps themselves to themselves. But, you know, it's that thing of, like, she didn't notice anything.
It's just me and the man in the hardware shop and some waiters in the Indian restaurant.
And I felt like I stuck out. But at the same time, I felt it was a very friendly town.
But by the time I'd spoken to her, her life had changed dramatically.
So Aisha, which isn't her real name, you say her life changed really dramatically. And that, of course, is because of the Bell Hotel and everything that happened there. Tell me about it.
It's a 16th century coaching inn. I sort of like to imagine, you know, the kind of highwayman myths of your, you know, Dick Turpin maybe kind of stopped there to have a drink, you know. But in recent times, you wouldn't have gone there for your honeymoon. It wasn't like a five star hotel. It was quite a perfunctory hotel. And in 2020, during the pandemic, the government needed help. to solve a crisis basically of um processing migrants and they turned to using hotels but so many people i spoke to said they they never even knew it was being used and then that all changed didn't it last year in 2025 because of the actions of one man tell me what happened
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