Inside Basildon, the new town where locals can’t afford a home ...Middle East

“It’s really gone down the pan,” says 87-year-old Eileen. A pensioner and mother of five long-grown-up children, Eileen and her 88-year-old husband Brian moved to Basildon from Stanmore in north-west London more than 60 years ago.

The couple moved with Brian’s parents because his father was relocated by his employer, Carreras, a cigarette manufacturer that opened a factory in the Essex town in 1959.

“I didn’t like it here at first,” Eileen says, “but then things took off for us – good money, good hours, good quality of life.”

Eileen and Brian were given their own council house in the 1960s while Eileen was pregnant with their first child. Standing underneath Basildon’s iconic (but dilapidated) brutalist high rise, Brooke House, the couple reflect on how that stable home with “affordable” rent helped them save a deposit so they could buy a home of their own.

When Brian and Eileen moved to Basildon, it was one of the original new towns ushered in by the post-war rebuilding drive of the New Town Act 1946.

Sir Keir Starmer hopes to recreate these sorts of places with “new generation new towns” as the Labour Government looks to meet its target of building 1.5m homes.

However, many people living in Basildon, including a local councillor, say it is an example “of what is very good about a new town, and what can go very wrong”.

After moving to Basildon, Brian went on to work at the local Shell Haven oil refinery, and Eileen worked as a pattern cutter for boat sails. However, in 1999 the oil refinery closed down, as the cigarette factory where Brian’s father worked had done in 1984.

“Essex was good to us,” Brian adds. “But now, just look…” he points, “that used to be a cinema. That used to be a post office. Every shop you go to has got shutters down.”

If Eileen and Brian moved to Basildon as a young couple expecting a baby today, it would likely be a very different experience.

Basildon council recently warned a shortage of social and council homes meant “a growing number of residents” were stuck in temporary accommodation, with more than 700 households in emergency housing last month. The authority also estimated about “10,000 young people aged 20-34 are still living with their parents” in Basildon because of a lack of affordable homes.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the number of people looking for work has been rising in Basildon in recent years. In 2024, the area had an unemployment rate of 4.7 per cent, higher than national and regional averages. The number claiming benefits has also risen.

Sitting outside the Robbins Pie & Mash shop just along from Brooke House, Melissa, 56, a mother who lives in social housing, is sitting in the sun after doing a weekly shop.

“I worry about where they will be able to afford to live and what sort of jobs they will be able to do when they grow up,” she says.

“I worry [about] how my kids and the other kids in our family will turn out. I also hear from friends that there are like 1,000 people applying for one job here these days, it’s really difficult.”

Basildon is typical of many English towns. Home to about 190,000 people, it is neither very rich (though some nearby villages are) nor deprived. It is conservative, despite not being wealthy, which is why “Basildon Man” came to be understood as the sort of voter that the Tories could capture from Labour in the 1980s.

Today the median salary hovers around £29,000, bang on the UK average (£29,670). Basildon also has an economic inactivity rate of 17.6 per cent in line with the average for England.

However, the average house price here is £337,833, more than 10 times the average worker’s salary.

The concrete town centre is a monument to the Utopian post-war planners who took risks with brutalist architecture while also attempting to make sure inhabitants would have everything they needed.

Flats are close to retail spaces, the council’s offices are next door to a theatre and a church, and if you’d visited a few decades ago, you’d have found thriving markets here too. The bandstand in nearby Gloucester Park hosted a festival called Basildon Rock from 1978 onwards, which saw early performances from Basildon residents such as Alison Moyet as well as members of Depeche Mode.

Today, though, the physical brutalist concrete structures of a post-war new town remain, but locals say shop closures mean the substance has been lost.

The plan is to build 495 new flats in the town centre, on the site of a now-closed Marks and Spencer.

This will take the area close to meeting its own Local Plan target of building 27,000 new homes in the coming years but even thriving local independent business owners question whether “knocking down old shops” and replacing them with flats “can make it all better”.

Those are the words of 57-year-old Thomas Alcrest. He is the owner of one Basildon shop which is most definitely not shuttered up – the independent family-run Robbins Pie & Mash which has been going in London and Essex since the 1920s.

Business is booming here, there are no free tables and people are queuing in the street for pie, mash and liquor priced at just £5. Even so, Alcrest – whose restaurant chain employs 60 people in total – says it’s becoming more and more challenging to keep going.

“They’ve put our business rates up, Labour have put our [National Insurance] contributions for staff up… so everything’s hard at the moment,” he says.

“Since the war in Ukraine, our costs have gone up too – fuel and flour – our bills have gone up. We’ve got loyal people, and we don’t want to let anyone go… But I think more businesses will have to close.”

As Alcrest sees it, the Government is “not looking after the small business owner”.

However, his rent is also a problem. Even though it sits in the town centre, which was originally built by a public body – the Basildon Development Corporation – Alcrest’s shop is now owned by a major international corporate landlord.

“They’ve only given us a five-month lease,” he says. “And they wanted six months’ rent upfront – our rent is £60,000 a year here.

“[The building owners in Basildon] want to knock the old shops down and make it all better, but there’s no money about. Three shops closed over the road, but the way they put the rents up plus business rates, it’s a big challenge for anyone who wants to open a shop now.”

Basildon’s original design not only includes the town centre, but also a series of housing estates in villages in the surrounding area, such as Laindon, Pitsea, Vange, Dunton, Langdon Hills and Nevendon.

Many of them originally bordered the factories and offices of major employers who came here after the Second World War. The intention was to create good-quality homes near green spaces which were within easy reach of people’s work.

In 1953, Bonallack & Sons coachbuilders moved to Basildon. Ford opened a tractor plant here in 1964, and the British cosmetics giant Yardley followed in the mid-1960s.

In the 1980s, a new estate, Southfields, was created in the Basildon village of Laindon. Gordon’s Gin opened a 26-acre factory there in 1984. It is no more.

The world has changed almost unrecognisably since Basildon was built, including the advent of online shopping and the closure of many British factories as trade became more global.

Christine Townley, 68, moved to Basildon from London in her 20s to work as a civil engineer but said infrastructure has not kept up with a growing population.

She said: “If I go to the theatre in Basildon, I can’t get home easily. After 6pm, the buses run every hour, and on Sundays, they stop at 8pm.

“What happens if you want to go visit somebody in hospital? You have to drive. There isn’t even community in that sense.”

Jeff Henry, 53, is a Conservative councillor for Essex County Council. He was also a borough councillor for six years until losing his seat in 2024.

Driving around Basildon, he points out that despite a number of factory closures, there are still success stories in the town.

New Holland tractors – a major manufacturer with global exports – are based in Basildon. Similarly, a Costa Coffee roastery moved here from south London in 2017, one of the largest in Europe. There is also an Amazon warehouse hub.

“I love it here,” Henry says. “I’ve been here for 40 years and even though my family have moved back to Ireland, I stayed here.”

Henry wants Basildon to thrive, but he worries about his town’s future.

“ -war planning was incredible. If you look at the original ambition, it was all about people,” he says. “But I think what’s missing now is that we’re chasing a number [of homes] with local plans and not thinking about people.”

Basildon council confirmed that they have recently approved 1,163 new homes, and raised £16.3 million for infrastructure improvements.”

Building sites and sales signs confirm that new housing is going up all around Basildon, but Henry fears there is opposition to new building because it is not being properly considered.

“It feels like government is happening to us now, not with us,” he reflects. “We need the houses, but we have to plan ahead. Will there be enough trains to London? Will there be enough jobs here? Will the one hospital, which is already the main hospital for the entire area from Thurrock, be able to cope? I’m not sure it’s being properly thought through.”

In many ways, Basildon is an example of some of the best town planning in British history. But it is also an example of how even the best planning cannot see into the future and predict how economies will change. New homes will be built here, but will anyone be able to afford them? Where will they work? Will those jobs pay them enough to live on? Will the local hospital cope with an increase in population?

Henry looks around Basildon’s Eastgate shopping centre. He remembers how the department store chain Allders, which went bust in 2005, used to be here. Then Debenhams took over before collapsing in 2020 and leaving a gap which is still yet to be filled.

The 200-square foot hole left by that store will soon be replaced by a private healthcare centre which, Henry hopes, can pick up overflow work from the NHS.

“It was amazing when this shopping centre opened,” Henry remembers. “I hope it can be great again”.

An MHCLG spokesperson said: “Our next generation of new towns will be well-designed communities which deliver hundreds of thousands of affordable and high-quality homes, as part of the largest building programme since the Second World War.

“We expect at least 40 per cent of homes in the new towns to be affordable, and to be created alongside good jobs and the infrastructure communities need, so we can restore the dream of a secure home for families.”

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