The best place to watch the drama of Britain’s fastest changing postcode is next to Rainham’s 12th-century Norman church. At quarter past six, a tube-carriage haul of glum commuters is dumped at the station, where Essex meets the London sprawl. The final slog home is a curious walk of shame: past the gated Georgian pomp of Rainham Hall, and a sign for the Prawn Hub takeaway, mocked up in glaringly familiar colours. Barrack rows of new builds await them, following the pylons out to the desolate Rainham Marsh, where once upon a time, the Britain of the Nineties dreamt of building its own Disneyland.
What’s it like living here? I ask two men skulking off to the pub through the graveyard, past a pair of Lithuanian builders drinking cans. “It used to be a lovely English village,” says one. “Now it’s a fucking shithole and I can’t wait to get out.”
That night, the local branch of Reform UK met to plot their revolt against this New England. In the seedy light of the local working men’s club, the rebellious bourgeoisie of Essex shook hands with their exiled London counterparts: retired City bankers, tradesmen, medical students, labourers, and a softly spoken NHS worker from India. On stage was a map depicting the theatre of war: Barking and Rainham and Havering, the gap between London and shires, and the new fault line of British politics.
“The people gathered here are terrified for their children’s future,” explained Philip Hyde, a veteran of Havering politics, before taking to the stage with his mic. “You won’t believe the things I’ve been researching,” he teased his sullen audience. A litany of misery poured forth: cuts to police; IMF reports on public sector austerity; bankrupt councils; young families being raised in collapsing flats. A new mosque planned in Romford. A cavernous pause was left to allow the audience to groan. “We’re the bloody minority around here now,” someone heckled from the back.
Just 40 minutes away on the tube, Westminster is facing the prospect of a seismic revolt. Should Reform hold its polling momentum through 2029, a thick seam of light blue will reorder the old electoral map, spreading from the suburbs of East London, across the safe Tory seats of Essex, and out towards Nigel Farage’s holdout in Clacton. Barking and Dagenham — a Labour stronghold — is set to fall too. Here, amid the inter-war housing estates, the proportion of the white British population has fallen by 51% in two decades. The last election saw a 17.6% swing to Reform, and a slight Labour drop.
The defeat of the BNP in 2010, then the 2012 London Olympics, were supposed to remake the area into a confident multicultural district. Now, though, Reform’s revolt is set to be levied by two forces well beyond the comprehension of that long-lost decade. Demographic anxiety in the face of historic mass immigration has unearthed the folk memory of an exiled cockney diaspora, forced even further into the Essex shires. Old notions of class are increasingly redundant in these shifting hinterlands. Mass migration and downward social mobility have created a quasi-ethnic voting bloc, one that regards the British state as defunct, broken and entirely alien to its interests.
At the Rainham working men’s club, Hyde’s romp through national decline had driven the audience into an embittered fugue. Midway through an excoriation of the council, the master of ceremonies was interrupted by an angry mother. During a protest in Whitehall after the Southport stabbings, she claims her son was jailed for 13 months simply for standing there. “Where was Nigel Farage when they were sending innocent boys down for nothing?”
“Bring back Rupert Lowe,” someone heckles in the ensuing fracas. The tension’s been brewing all night: between a party in search of professionalisation and a lagered-up, pissed-off crowd. The bickering is only broken by a young man, taking to the stage and seizing the mic. “There’s no point squabbling,” says Kai Cunningham. “Reform is our only chance. The country is broken. Barking and Dagenham is broken, and all the lefties need to hear us say it’s broken, and realise we’re still here advocating for our country.” The loudest cheer of the night bellowed out.
Cunningham is representative of the new Reform. Twenty-one years old, confident, brisk, cheeky: fluent in both the fall of modern Britain and hope of its renewal. He has seen something like it with his own eyes. Jordan Kukabu, a friend from school, was stabbed in the heart with a machete outside Dagenham Heathway Station. “If I had gone down that route,” he says, as we walk past the day after the meeting, “I could have ended up like him.” A boxing club turned him around. Then came a political awakening while undergoing basic training in the army. At night, in the barracks, Cunningham would watch “atrocities taking place across the country” on his phone.
A plan was hatched. A degree in law would get Cunningham credibility. It would force those in Westminster to take him seriously. “We need more white working class men going into education, because let’s be honest, no one is going to listen to some brickey from Dagenham.”
Should Reform win — either in upcoming council elections or in 2029 — the party will inherit an area on the brink of even greater change. On the council website, a video of drone shots shows the up-and-coming district in the shadow of the London skyline: neo-Georgian municipal buildings, built in the days of Fifties full employment, overshadowed by a burgeoning vista of tacky high-rises, their garish plastic facades glowing in the estuary sun. Thousands of jobs are promised for a population set to jump by a half in the next decade.
But walk the streets below and a parallel city emerges. Britain’s fastest changing district, it’s ground zero for the historic wave of migration now set to define Britain’s 21st century. Every year, 18,000 people come here, and another 18,000 leave. “I have no idea who lives there,” says Cunningham, pointing to one of the newly built high-rises. At street level, arrivals from India, Nigeria and Afghanistan shun the worn-out shopping parades and high-street shops, opting instead for thriving open-air markets: an unnerving hum of a fringe non-place in a new global city. Transient, eerie and mysterious are how other locals describe it. It all speaks of a demographic upheaval so vast, says one social worker from nearby Ilford, that the state can barely conceive of the pace of change.
Glimmers of the past remain. The Becontree Estate — once the world’s largest social housing project — still offers a stubbornly suburban image of privet hedges and satellite dishes. Here are the cues for Cunningham’s vision of renewal: he speaks of his father and granddad’s generations, stretching back to the Ford Factory that opened back in 1932. They enjoyed simple things: a job, a home, a place to raise a family. Can Reform restore this? Cunningham mentions the party’s policy on apprenticeships, but there’s some deeper grievance, one beyond the exhausted sparring you see on Question Time. “It upsets me when people say they’re leaving, that they’ve got no one around anymore,” he says, recalling the family and friends that have packed their bags. “But there’s a younger generation that wants to stay and put up a fight.”
“There’s a younger generation that wants to stay and put up a fight.”
The loss of young people like Cunningham irks both the local party and its grandees. “Really, that’s the sort of young man we should be attracting back to the Labour Party,” says Jon Cruddas when I tell him about our tour. The former local MP is currently writing a social and political history of Britain through the lens of Dagenham, exploring how the “dynamics of modern capitalism” ran through the area. Here, he explains, was the Fordist utopia that inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, then the steady unravelling of social democracy across the 20th century. The prospect of having to conclude his book with a Reform victory would be grimly ironic, especially for a man who’s helped keep the area Labour against the odds. The seat was supposed to fall with the Red Wall in 2019, but a hyper-local political machine kept the bricks here intact.
Cruddas became the area’s MP in 2001, at a time when 40,000 local manufacturing jobs were in the process of disappearing. The next two decades formed an almost moral crusade to stop the area from being forgotten completely. He once tried to get Ed Miliband to watch Fish Tank, a film set on an estate in Dagenham that might, as Cruddas puts it, explain crumbling class constituencies, worklessness and the importance of human flourishing. “He told me it was too depressing to watch.”
Cruddas sees Dagenham in almost novelistic terms: a place at the vanguard of change, seeming doomed to exist beyond the comprehension of Westminster — until all it can offer is hubris and warning. For him, it all started with the 2001 census, which failed to pick up on demographic change ahead of the BNP’s short-lived local triumph.
Now another reckoning is coming. “What’s at stake in the area is not just the future of the government, but the future of the Labour Party,” says Cruddas. In some sense, No. 10 understands this. Blue Labour, forged in the area, has been courted by Starmer, hoping to cobble together a coalition of Britons who want security, community and common sense. At the helm is Dagenham veteran Morgan McSweeney, rolling out set pieces once reserved for Nick Griffin. That involves the basics — repairing potholes, civic pride, neatly tailored patriotism (this time with an eye on the Donbas) — all glossed up with deportation spectacles and lively graphics on social media.
But Dagenham is not just a political lesson in staving off Right-wing populism. Just like Huxley’s interest in the area, a quieter, more tangible dystopia is being formed in this hinterland of London. Here is a vision of a radically different 21st-century Britain, an upheaval slowly emerging round its towns and cities: precarious work, ersatz apartments, a churn of neighbours, all gazing out over a solemn, unknowable sprawl, offering barely an echo of the lively, globalised, multicultural Britain promised to the country in the Blairite pomp.
Down by the river, you can find this new Dagenham being built on the ruins of the old Ford factory. Cranes tower over the estuary horizon, tending to a highrise village of 3,500 flats, part of the 50,000 planned for the area. Here, the place seems trapped by the weeping Thames sky, the dismal orbit of the A13. The end not just of London, but of the world itself. “Dagenham is home to a proud and diverse community that reflects the industrious and pioneering spirit of its heritage” boasts the construction site billboard. “This place is driving accelerated support for Reform,” Cunningham says. “On the doorstep we have a simple message that works well: improve the lifestyle of the people here rather than just adding more.”
In 2025, faced with a disastrous start, Labour seems finally to have heard Cruddas’s concern for human flourishing in Dagenham. Last year, a Demos essay by Chris Naylor, the former chief executive of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, portrayed it as the platonic form of the New England coming into being. This, he wrote, is a place where “vast changes in expectations, the erosion of trust” in politics meet the decline of “old world power paradigms” and collide with “new technologies” and ”rapidly changing demographics”.
But if Naylor’s essay is an accurate reading of Dagenham as it is, and Britain as it may yet be, its purported solutions also offer a warning for Starmer. Here the administrative state’s buzzwords around hubs, community engagement and multicultural success run up against reality, one that may yet spill over to rout not just Labour, but the entire Westminster establishment.
One issue is money. The local council is in worse financial straits than bankrupt Birmingham. The relocation of Smithfield and Billingsgate market to Dagenham Dock, and the arrival of 2,700 jobs, was recently scrapped due to rising costs. Amid that epic demographic upheaval, meanwhile, locals are increasingly resentful of how many foreign-born households are given social housing — especially when the wait for a four-bedroom home here is 67 years.
Outside an abandoned pub, Chloe, in her early thirties and pregnant, walks carefully with her two year old near the indifferent hum of the A13. She spent six years on a council waiting list for a house, while living in a “rat-infested flat” where the rent rose to nearly £2,000 a month. “I was basically the wrong colour,” she says wryly. “It’s not just English people, but second- and third- generation Asian and black families that are fed up and want to leave. I don’t want to sound awful, but it’s just not England around here anymore.”
Walking back to Rainham, certainly, there is a sense of exodus. Gated bungalows, guarded by stone lions and Union Jacks, dream of Deep Essex. In Orchard Village, the regenerated estate where Fish Tank was filmed, Mia*, a data and systems manager, points out the flats of people who’ve left: for Chelmsford, for Billericay, for Basildon. “You’d like to see Nigel Farage’s party around here to be quite honest,” she says. Hailed as a regenerative success after being rebuilt in 2009, the estate has drifted back to the despair Ed Miliband once ignored. “I feel sorry for the young people around here now,” says Rob, semi-retired, wearing his knackered Tesco outfit, rolling a cigarette in a stone patio full of gnomes. “I just can’t see a way to get on, have a life.” He’s never voted, but next time might well pick Farage.
The train takes you away from Dagenham and towards Rainham once more. Silent rows of new houses line the tracks, stretching out into the expanse of the silent Thames marshes until they become part of the forgotten landscape itself. Back on the high street, not far from Rainham Hall, I meet Greg*. A small business owner, he was a reluctant Reform voter at the last election. “The change I see in the area frightens me,” he says. “When people don’t know what the future will look like, they can do strange things.” As we talk, in the dusk of the spring evening, there is birdsong and daffodils, traces of the village that was.
*Some names have been changed.
