The battle to reclaim Epping

Summary

Podcast Summary: Today in Focus – The Battle to Reclaim Epping

Date: July 20, 2026
Host: Helen Pidd (with contributions from Tim Burrows, local residents, and activists)
Podcast: Today in Focus by The Guardian

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Main Theme

This episode explores the aftermath of the anti-immigrant protests that erupted in Epping, a small market town on London's periphery, after a high-profile crime involving an asylum seeker in 2025. It investigates how a single incident spiraled into national and even international controversy, drawing in everyone from far-right agitators to figures like Elon Musk. Through firsthand reporting, testimony from residents, activists, and protestors, the episode dissects how misinformation, social media, and political division reshaped a once-peaceful town—and reveals the resilience and complexity of its community as it grapples with fear, division, and hope for reconciliation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Epping’s Identity and Demographic Shifts

[00:56–01:43]

• Helen Pidd and Tim Burrows discuss Epping’s history of aspiration, affluence, and its evolution as a leafy retreat for East Londoners.

• The town is "predominantly white British, but... also part of, you know, the London mix.”

• Aisha (Resident) shares her family's journey from East London to Epping, drawn by space and affordability, and how she initially found the community friendly and welcoming.

  “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.” – Aisha [04:27]

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2. The Bell Hotel Incident and Its Fallout

[04:55–06:55]

• The Bell, a historic but unremarkable hotel, begins housing asylum seekers in 2020 during the pandemic—most locals don't notice until a criminal incident explodes public awareness.

• In July 2025, Hadoosh Krabatu, an asylum seeker, is arrested for the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, leading to public outrage.

  "Events in Epping on Tuesday evening were deeply disturbing. This cannot continue.” – Chris Whitbread (Council Leader statement, paraphrased by Helen Pidd) [06:46]

• Local unrest is rapidly magnified by online activity. An existing Facebook group is rebranded as "Epping says no," becoming a focal point for protest organization.

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3. Escalation: Protests, Far-Right Influence, and Social Media

[07:46–11:41]

• Online panic about “dangerous foreign men” leads to physical protests outside the Bell, attracting far-right figures like Callum Barker, associated with extremist groups.

  “Epping will turn out to protest. Epping will turn out to protect our girls. Epping will come out to stand up for our community.” – Callum Barker (Protester) [08:28]

• Protests turn violent; security guards at the hotel are attacked, and police describe this as racially aggravated.

• A second protest on July 17, 2025, is particularly violent, leaving eight police officers injured. The council unsuccessfully seeks a court injunction to shut the hotel.

• Elon Musk amplifies the issue globally:

  “As goes Epping, so goes all of England... Every village in Britain will become Epping unless the people of Britain take action.” – Elon Musk (tweet, quoted by host) [02:43, 11:22]

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4. Consequences for Residents and the Community

[14:21–16:17]

• Aisha describes how the protests upended her life, making her avoid the high street, avoid socializing, and feel less safe.

  “We don’t go out shopping to the high street. We use the restaurants less. I don’t call my family round... like I used to.” – Aisha [14:38]

• She discusses how divisive media coverage, especially interchanging “Muslim” and “Islamist", amplified hate and split her family, including with her white in-laws.

  "I feel very much under the umbrella of hatred, which is a generalized hatred." – Aisha [15:13]

• She notes that open racism has become more mainstream compared to the far-right agitation she experienced in the 1980s.

  “It’s gone from a kind of a niche, crazy far right group thing to being openly acceptable to say racist things in the press, which 10 years ago nobody would have said.” – Aisha [15:57]

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5. Local Resistance: Epping For Everyone

[16:32–18:24]

• In response, locals (mostly women) form Epping For Everyone to counter far-right narratives and support asylum seekers directly.

  “The anger that these men… will turn up in our town and speak for me, speak for women, and talk about us, our women and girls, and do it in such a violent, misogynistic, abusive, aggressive way was beyond anger…” – Jane/Amelia (Epping For Everyone) [17:09]

• They focus on grassroots action—English lessons, volunteer support—despite being abused by opponents.

  "When I go into the hotel as volunteering, it’s not uncommon for people to drive past and shout... there’s a really, really dark edge for people who aren’t white." – Jane/Amelia [18:42]

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6. Building Bridges: Football and Community

[19:16–21:47]

• Local coach Dom helps form a football team—Bell FC—among the hotel residents, fostering morale and integrating them in some small way.

  “If we were given the time and the space, we could make a team out of these guys. No doubt about it... there’s some really, really, really capable players.” – Dom [19:38]

• The team ultimately wins a charity tournament, symbolizing hope and resilience amid isolation.

  "They just got better and better and better as the thing went on... it was really satisfying." – Dom [21:08]

• Epping For Everyone organizers note that the crisis revealed unexpected community strength:

  “In a way they were glad this happened because they’d found a kind of new side of the community that they didn’t know was there.” – Helen Pidd [21:17]

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7. The Aftermath: Closing the Bell and Lingering Divisions

[23:12–28:30]

• In the summer of 2026, the Bell Hotel is abruptly emptied of asylum seekers, officially for fire safety but likely due to new government policy.

• Dom expresses sadness, feeling that the crisis brought out both the best and worst in people:

  “It felt like Epping was being used... So many people stood up to help… but it does push a good response from a lot of people.” – Dom [23:58]

• The town remains deeply divided. Protesters including Callum Barker persist (now rebranded under “RESTORE”), and talk of large-scale deportation becomes alarmingly normalized in casual conversations.

  "I would never have imagined deportation to be on the political agenda... these sort of things become normalized.” – Helen Pidd [26:06]

• Some protesters descend into paranoia, convinced the hotel remains occupied in secret. Local scenes—like someone peering through curtains with a stick, or a football belonging to Bell FC changing hands—capture the strange, poignant new normal.

  "You have this very isolated and isolating online culture, sort of like just taking the ball and taking it home." – Helen Pidd [28:03]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Every village in Britain will become Epping unless the people of Britain take action.”
  – Elon Musk [Quoted at 02:43, 11:22]

• “It has split my family apart, to be honest… I feel very much under the umbrella of hatred.”
  – Aisha [15:08]

• “If you’re only concerned about the violence that’s committed by men of color, then you don’t actually really care about women… you care about racism, immigration, whatever you want to call it.”
  – Jane/Amelia (Epping For Everyone) [17:52]

• “In a way they were glad this happened because they’d found a kind of new side of the community…”
  – Helen Pidd [21:17]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:56–01:43: Epping's socioeconomic and demographic context
• 02:13–03:47: Introduction of Aisha and her family’s experience as minorities
• 04:55–06:55: Bell Hotel incident—timeline of the crime
• 07:46–11:41: Escalation to protest, far-right mobilization & social media
• 14:21–16:17: Impact on minority residents like Aisha
• 16:32–18:24: Grassroots resistance—Epping for Everyone
• 19:16–21:47: Bell FC football team and rebuilding community spirit
• 23:12–24:46: The closing of the Bell, government policy, and displacement
• 25:01–28:03: Current social and political atmosphere, ongoing division

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Conclusion

The episode paints a nuanced portrait of a community deeply transformed by national panic, social media, misinformation, and far-right exploitation—but also by local empathy and resolve. While Epping has yet to fully heal, the story illustrates both the dangers of division and the stubborn hope found in collective action and human connection.

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This summary captures the episode's central arguments, highlights, and mood, grounding every insight in direct testimony and clear attribution. For listeners and non-listeners alike, it serves as an in-depth guide to Epping’s recent history and the broader challenges facing Britain today.

Transcript

[Helen Pitt]

This is the Guardian.

[Interviewer/Host]

Today, what happened after the battle over the Bell Hotel.

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[Helen Pitt]

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.

[Interviewer/Host]

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.

[Helen Pitt]

You know, instead of moving by the estuary, which is the Essex I knew they moved by the forest and it was to go somewhere leafy. But also it's quite, you know, a historic place.

[Interviewer/Host]

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.

[Helen Pitt]

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 that watching that from afar sort of intrigued me.

[Interviewer/Host]

That's 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.

[Security Guard/Police Officer]

Tommy,

[Helen Pitt]

There we go.

[Interviewer/Host]

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.

[Helen Pitt]

And Elon Musk replies. Every village in Britain will become epic unless the people of Britain take action.

[Interviewer/Host]

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.

[Helen Pitt]

Thanks for having me.

[Interviewer/Host]

So you've told us about Epping as a place, but what about the people who live there?

[Helen Pitt]

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.

[Aisha (Resident)]

I'm British, Bangladeshi. I wasn't born here, but I've pretty much been British since birth, really. My parents were British, so.

[Helen Pitt]

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.

[Aisha (Resident)]

And then we came to Epping like everybody else, for a bit more space because it was a bit cheaper and

[Helen Pitt]

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 is, you know, everyone keeps themselves to themselves. But, you know, it's that thing of like, she didn't notice anything.

[Aisha (Resident)]

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.

[Helen Pitt]

But, you know, by the time I'd spoken to her, you know, her life had changed dramatically.

[Interviewer/Host]

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.

[Helen Pitt]

It's a 16th century coaching inn. I sort of like to imagine, you know, the kind of highwayman myths of yore, 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 to solve a crisis, basically of processing migrants and they turned to using hotels. But so many people I spoke to said they never even knew it was being used.

[Interviewer/Host]

And then that all changed, didn't it? Last year, in 2025, because of the actions of one man. Tell me what happened.

[Helen Pitt]

What changed in Epping was very specifically a series of crimes committed over two 2025 by a man called Hadoosh Krabatu. And he was seen on the high street on the 7th and 8th of July approaching a group of school children who were 14 years old. And in particular, he committed sexual assault by touching the thigh of one of the schoolgirls he was also accused of touching another young woman who was over 16. And this came to a head when he was arrested on the 8th of July.

[Security Guard/Police Officer]

It's now 1715. I'm arrested on suspicion of sexual assault on a female under 16 years old. So you didn't have to say anything. The mayhem, you defence if you didn't.

[Helen Pitt]

He was a resident of the Bell Hotel. He hadn't long been in the uk, he'd crossed the channel on a boat. And I think there was some rumor about what had happened going around, but there's certainly nothing much that's traceable, that's obvious out there until the the leader of the council, Chris Whitbread, makes a statement. Events in Epping on Tuesday evening were deeply disturbing. This cannot continue.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

The Bell Hotel must be closed immediately.

[Helen Pitt]

Once this is out there on YouTube, it kind of spreads. And one thing that happens that's really interesting on the same day is a Facebook group called Epping says no. But it's not created from nothing. It actually had an innocuous name. I think it was Epping Residents Group, but the names changed and Epping says no was kind of used to drum up protest. So it's certainly true that there was local unrest and there was local worry and concerned parents. It's something that is alarming. You know, the crime is something that is worrying. But what's certain from the get go is that you do have people trying to manipulate that worry.

[Interviewer/Host]

If you're just an ordinary resident in Epping, you're on Facebook, you see this group, you know, you feel powerless, you're worried about your kids. What happens next?

[Helen Pitt]

What happens next is it just explodes, it just explodes online. Why should leafy suburbs like Epin have to put up with foreign men, dangerous foreign men in many cases, walking amongst their children and their school children, their wives, their mothers and their sisters. People want something to be done. And so there is a protest for the following weekend. There were members of the far right there, such as Callum Barker. I'm here with Callum, who's been called the lion of Epping. We're just outside the civic officers right now.

[Callum Barker (Protester)]

It has been fantastic. Come rain or shine, Epping will turn out to protest. Epping will turn out to protect our girls. Epping will come out to stand up

[Helen Pitt]

for our community, who at that point was a member of Homeland, which hope not hate, described as a fascist political party that splintered from patriotic alternative, the UK's largest neo Nazi group. A couple of your members have been. There's pictures of them. I've Got them here on my phone if you want me to show you them of doing Nazi salutes.

[Callum Barker (Protester)]

I'm not a fascist. I'm not a Nazi. I'm a local resident. Stand up for. I believe in those members. They're not here today. They're not with us. It's about the girls and get them at hotel closed down.

[Helen Pitt]

It's not about me and Julian Leppert, who was a Full Britain councillor for Waltham Abbey and formerly of the bmp. It was advertised as a peaceful protest. Come home, back on your boat and go. However, later that day, two security guards of the Bell Hotel were attacked, and the police described the attack as racially aggravated. It's kind of kept under control and it's just. It's the following protest on 17 July, where all hell breaks loose, basically.

[Interviewer/Host]

When I look back to that time, I think it was that second protest that really caught my attention because of the level of violence. Tell us how it kicked off. What happened?

[Helen Pitt]

You know, the police were receiving kind of information that people were planning to mask up and bring rage. It's something that, you know, seems to have been premeditated.

[Security Guard/Police Officer]

But you.

[Helen Pitt]

How on earth would you allow it to happen? Feelings are running high. The violence left eight police officers injured. We will always facilitate peaceful protest. What we will not tolerate is those random acts of violence that we saw last night. And so the council's reaction is, you know, they just want to stop this unrest and the best way that they can think of doing that is to get the Bell shut down. And so they seek an injunction from the High Court, but then that's overruled by the Court of Appeal. And then it really does kick off then, because who enters the fray? Elon Musk, of course, who has a really quite strange obsession with England already. But it's sort of. It's a kind of perfect populist story to tell. So that's what he decides to magnify. It starts in London, but it will spread to every town and village in

[Dom (Football Coach)]

the country and no one will have any peace.

[Helen Pitt]

And so that's what makes sure that this doesn't end anytime soon.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, and he was tweeting all the time about it. I've got some of his tweets in front of me. So he tweeted, as goes Epping, so goes all of England. He also sort of issued a call to arms that said, every village in Britain will become Epping unless the people of Britain take action. Now, do you think that was quite influential?

[Helen Pitt]

I think it was completely Influential. And in Epping, it was visible, and it still is visible in a way, in the way that people don't trust each other's narrative. You know, you have this one crime and you have the mess up as well.

[Interviewer/Host]

Rearrested in North London this morning, the

[Helen Pitt]

end of a manhunt for Hadoosh Kabatu,

[Interviewer/Host]

spanning three days after the migrant sex offender was released from prison accidentally here

[Dom (Football Coach)]

in the uk, the Home Office has confirmed that Hadoop has been deported from Britain to Ethiopia.

[Interviewer/Host]

Fast forward to this summer. You've been back to Epping to speak to people on both sides of this protest. Why did you go back?

[Helen Pitt]

What I found interesting is Epping is a place that really tells the story of the changing face of global media. And this is where it really gets murky to me. I went to visit one of the protesters. He lived just off the high road. His name was Lee Robinson. You know, he said he was very concerned about his children and granddaughters and just people in the local area. He had a picture of Churchill in his hallway. He didn't like what become of Epping. He told me he was convinced that insurrection, you know, might be the only answer to the problems. He had really outlandish ideas about why they'd come in the first place. You know, lots of the people who come to seek asylum are coming for on war zones. He was having none of that. He thought it was George Soros who had kind of convinced people to come over to basically weaken the country. And I said, where did you read this? And he said, well, he saw it on YouTube. So it's that chaotic nature of the online world where so much misinformation can just sweep into our lives. It was very evident about some of the reasons people were protesting, but not only about the Bell Hotel. He didn't like the fact that it was, you know, wasn't as green as it. As it once was. So there was a lot of nostalgia about the place. And, you know, in Britain, which has been through austerity, that's not untrue. I mean, I think we have to be careful sometimes to not throw the baby out with the bathwater on this. And so, you know, someone like Lee, although Lee seemed very influenced by misinformation, there is a core of truth in some people's feelings about, you know, this country is in decline, but it's just they're blaming the wrong people.

[Interviewer/Host]

And I know that you've spent a lot of time talking to people in Epping and you've told us already about Aisha how did these protests affect people like her?

[Helen Pitt]

Well, Aisha had to change her commuting route. She said they didn't really go out so much.

[Aisha (Resident)]

We don't go out shopping to the high street. We use the restaurants less. I don't call my family round like my family who are Bangladeshi. I don't call them to go and eat out like I used to.

[Helen Pitt]

She also said her family life got harder and it got harder to speak to people about what she was afraid of.

[Interviewer/Host]

And she's got white in laws, hasn't she?

[Helen Pitt]

Well, this is it. So she'd sort of go there and talk about, you know, what was happening and how she felt.

[Aisha (Resident)]

It has split my family apart, to be honest. We're having a really hard time. I've been a part of their family for nearly 30 years and they are reading GB news. I've noticed how all the headlines, the word Muslim, Islamist is interchangeable. That's where I get affected. I'm brown. So, yeah, I feel very much under the umbrella of hatred, which is a generalized hatred.

[Helen Pitt]

Once received wisdom changes like that, it's kind of really scary to live through. And that's why she told me that she felt this was worse than the 1980s when the National Front were marching through the East End, when she was seeing flags, she was even seeing swastikas.

[Aisha (Resident)]

It's gone from a kind of a niche, crazy far right group thing to being openly acceptable to say racist things in the press, which 10 years ago nobody would have said.

[Interviewer/Host]

And you mentioned already the counter protest that took place that summer. I was always curious how many locals were among that number. How many locals were against the violent protests and. And how many of them were against the fact that the residents of this hotel were essentially besieged inside there.

[Helen Pitt]

I think this is the thing with stories like this. It's really easy to despair from the outside, but most of the time there were people doing quiet work to try and counter these things, and they're often not the people going down with placards. So when I went to Epping, I found a group there called Epping For Everyone. And they'd been set up by a group of women, two of whom I spoke to, Jane and Amelia. And they'd been set up in the wake of the protests with a sort of like righteous anger, kind of propelling them to do so.

[Jane or Amelia (Epping For Everyone Organizer)]

Absolute anger. The anger that these men primarily will turn up in our town and speak for me, speak for women, and talk about us, our women and girls, and do it in such a violent, misogynistic abusive, aggressive way was beyond anger. I didn't want to do it myself to counter that.

[Helen Pitt]

Essentially, these protests were about a crime against a young girl. And, you know, they said that most women would have experienced something similar, but, you know, this is not the way to deal with it. So they got together and they just started organizing. And I think about 30 people come and meet in a park.

[Jane or Amelia (Epping For Everyone Organizer)]

What I actually think is if you're only concerned about the violence that's committed by men of color, then you don't actually really care about women. You care about racism, immigration, whatever you want to call it. So I think a lot of them maybe think that they're doing the right thing, but actually they're focusing in the wrong place, because every statistic should tell you that.

[Helen Pitt]

And so people started going in to volunteer. There were English lessons offered. There were just people going in to look out.

[Interviewer/Host]

And so the fact that this group started to go in and befriend and help the asylum seekers who were still waiting for their claims to be processed, how was their kindness viewed by those who had been protesting against the hotel?

[Helen Pitt]

They'd get things shouted at them.

[Jane or Amelia (Epping For Everyone Organizer)]

When I go into the hotel as volunteering, it's not uncommon for people to drive past and shout, stun at me, and wait to be let in. I've dropped people off there before, and

[Helen Pitt]

I've got deadpool, deep hole as people

[Jane or Amelia (Epping For Everyone Organizer)]

are drunk so far. And there's a really, really, really dark edge for people who aren't white. Definitely.

[Interviewer/Host]

And who else did you meet?

[Helen Pitt]

So when I went to Epping, I went to an Epping for Everyone event that was supposed to be a picnic, but it rained and rained and rained, and so. So it's moved inside to a local, local Quaker meeting hall.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

Coach Storm. They all call me Coach.

[Helen Pitt]

Okay, Coach. And one of the guys I met who was part of Epping for Everyone was a guy called Dom, and he was a local football coach. And the first thing he said to me was how that's what he felt he could do with these guys.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

We said quite early on, after about two or three weeks, if we were given the time and the space, we could make a team out of these guys. No doubt about it. There's some really, really, really capable players

[Helen Pitt]

in now, and it's a shame. You could tell they used to go and play football before all of this. So you've got these guys who are sitting there doing nothing and not being able to do anything. So, Dom.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah. Not allowed to work, are they?

[Helen Pitt]

Not allowed to work. So Dom decided to shape a football team. And so I think he kind of managed to get them to train in a fairly small courtyard in the back of the hotel.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

But they started training every day of the week. So the guys that we got together seem out there every day because just in the courtyard, just in the courtyard, just organising stuff themselves, organising drills, little games, learning each other.

[Helen Pitt]

Well, what happened after a while is there was a football tournament organised by the charity Care for Calais and Bell fc, who they became, were invited. It was in Clapton, the local club in East London. And they lost the first game. They were really despondent, but they found something within themselves. One of the residents who was in the stands, Alley, started banging a drum. He found, started chanting, bell Hotel. Bell Hotel. And they found strength within them and they won the tournament.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

And they just got better and better and better as the thing went on. And it was. Yeah, it was really satisfying.

[Jane or Amelia (Epping For Everyone Organizer)]

Was it?

[Helen Pitt]

They get a little bit of silverware.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

Yeah. Let me see if I can find some pictures for you.

[Helen Pitt]

And so the thing I really found when I started talking to people at the Epping For Everyone event is how much they wanted to tell the story. And it was almost like everything had been bottled up. Many people said that in a way, obviously not completely, but in a way they were glad this happened because they'd found a kind of new side of the community that they didn't know that was there.

[Interviewer/Host]

Coming up, the Bell Hotel is finally shut. To asylum seekers, at least. But that's not the end of the story.

[Security Guard/Police Officer]

He's dribbling the ball with everything on the line. He's driving down the pitch. He's facing price hikes and cuts past him. Carrier contracts, tries to block him. Oh, he leaves him in the dust. He's at the edge of the box. He cuts past the nonstop group chat, trash talk. He clears on goal. He shoots. No unlimited data for $25 a month. Forever.

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[Interviewer/Host]

And at the time we're talking, the Bell Hotel is no longer housing asylum seekers. Tell me, when did that happen?

[Helen Pitt]

When I started writing this story, there were still residents at the Bell Hotel. Not much had changed. There were still protests going on every Sunday to get them out, but the sort of rug was pulled under me a bit, actually. A week before my second trip, the residents of the Bell were moved out during the night, I think, and I was called by one of the members, Epping, for everyone to tell me that they'd been taken. They didn't want to tell me where they'd been taken to another part of the country, sort of. I think it was a bigger center. I was talking to Dom, the football coach, and he was really cut up about it.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

And it's a shame, actually, because football is such a leveler, as you know, that's how I got involved in the first place. Yeah, it felt like Epping was being used. It seems that every summer at the moment, there's an incident that makes it kick off big time. So many people stood up to help because of. Of what was happening, but it does push a good response from a lot of people.

[Helen Pitt]

He kept in touch with them all, but it was emptied under the guise of there being fire regulations that weren't being met. But then it seemed quite apparent that the whole country was seeing some version of this, like Labour had decided to empty these hotels if they could, and so Epping was, was one of them.

[Interviewer/Host]

I mean, Labour had to be fair to Labour. They had been elected on a manifesto to close those hotels. And most people involved on all sides of this debate would agree that the hotels are not an ideal place for these people to be kept. And what does Epping feel like now?

[Helen Pitt]

Well, this was my question on my last visit because I went to Epping with Harry, who's a great photographer, and we walked around and we spent a long time. I spent a long time talking to local people and it was obviously still very divided. Since the protest, Callum Barker has moved from being associated with more extreme politics to now, you know, he's wearing the insignia of RESTORE as well. Hello, Mr. Callum Barker.

[Security Guard/Police Officer]

Callum, how are we doing today?

[Callum Barker (Protester)]

I'm doing quite fine, thank you. The energy here is fantastic. Sorry.

[Helen Pitt]

Online. He still is a very toxic kind of figure who kind of relays these horrible deportation fantasies on his ex account.

[Callum Barker (Protester)]

I'm here to spread the word of remigration to the people. As we know. Tommy Robson isn't 100% on board with re migration and our ideas? Somewhat.

[Interviewer/Host]

Well, yeah. Rupert Lowe has said if it needs to be millions of people, so that would be second generation immigrants, maybe third generation immigrants as well, then so be it. He said.

[Helen Pitt]

Well, that's one thing that really alarmed me about casual conversations I was having with people, you know, similar types type people from Essex who I know from having grown up in Southend, who might just throw in something about that. I would never have imagined deportation to be on the political agenda. Which goes to show, I think when you make political messaging more extreme and more available, these sort of things become normalized.

[Interviewer/Host]

Two ambulances called and on that last trip to Epping, you went back to the Bell Hotel and protesters were still gathering there every Sunday. What did you find there this time?

[Helen Pitt]

So the protest wasn't very big that day, but there was a kind of gaggle of people who turned up.

[Interviewer/Host]

Like a ritual.

[Helen Pitt]

Yeah, there was Prosecco drunk sometimes, you know, there were marquees. You know, it was a kind of English fare gone wrong sort of vibe. But on this particular Sunday, there was, you know, probably just a handful of people by the side of the road opposite the hotel. And I approached them. Well, one thing they were saying was they didn't believe that the hotel was empty. They thought it was just a trick. Have you come down here just to check if they're still in here? Just to check, not. Not to protest. Because we used to told that they went, yeah, no one's seen any coaches go, so Hal dead or night. But then they said, you know, some people have gone round the back of the Bell Hotel to kind of make video content to try and find out the truth. And so me and the photographer, Harry, decided to kind of go. We saw maybe six or seven people. If there's no one in there, why the security in there?

[Callum Barker (Protester)]

Yeah, right.

[Dom (Football Coach)]

So why are they sitting in an empty building?

[Helen Pitt]

They haven't got to do that. Then there were these three young women. They had juicy Couture hoodies and shiny sliders and they were. One of them was filming it. They sort of like crept up to the window and it was like a scene from a weird kind of silent movie, like almost the Marx Brothers or something, where one of them had this stick that they'd found in the woods. She was sort of sticking it through the window and opening the curtain to see in one of the bedrooms to see if there was a migrant there. And as we walked away, one of the young women was holding a football and they'd sort of found one of Belafc's footballs, which I just found like such a weird sort of poignant image really. You know, you have Dom and Epping for everyone who kind of like really sought a community solution to this. And then you have this very sort of isolated and isolating online culture, sort of like just taking the ball and taking it home.

[Interviewer/Host]

And that's all for today. This episode was produced by Tom Glasser and Iver Manley and presented by me, Helen Pitt. Sound design was by Ross Burns and the executive producer was Danielle Stevens. We'll be back in your feeds this afternoon with the latest.

[Helen Pitt]

This is the Guardian.

[Security Guard/Police Officer]

He's dribbling the ball with everything on the line. He's driving down the pitch. He's facing price hikes and cuts past him. Carrier contracts, tries to block him. Oh, he leaves him in the dust. He's at the edge of the box. He cuts past the non stop group chat trash talk. He clears on goal. He shoots no unlimited data for $25 a month forever.

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