East Tilbury

East Tilbury is what happens when a shoe company builds a town to house its workforce and then, some decades later, stops making shoes. The estate to the north still has the flat roofs and the factory-owner optimism, while the old village down by the Thames has a Norman church, a Victorian fort and a marsh that has never fully accepted any of them. Between the two runs a railway line and a great deal of sky. Buyers fall for the modernist houses first, and then somebody mentions the river.