They’re still finishing the driveways in the new executive development across the road (prices from £675,000 up to £1.3million). Not that anyone is forming an orderly queue. Most would-be buyers have already run a mile.
One local estate agent, we are told, has just laid off two members of staff because the market has evaporated.
You seldom hear even the tiniest violins playing for estate agents, but they are playing here in Crowborough, East Sussex.
Previously best known for two local literary legends – Winnie the Pooh, in nearby Ashdown Forest, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived here in his twilight years – it is now adjusting to its new-found fame as Britain’s next migration tinderbox.
Until this week, the local Army training camp had been used by successive generations of cadet forces from across East Sussex.
On Thursday night, the last of these cadet groups was told to pack up and move out ahead of a change of ownership, applauded off the premises by a small group of residents protesting at the entrance.
As of Monday, the 37-acre site will cease to be a Ministry of Defence base and the new landlord will be the Home Office, which plans to move in around 600 migrants – all single men aged between 18 and 65 – into the barracks on a come-and-go-as-you-please basis.
There has, unsurprisingly, been a furious reaction from residents ever since news of the plan broke six weeks ago. A series of demonstrations – the last attracting 4,000 people – will continue this weekend.
Sound familiar? Is this just another Epping waiting to happen? There are certainly similarities with the Essex commuter town that dominated headlines for much of the summer.
Residents there were (and still are) apoplectic after the local hotel was commandeered by the Home Office to house asylum seekers, one of whom sexually assaulted a young girl and a woman.
Any residual smidgeon of public confidence in the authorities vanished when the 41-year-old child-sex offender, Hadush Kebatu, was accidentally released early from prison six weeks ago. Even when he was subsequently deported, he was waved on his way back to Ethiopia with a £500 handout from the British taxpayer.
However, you do not have to spend long in Crowborough to realise that this is not just Epping Mk II. This could degenerate into an even more toxic situation. For it also raises serious questions about the way in which the Government has simply decided that the best way to win round popular opinion is to ignore it altogether.
That’s why Crowborough feels like a box of fireworks perilously close to a naked flame.
The politics certainly feel very different. Much as the powers that be might like to paint the local reaction as Reform-fuelled Nimbyism, stirred up by outside agitators from both the hard-Right and hard-Left – as we saw in Essex – that is not what I find here in East Sussex.
This is a case of an affronted and inflamed community versus an alliance of local and national authorities in full ostrich mode.
It is certainly striking that more than 24 hours after first contacting the local council for a comment, no one was able to speak to me. Not a word.
Opposition to the scheme spans every shade of opinion from grumpy Greens to angry Reformers, plus those of all political persuasions in between – and of none. Indeed, the main pressure group, now fully equipped with a fighting fund and a KC on board, is run by a mother-of-four who is a public servant with no political affiliations at all.
This is not regular Nigel Farage territory, let alone Tommy Robinson country. Crowborough sits inside Wealden District Council, run by a Liberal Democrat-Green-Labour coalition.
It lies in the orbit of Brighton, bastion of Green activism, and the fiercely non-conformist county town of Lewes. In other words, wokery is welcome here. Yet this specific corner of East Sussex leans to the Tories at general election time.
Crowborough’s MP is the Conservatives’ Nus Ghani, whose standing among MPs across the House is reflected in her position as Deputy Speaker of the Commons. That is a position which usually demands neutrality on contentious party political issues. Not this one, though.
‘What makes this situation unique, compared to other battles over asylum camps, is the Home Office is dealing with a council which is not fighting back, so that is feeding people’s anxieties. They are not being listened to,’ says Ms Ghani, who had received no advance notice of the plans for the new asylum camp.
‘The Home Office had told the council two weeks earlier, but, like everyone else, the first I knew was when I read it in the paper. So where is the council? It’s like ‘Where’s Wally?’.’
The news broke three days too late for accountant Aimee Stittle, whom I meet at the entrance to the camp, pushing seven-month-old Annabel in her pushchair.
‘We moved out of London for fresh country air and a place to raise a family. We’d literally just moved in and this happens, and now I can’t even take the dog for a walk after dark,’ she tells me.’
Nus Ghani says she has heard, anecdotally, that house prices across the wider area have already fallen by around 10 per cent.
‘No one feels much sympathy for property sellers, but when it’s your only asset and you need to move for family or job reasons, that is a major blow to how you plan your life,’ she explains.
Talk to local people, as I have this week, and you hear the same concerns about this fresh concentration of undocumented, unoccupied, fighting-age single men from countries and cultures which may have different social codes, especially in relation to women.
They no longer care if social media types want to hurl accusations of racism at them. Their greater fear is a small army of bored young men in an area with no CCTV, poor public transport and seven schools.
Residents have put together a pretty formidable campaign against the plan in a matter of days. Take a chap like Shaun Garner, 54, an accounting analyst who is waving a very East Sussex sort of flag.
It is neither the Union flag nor the Cross of St George – which you would see all over Epping – but the Royal Banner of England (three lions on a red background). ‘It’s Richard the Lionheart’, he explains matter-of-factly.
He says he felt moved to come down here because he has a 17-year-old daughter who walks to and from the bus stop to get to college every day.
‘But that’s not going to happen any more with no streetlighting and no cameras and hundreds of strange men hanging around.’
The previous evening, he attended his first meeting of a group of around 40 locals who are setting up their own security operation called ‘Crowborough Patrol’.
The first migrants have yet to arrive. Yet the fact that an unofficial vigilante operation is already organising patrol shifts and bodycam equipment is testimony to the depth of local feeling.
‘There is a genuine fear and a complete vacuum of information from the council leadership, so we are just going to be extra eyes and ears,’ says one of the group, Michael Lunn, a beef farmer and opposition Tory councillor.
He emphasises that local opposition is no longer party political. ‘We’ve got plenty of Greens and Lib Dems involved too. This is a community-first campaign.’
Leading the charge against the new camp is Kim Bailey, a public-sector manager (she does not want to name her particular arm of the state, though she tells me).
She had never been involved in any sort of protest until she heard what was about to happen on her doorstep and, with a handful of others, decided to set up a community interest company called Crowborough Shield.
Their primary aim right now is to seek a judicial review against the Home Office’s decision to convert the camp, given concerns over everything from unexploded ordnance, to asbestos, to the demands on local services.
In just a month, they have raised £62,000 through crowd-funding and have already engaged a KC. In Epping, it was the local council which took the legal initiative. Here in Crowborough, it is left to residents.
‘My biggest concern is that the Home Office will say this is just for 12 months, and then they extend it and then it becomes permanent and there is nothing we can do about it,’ says Kim.
Though her four children have now left school, she points to the large numbers of others who happily walk past her house every day and whose parents will now feel obliged to make other plans.
Also here is local councillor Andrew Wilson. He was elected as a Lib Dem but now sits as an independent fighting the plans. As chair of the council scrutiny committee, he called an emergency meeting to discuss the plan and was dismayed by the lack of engagement from the authorities.
‘The police declined to attend because they said they had nothing to say,’ he tells me.
For now, there is no clear timetable. A Home Office spokesman will only say that ‘onboarding’ (Blob-speak for arrivals) will begin ‘when the sites are fully operational and safe’.
He adds: ‘We will not replicate the mistakes of the past where rushed plans have led to unsafe and chaotic situations that impacts [sic] the local community.’
Adding to a sense of obsessive secrecy is this week’s erection of a 7ft green screen around the entire site to stop people looking in (it blew over in Wednesday’s winds and had to be reinstalled).
Another cause of resentment here in Crowborough is our old friend, two-tier justice. Because of its proximity to Ashdown Forest, and the Green lobby within the council leadership, Wealden District Council imposes strict constraints on any planning applications in this neck of the wood (and a very famous wood it is too, thanks to Winnie the Pooh).
Nus Ghani points out that people are routinely banned from building granny flats or converting farm buildings, ‘yet now the Government is changing the entire local dynamic and the council rolls over’.
Andrew Wilson explains that the council has been so stung by the level of opposition that it is now belatedly trying to look as if it is upset and has put the Home Office on three weeks’ notice to provide further details of planning issues. ‘It’s hardly putting up a fight, is it?’ he laughs.
When the Home Office first informed the council leadership of its plans, Wealden’s Liberal Democrat council leader, James Partridge, wrote to the minister, Mike Tapp, saying: ‘We are keen to work with you to ensure your plans are as effective as possible and the impact on the community is carefully managed.’
His Green deputy-leader, Rachel Millward, who is also a deputy leader of the national Green Party, even released a video which has now gone viral. It shows her next to the camp, talking of being deeply moved by stories of ‘the surgeons and doctors and lawyers from Eritrea and Afghanistan’ who are soon going to be living there.
Outside the gate, one of the protesters pulls up the video on their phone and everyone gathers round for a good laugh. ‘If we get a single surgeon or lawyer living here, I will eat this,’ says one pointing to his bobble hat.
Eventually, one lone supporter of the plan arrives. Psychologist Paulina Slater gets out of her car to tell the protesters that they are creating a hostile atmosphere.
‘I am here to protest against the protest,’ she tells me. ‘I hate all this ‘Crowborough Says No’ messaging. We need to be welcoming and these asylum seekers need somewhere to live.’ It is, safe to say, a minority view.
As in Epping, so here in Crowborough, there is now a group called the Pink Ladies, a voice for local women and girls uncomfortable about hundreds of male strangers being suddenly imposed on a community.
Its leader, Jeannette Towey, points me to the bus stop next to the camp where home-bound children are just getting off on their way home from school. ‘The migrants will all get free bus travel. There’s not much to do in Crowborough so they will just go down to Lewes and Brighton or up to Tunbridge Wells,’ she says.
It is indeed only 20 minutes to the old spa town, home of those mythical letters to newspaper editors signed ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’.
Any day now, I suspect they are going to be even more disgusted than usual.
