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‘I don’t talk to mainstream media,” says a young man in an Arsenal shirt. I’ve just asked what brought him to the latest protest against the housing of asylum seekers in Thetford, Norfolk, and his disdain is clear as he goes to warn other protesters of the Guardian’s presence. This isn’t exactly the unity promised by the flyer advertising today’s march: “Everyone welcome: families, friends, dogs. Including the media.”
The protest is planned as a two-mile march from Thetford’s market square to RAF Barnham, a site just over the border in Suffolk, which is due to house asylum seekers while they progress through the system. It is the latest part of a campaign that has lasted the whole summer. Banners line the square, the largest succinctly describing why people are gathering here today: “Thetford and Barnham says no to asylum seekers.”
Some of the protesters are from Thetford, others from farther afield, but mostly Norfolk or Suffolk. I have been visiting Thetford in the weeks before the protest and, while the reasoning of the protesters varies, many say it comes down to numbers. How can this site house 1,250 people when the nearest village has a population of only 600?
Some say the country can’t afford to keep housing asylum seekers as they wait to be processed, or that there are simply too many coming in, or that we don’t know who they are. Asylum seekers are referred to by some here as “boat people” and “invaders”. The suggestion that Britain has lost control of its borders is nothing new. But new theories still materialise. At a protest the week before the march, one attender suggested that people may be being sent intentionally from Iran. “They say that they are sending some of the terrorists over to the UK and we have no idea who comes off the boats,” a protester, David Goulty, told me. “There’s no control on who comes into the country.”
In opposition, Labour criticised the Conservative policy of housing asylum seekers on military bases. But in October last year, now in government, it changed tack. The sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by a resident of the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, had prompted months of angry local protests against the housing of asylum seekers in hotels. Keir Starmer announced that military bases would be used once again.
Labour was explicit about the reason for the U-turn: “We know that communities don’t want asylum seekers housed in hotels, and neither does the government, and that’s why we are determined to fix the mess that we’ve inherited by getting a grip of the issue and committing to close every single asylum hotel, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds.”
Typically of Starmer’s time as prime minister, the people he was trying to appease with this policy responded: “Thanks, we hate it.”
Now, the Home Office is actively working to expand or open five sites, two of which are already active. MDP Wethersfield, a former RAF airfield in Essex, houses 800 asylum seekers, but could increase its capacity to more than 1,200. Crowborough training camp in East Sussex plans to increase its numbers from 350 to 540; a volunteer vigilante patrol group has been set up in the area to “protect” locals from migrants. Three large military sites are being readied with a reported capacity of 1,250 each: MOD Bicester in Oxfordshire; RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire; and RAF Barnham.
Much of the classic sitcom Dad’s Army was shot in Thetford, including the external shots of the episode that ends with the show’s most famous joke: “Don’t tell ’em, Pike!” The Guildhall on the market square, where the protesters congregate to start the march today, was often used as a backdrop.
The Dad’s Army museum is on the other side of the Guildhall. One of the protesters is an 80-year-old US air force veteran who thinks the UK should emulate Trump’s immigration policy. He sees a group of tourists being led on the Dad’s Army guided tour and invites them to join the march. It’s clear they would rather hear more tales of Jones, Mainwaring and Pike.
On the other side of the square, Anwar Noor, 63, is selling ice-creams from his truck to people gathering for the march. Noor came to Thetford from Kenya in the 1980s and worked in the Thermos factory for 17 years, before being made redundant when it closed. (Thermos moved manufacturing to Asia in 2000. Other big employers, such as the factory that processed Danepak bacon, have since closed, leading to the loss of hundreds of jobs.) Noor started another business, a scrapyard, before joining the ice-cream trade a couple of years back as he started his semi-retirement.
You could argue that Thetford is East Anglia’s capital of integration. In 1903, it elected the first black mayor in the UK, Allan Glaisyer Minns, who was born in the Bahamas and had trained as a doctor at Guy’s hospital in London. There is an established Portuguese community, congregating this morning at a cafe near the square, drinking bottles of Super Bock beer as a very loud wildlife documentary about porcupines plays on TV. The community moved here in their hundreds in the 2000s, after big East Anglian agribusinesses, including the turkey giant Bernard Matthews, set up recruitment offices in the country.
There is a statue of Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, who was exiled to Britain from Punjab and became a favourite of Queen Victoria, living in Elveden Hall, just over the Suffolk border. His son, Prince Freddy Duleep Singh, became a scholar of Norfolk life and gave Thetford the Ancient House, a home thought to have been built in about 1490, which is still used as a public museum.
But, as Ian Jack wrote in 2007, during a visit in which he marvelled at Thetford’s burgeoning Portuguese community, while suggesting the town was already paranoid about immigration statistics: “To compare Prince Freddy with the immigrant ham-slicer or turkey-gutter is of course ridiculous.”
There had already been unrest around immigration when Jack visited the town. In 2004, as New Labour’s second of three terms was nearing its end, Thetford was topping tables for deprivation and child poverty while coming bottom for skills and education. That summer, after England lost to Portugal in the quarter-finals of the European Championship, the Red Lion pub on the market square was besieged by more than 200 hooligans, trapping about 120 people – mostly Portuguese – inside the pub. They pelted the building with bottles and stones, smashed windows and tried to force their way in. Police called in reinforcements from all over Norfolk and several officers and pub customers were said to have sustained cuts from flying glass. It was more than two hours before those inside could leave.
The Red Lion, now a Wetherspoons, feels more sedate today. It sits on the edge of the market square, which, in the sun, feels like a piazza with added pints. And yet Noor, as he doles out ice-creams, says he can understand why people are angry. “You probably noticed as you walked through the town how many shops are closed, post offices gone. All the banks are gone. You can see the centre hollowing out.” Noor says he understands local people’s frustration and that he has never experienced racism in Thetford. But he believes that blaming asylum seekers is “all wrong. We’re all in the same boat.”
At times this August, what has happened in this small Norfolk town has seemed portentous, at risk of provoking another summer of unrest in England, after events in Southport in 2024 and Epping in 2025 led to protests around the country.
At the start of this month, the addresses of some houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) used to house asylum seekers in Thetford were leaked. This led to crowds of vigilantes targeting the properties on 4, 5 and 6 August.
During the second night of unrest, hundreds of people descended on a terrace house on Clover Way in the 70s-built Fairfields estate. Some threw rocks and eggs, smashing an upstairs window, while others attempted to get inside. During these days of disorder, police officers were spat at, while one was hit by a rock and another was bitten. According to police, some of the vigilantes even entered a property and forced out a resident, stealing their mobile phone.
More than 20 people were arrested on suspicion of a variety of offences, including racially aggravated public order, inciting racial hatred and conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary, as well as possession of cocaine with intent to supply, possession of cannabis and driving without insurance.
On the day of the Thetford to Barnham march, I visit Clover Way. The house that was once home to asylum seekers is immediately identifiable by the dried yolk that remains on the windows, almost three weeks after the eggs were thrown.
One of the neighbours comes out to have a cigarette. She tells me she had to flee to a friend’s house over the road on the night the crowds came; since losing her husband last year, she lives on her own. She suggests I speak to her neighbour, John Finch, 91. He says the people who sold the house that was besieged were initially going to sell it to a family, but they were gazumped by a company, which offered more money.
On the night the protesters arrived, the crowds stood on Finch’s flowerbeds and trampled his plants. He saw the melee out of his window, but decided to go to bed. “I slept through it,” he says. He was in the RAF police branch that served in Cyprus when Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots started firing at each other. “I’ve seen worse.”
When the disturbances went viral online, it brought infamy to this quiet street. The next day, film crews arrived, as did people keen to see the newly famous house covered in egg. “There were a lot of people coming,” says Finch. “They were coming in cars and stopping and just looking at it. And I think: it’s an empty bloody house, for Christ’s sake.” He shrugs. “Perhaps it was the highlight of their life.” Thankfully, after those three ugly nights, the violent disorder in Thetford fizzled out. But the anti-asylum protests continued.
The first protest against the use of RAF Barnham to house asylum seekers was in June 2026. Now, every Sunday, they happen like clockwork at 2pm. The week before the march from Thetford town centre to RAF Barnham, I visit the protest camp at the military base.
I park on the dry grass verge and walk towards the protest, noticing a makeshift shed offering drinks to protesters for whatever they can afford. A shirtless fortysomething man with a tan greets me and asks if I want a drink. Clinton Warner grew up across the road from the site and knows its history. He runs a used-car company and each weekend he moves his stock out of the way, so that there is parking space to accommodate the protesters.
Warner tells me a contract worker, tasked with servicing the sewers on the RAF Barnham site, gave him a tipoff about the plan to house asylum seekers there. He decided to blow the whistle. “They were asked to recommission it, so the contractors knew about it seemingly before the councillors,” he says. “We put it online.”
RAF Barnham has been used in many ways over the years. It has been a logistics hub for the RAF, and during the second world war it was a mustard gas and munitions storage facility. After the war, it was commissioned by Churchill to store nuclear bombs and everyone forgot about the mustard gas stored underground. Warner remembers being warned: “Do not remove wildlife from these ponds, do not pick the lilies, do not remove the flowers, leave everything, because it’s all hazardous.”
The use of sites such as Barnham to house asylum seekers isn’t only controversial with concerned residents. Two years ago, the UK parliament’s home affairs select committee wrote that the use of large military sites to house asylum claimants had “generally proved more costly to deliver than hotel accommodation”. Military sites cost more because of the cost of refurbishing them; they are often in a poor state of repair.
When it comes to the asylum issue, the UK government seldom learns the lessons published by parliament. Rather than respond to the evidence, the government seems trapped in a reactionary loop, apparently keen to be seen to do something punitive.
“In policy discourse, there’s this concern about how some asylum accommodation can function as a pull factor,” says Nuni Jorgensen, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. “Politicians often say hotels can work as a pull factor because people imagine that these are fancy hotels and that’s why they come to the UK. But the evidence that we have on that is not very clear.” That hasn’t stopped politicians such as Reform UK’s Nigel Farage making hay with the suggestion. Jorgensen adds, however, that there is a lot of evidence showing that larger sites negatively affect asylum seekers’ wellbeing.
When it comes to housing, asylum planning boils down to three choices. Hotels are cheaper when it comes to housing many migrants at one site. HMOs seem a good option when it comes to integration and infrastructure, but are hampered by the reality of house prices. And then there are military sites, which are notoriously difficult to use for this purpose.
Hotels are easier to source than HMOs, says Jorgensen, but they “have been linked to very poor mental-health outcomes among residents”, as the conditions are often cramped and unclean and isolate them from the community. Dispersal to neighbourhood HMOs has, historically, been the Home Office’s preferred option. “They tend to be cheaper than hotels. They tend to produce the best wellbeing outcomes for asylum seekers. The problem is that they are very hard to find in some areas.”
The failure of the hotels policy and suspicion around private management of HMOs are among the issues that have led to the use of large military sites.
It is clear that these sites are controversial. Along with the volunteer vigilante patrol group in Crowborough, a village near RAF Bicester has voted symbolically to leave the UK over the policy. The use of military sites to house asylum seekers has, in a way, united left and right in opposition, but on very different grounds. Human rights campaigners say they amount to a form of “open-prison camp”, while Reform UK likens them to holiday camps.
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On my first visit to RAF Barnham, I meet Terry Curtis, 40, one of the protest movement’s organisers. He was present at the HMO protests in early August, he says, but left “when things escalated … because it’s not what we’re here for”. He says the police were heavy-handed in their tactics; he mentions that a woman on a mobility scooter was pepper-sprayed. No one I speak to who was present at the HMO protests seems to have considered how afraid those living in the affected properties must have been.
Curtis moved to Thetford from south London when he was 15 and still supports Millwall. London accents can be heard all over Thetford. In the 1950s, the town’s population was 5,000. By the end of the 1960s, due to overspill from the capital, it had more than tripled to 17,000. In that booming decade, when new towns were referred to as “pram towns” because of the amount of children being born, Thetford was the fastest-growing in the country.
The Abbey estate was the last to be completed in that period of great expansion. In 1968, it was opened by Labour’s minister for housing, Tony Greenwood, who said the design was “exceptional”. The estate is today the poorest area of Thetford and was one of the locations of the violent protests in early August. Regeneration plans were announced in 2019, which were deeply unpopular with many residents and scrapped by Reform UK when they took over Norfolk county council in May. This was part of a Reform UK surge across the county, except in liberal, urban Norwich.
Curtis says he knows what it’s like to go through hard times: “I’ve been homeless myself … I’ve been in hostels.” The movement isn’t affiliated with any political party, he says, which feels like a stretch. Local Reform UK politicians mingle with the protesters each week, including the councillor Scott Hussey, a former Sun journalist who has moved back to his home town and seems fully committed to the anti-immigration agenda.
It is clear that the rise of Reform, and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, in East Anglia has put the wind in the sails of movements such as these. Reform UK now runs the county councils in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, in each case unseating the Conservatives, while Restore-backed candidates swept all 10 contested seats they stood for in the May 2026 local elections.
“I feel like we’ve got more inequality than we have equality these days,” says Curtis. “Everybody should be treated the same. And, unfortunately, we’re not. Everything’s going up. Prices are going up. Taxes are going up. But, yeah, people are able to come over here, you know, on boats, seek asylum and then get a home, get a house, get what they want – fed, gas, electric, all paid for by the government, which is inadvertently [sic] the taxpayers. Personally, I think we should close the borders to everybody. Get our own country sorted first.”
A failure of political communication, and the rise of social media that reward extreme content, has led to the anti-asylum narrative in UK politics becoming overwhelming. This isn’t lost on Terry Jermy, the Labour MP who represents South West Norfolk, the constituency that includes Thetford.
Some MPs parachute into a constituency with barely any knowledge of it. Not Jermy. He shot up the ranks of local politics, from town councillor in 2008 to mayor in 2016, before giving Liz Truss her Portillo moment in 2024, when he was unexpectedly elected MP at the expense of the former prime minister.
Jermy’s family has lived in Thetford for hundreds of years. In his maiden speech, in October 2024, he alluded to the fact his dad was one of 13 and his mum had seven brothers. “With nearly 40 aunties and uncles and over 100 cousins, I am sure that I owe at least my first election victory to my grandparents’ love for one another.”
After the HMO attacks, Jermy said the violence was “scaring and terrifying people who live in Thetford, particularly people from minority ethnic communities who are contacting me terrified that they are going to be misidentified as an asylum seeker and attacked”.
Jermy says he can see why the hotels policy had to change – “it’s not a good use of taxpayers’ money” – and isn’t against the use of military bases in principle. But he strongly opposes the use of Barnham. “I get branded a hypocrite when I say that Barnham’s not appropriate,” he says. “But if you’ve been to Barnham [the village rather than the military base], you will see that it’s relatively small. It’s in the middle of nowhere and it’s going to cost the government a fortune to put in the sewage and electricity and everything else that’s needed to make it work. I suspect, once they’ve done their calculations, they will realise that the cost-benefit rules it out.”
He points out that Barnham was only ever an overflow base for Honnington, a much bigger base nearby. Barnham has been empty for a long time and Jermy says a lot of the buildings are in a state of disrepair, “so new modular units will have to be built” to accommodate people.
The truth is, like a lot of asylum policy, this plan doesn’t feel very well thought-out. Meanwhile, the language used by the Home Office has been sloppy to the point of stoking rage, he says. “In the official government factsheet about Barnham, they referred to the people due to be based there as ‘illegal migrants’. They are asylum seekers. They are waiting to be processed.”
Jermy has flagged this with Home Office ministers, but he is facing an uphill battle with his constituents over a subject that is confusing at the best of times. “Most people don’t understand the difference between refugee, asylum seeker and economic migrant. And we’ve got a lot of work to do in this country to educate people about that, but also to talk more positively about immigration and its contribution to society.”
He doesn’t blame local residents for being angry. “These people have been failed,” he says. “They’ve been failed by decades in which people don’t shop in town centres any more and manufacturing is on the decline. And the vast majority of jobs locally are minimum wage. Our schools are rubbish and our healthcare system is rubbish. They’re going to be grumpy and they’re looking for somebody to blame. And rather than us, as a Labour government, articulating, actually, that it’s greed and austerity that are driving this, a lot of the language that we have used, trying to out-Reform Reform, has aided and abetted a lot of those concerns.”
At 1.30pm on Sunday, the march from Thetford to Barnham is due to begin. A group of women assemble behind the main banner. The march starts and passes through town. Shoppers stop and stare at the collection of union and St George’s flags.
The protesters move past a golden statue of Thomas Paine, the Thetford-born autodidact, founding father of the US and author of Rights of Man. The statue glints in the sunshine as Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World drifts out of a speaker on wheels, being pulled by a female protester. The next track is Vera Lynn’s The White Cliffs of Dover. As we turn a corner, a horse-drawn hearse, crewed by three funeral directors in traditional garb, arrives out of nowhere, carrying a cardboard coffin with “DEMOCRACY” written on its side.
A handful of people watch the protesters pass. One or two are clapping. I don’t come across anyone who is vocally against the protests, despite talking to scores of people. It occurs to me later that I didn’t meet anyone who wanted to say anything in support of asylum at all.
And yet, the turnout of 130 people or so tells its own story. Although the march was billed as a community event, it hasn’t attracted a big crowd. One of the main chants as we walk out of town is distinctly un-family-friendly: “Deport, deport, deport the fucking lot.”
Jermy isn’t here because, although he agrees that Barnham should not be used to house asylum seekers, the protests have attracted gestures of support from not only Reform UK and Restore, but also the far-right party Britain First. During the protests at RAF Barnham, says Jermy, “there have been speeches on the stage which have basically been outright racist and disgusting and my presence would be seen as condoning that behaviour”.
We are on the straight road out to Barnham when the crowd starts cheering for a young man who is standing on the side of the common, setting off a flare attached to a St George’s flag. Acrid smoke spreads across the march. As two police officers approach the young man, an accomplice on a motorbike arrives, speeding him off towards a housing estate, to more cheers.
The march crosses the border from Norfolk to Suffolk, exiting Jermy’s constituency and entering the Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket constituency of his fellow Labour MP Peter Prinsley. “It’s affecting the whole country,” says Jean Glasdale, 73, who has come to the march from just outside Bury St Edmunds. What does she want the government to do? “I want them to deport them,” she says. “I want to be able to walk safely. I mean, they’re not just raping children, they’re raping pensioners like me. I want to feel safe in my own country.”
Talk of rape, amplified and distorted, fills the air at events like this. After we reach Barnham, male speaker after male speaker from Reform UK and smaller fringe parties follow each other on to the small stage with ever greater claims about what rape statistics suggest about migrant behaviour, generating fear about the threat posed by “undocumented, fighting-age men”.
What is clear from the statistics is that most rapes are perpetrated by men already known to the victim. But the image of men marauding the countryside and making women unsafe is potent and heavily exploited. I talk to a 38-year-old woman who lives near RAF Barnham and is on the protest with her small children. She is full of fear, she says, about what she sees as the threat posed by asylum seekers. She is so scared, in fact, that she thinks they should be held in detention offshore: “The safety of people is paramount. If they’re off from the main island – you know, if they’re off, say, Shetland or wherever – it’s another barrier and it’s another bit of protection for us.”
Safety concerns trump talk of specific ideologies – and sometimes reality. “No, there’s no far right,” says Curtis, the organiser. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re left or right wing. This is not what it’s about. It’s just about the community – all the communities getting together to feel safe. You know, everybody’s concerned for the safety of the whole area. Because the people that are going to be put here are going to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want.”
It’s a message that magnifies the threat of foreign-born men. “It’s been going on since for ever,” says Vron Ware, author of Return of a Native, of the exploitation of these primal fears of rape by “others” and “invaders”. Ware’s book is a reckoning with rural England and chancers such as Lowe and Farage who try to exploit its insecurities.
In the 1980s, Ware was the editor of the anti-fascist publication Searchlight. “I’ve got a poster of an old fascist march in the 70s where someone’s got a placard that says: ‘75% of rapings are done by immigrants.’ It’s just a trope that never goes away.”
After the march, I ask Curtis how he thought it went. He seems a little disappointed with the turnout. He says he is going to take some time out from organising, which has taken its toll.
I leave RAF Barnham with Harry Murray, who has been taking photographs for the Guardian. We trudge along the side of the road, articulated lorries rushing past, until we reach a footpath through a field. As we make our way towards town, passing a few cows, I think about how angry everyone is – not just at events like today, but everywhere and all the time – and how draining it feels.
Will the rage blowing through East Anglia eventually die down? I think back to Glasdale, to whom I was talking as the march neared the protest camp. When I asked her if she thought the populist party she leaflets for, Restore, could make a dent in the next general election, maybe even win it, she was very positive. “We’ve only got to look at today,” she said. “These people are so … incensed.”
