‘The St Lawrence is mere water. The Missouri muddy water. The Thames is liquid history.’ John Burns MP, 1929.

Thurrock has a long and interesting history of which remains are still visible, although often overshadowed by the massive growth the area has experienced in the 20th century.

Mammoths once grazed in the Thurrock area and archaeologists recently unearthed the remains of a jungle cat. Man has been in the area since prehistoric times, and the land has been farmed by the Romans and Anglo-Saxons.

The Domesday Book mentions many of the villages. Grays is named after the Norman Henry de Gray who became Lord of the Manor after the conquest. The twelfth-century pilgrim’s church of St. Clements in West Thurrock is now sandwiched between a warehouse and the Proctor and Gamble soap factory. The church was used for the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

The area became wealthy in the Middle Ages as the national economy focused on the east of England’s farms and ports. Tilbury’s position meant it was important in the defence of London. Henry VIII built riverside Block Houses at East and West Tilbury, which later became Coalhouse Fort and Tilbury Fort.

In the 16th century Dutch engineers built the drainage ditches and protective sea walls along the Thames. Elizabeth I addressed her troops at Tilbury as the Spanish Armanda was threatening to sail up the English Channel. The 16th and 17th centuries saw the building of the borough’s largest mansions and the present Tilbury Fort while the Thames-side economy grew with naval and trading traffic.

In the 18th century more efficient transport and communication networks allowed agriculture, mineral extraction, brick making and brewing to expand rapidly. Purfleet was particularly important for chalk mining and was also the site for a major secure gunpowder store built around 1760.

Coalhouse Fort was rebuilt in the 1860s and the building of Tilbury Docks in the late 19th century encouraged the influx of many different nationalities who could easily find work in the docks. Purfleet became popular with daytrippers and was the inspiration for many of the locations in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897.

In the early 20th century industry expanded in the borough especially with the arrival of major cement works using locally mined chalk and clay. The modernist Bata shoe factory and workers’ housing was built in the 1930s and is now a conservation area. The building of the London Cruise Terminal at Tilbury in the 1930s brought additional attraction to the area.

After the Second World War many Londoners who had lost their homes in bombing raids were rehoused in Thurrock on the new Belhus Estate. In 1948 the ship ‘Empire Windrush’ landed at Tilbury, bringing the first Carribean immigrants to England.

Other ethnic minorities started to arrive in Thurrock in the following decades particularly from Asian communities. Londoners moving out of the city also started to settle in Thurrock and in the 1990s the area became home to refugees from the Balkans conflicts as well as increasing numbers of commuters attracted by lower house prices and easy access to London.

The completion of the M25 in 1984 stimulated a major revival in Thurrock attracting warehousing and logistics operations and the ‘shed’ development that has now become synonymous with the motorway surroundings. The M25 also enabled the development of Lakeside which opened in 1990.