Thurrock has a diverse and fragmented grain of residential development. Tower blocks, cottages, very low-density suburban housing estates, as well as traditional, isolated rural villages.

‘old, irregular, and like all those small Thames Ports, lazy-looking and dirty.’
James Thorne on Grays, 1876.

Tenure and type

• 70% owner-occupied overall
• Some areas as high as 95% owner-occupied (mostly in rural areas) but in Tilbury Riverside 44% of the housing is council or RSL rented.
• Mostly semi-detached (34%) and terraced (34%) and some flats (18%)
• Grays Riverside is 46.4% flats, with a large council-owned estate, and in Tilbury tower blocks stand at the edge of the marshes

Tenure, social group and housing type are strongly linked in Britain. The contrast is marked in Thurrock between the small rural villages, generally without rail stations, and those that have grown with new housing estates, providing home ownership at reasonable prices. The latter tend to be in easy reach via road and rail of jobs and services, while retaining the fantasy of a ‘rural’ life.

‘Barratt World is hallucinogenic: mushroom villages, Noddy in Essex. No hurt. Cohabitating couples in gainful employment.’
Iain Sinclair

The Thurrock and Essex greenbelt has a history of idiosyncratic, idealistic communities such as the modernist ideal village of Bata, the Plotlands where East End city dwellers self built weekend shanties that became permanent communities, and other utopian social experiments in the countryside. For further information refer to the greenbelt charrette briefing material.

New residential communities
The major new development of housing in Thurrock is currently Chafford Hundred which, when completed, will provide around 5,000 new homes, mainly detached houses and high-specification apartments.

“There is nothing to do in Chafford, except have babies, rent videos and watch more houses being built.”
Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard.

Other development has been almost entirely private sector, generally based around existing communities with good transport links to avoid encroaching on the greenbelt. Most new developments have been on previously used land whose former uses range from schools to cement works and quarries.

Policy remains committed to using brownfield land outside the greenbelt. New strategies are also emerging for the intensification of existing residential areas by backland and infill development, in response to Government policy on higher density, more sustainable development. Nevertheless, recommended densities still remain low – between, 30-70 dph – compared to the densities of some historic areas (terraced houses usually have a density of around 150 dph), and the large size of the towns.

Targets for Housebuilding

• Thurrock Unitary Development Plan – around 9,500 new homes by 2016
• This is adequate to accommodate the natural population growth of the area and the trend towards smaller household sizes which necessitates a greater number of dwellings
• 4,400 will be met by existing commitments for which planning permission has already been obtained
• Under Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) plans for the newly formed Urban Development Corporation (UDC), it is estimated that the borough could provide around 17,000 new homes if the UDC was fully effective
• For this to be sustainable substantial numbers of new jobs and a great increase in essential services will be required, which the UDC will have to generate