When Sherzod* moved to Epping in 2025, he was dreaming of a little garden, long dog walks in the forest and more space to breathe. At 20, he had moved from Uzbekistan to the UK to study law, then lived in north London for decades. In his mid-40s, after establishing himself in a media job, he began visiting the forest – 5,900 acres of green lung saved by the Epping Forest Act 1878. The pretty shops of the old south-west Essex town delighted him. “I just liked the high street, I liked the people,” he says. “The people were really friendly.”
Epping was created by the canons of Waltham Abbey in the 13th century as a market town on the road from London to Cambridge. Its high street is still thriving. There is a Gail’s bakery and an M&S Food shop; the four-bed semis in the estate agents’ windows are listed at just shy of £1m.
Sherzod settled on an area overlooking the rolling hills of west Essex and kept his eye on property sites “like a hawk” for years. Finally, in early 2025, a house came up in the exact spot he was hoping for. On moving day, in early August, he headed along the high road into town to buy some lunch. As he walked, a driver lowered their car window and shouted: “Go home.”
Sherzod froze. At first, he wondered if he was the intended target. He looked around, but couldn’t see anyone else the abuse would have been aimed at. A few days later, something similar happened. A motorcyclist rode very close to him and sounded his horn to the rhythm of a football chant: “Do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do-do, Eng-land!” There was no tournament on at the time. By the winter, Sherzod had bought a long raincoat to protect himself from the drivers who deliberately drove too close to the pavement, through potholes, to soak him.
These provocations filled Sherzod with dread, but he wasn’t exactly surprised. Just after he had paid the deposit on his new house, there had been a flurry of protests against a hotel for asylum seekers situated a few minutes’ walk away.
The Bell hotel began life in the 16th century as a roadside inn on the edge of the forest, serving merchants travelling in and out of London and farmers taking livestock to market. More recently, it was a low-rent hotel, before being repurposed in 2020 by the Conservative government to house asylum seekers. During the Covid crisis, passage to the UK via road and air stopped and the numbers of asylum seekers arriving by small boats grew.
Initially, the most vocal opponents of the hotel’s change of use were two local far-right politicians: Eddy Butler, formerly the elections chief for the British National party (BNP), and Julian Leppert, then a For Britain councillor in Waltham Abbey. (Leppert once said he “ideally” wanted to keep Epping for white people only.)
According to one neighbour of the Bell, Steve*, most locals were “never really concerned” about the asylum seekers next door. “I’ve got two daughters,” he says. “They’ve never had any problem walking past the hotel or into the high street.” In the summer, the Bell residents used to have their dinner, then head to the cricket ground nearby. “I’d go over in the morning and walk my dog,” says Steve. “There was no rubbish or anything. You wouldn’t even know they’d been there.”
But in July 2025, the largely cordial relationship between Epping and the asylum seekers ended abruptly.
Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu had entered the UK on 29 June, travelling nearly 6,000 miles from Ethiopia, through Sudan, Libya, Italy and France, before crossing the Channel in a small boat. He was transferred to the Bell hotel on 7 July and on the same day approached a group of 14-year-old schoolchildren, seated on a bench near the local Domino’s. Kebatu asked if he could have some of their pizza.
Although the children had told him they were 14, Kebatu proceeded to tell the girls that “they were pretty [and] that he wanted to have babies with them”, then invited them back to the Bell hotel, according to a court document recounting the events of that day. Kebatu followed the teenagers around Epping; at one point, he tried to get them to drink alcohol and attempted a kiss.
One witness told the court that Kebatu had asked the victim to “come back to Africa and [told her] that she would make a good wife”. A witness “recalled that at one point after [the victim] had refused to let the defendant kiss her, he tapped his own cheek as if for her to kiss him”. Kebatu was challenged by another victim, who was over 16 and had been touched by him on the thigh already. She called the police, but he ran away.
The next day, 8 July, the same group of children saw Kebatu sitting on a bench on the edge of the high street. This time, he encouraged the two 14-year-old girls to kiss. He also asked one of them to sit down with him and put his hand on her thigh. Later that day, he was arrested. On 4 September, he was found guilty at Chelmsford magistrates court of two counts of sexual assault, one of attempted sexual assault, one count of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity and one count of harassment without violence.
The day after Kebatu was arrested, the leader of Epping Forest district council, Chris Whitbread, a Conservative, broke the news that the suspect in this case was from the hotel. The story exploded. Here, according to some, was exactly what the far right had warned of.
Whitbread asked local residents to “stay calm”, but his statement was criticised for providing fuel for a potential fire. “Epping Forest district council has consistently opposed the use of the Bell hotel to house asylum seekers,” he said. “It’s totally unsuitable. It lacks the infrastructure and support services required, putting both residents and asylum seekers at risk.” Whitbread ended his statement by asking residents not to “rely on Facebook chatter or social media chatter”. It was too late.
In August 2024, an innocuous-looking local Facebook group had been set up called Epping Forest Residents Group. On the day of Whitbread’s statement, its name was changed to Epping Says NO. Three of the admins – Callum Barker, Adam Clegg and Andrew Piper – were members of Homeland, described by the anti-extremism organisation Hope Not Hate as “a fascist political party that splintered from Patriotic Alternative, the UK’s largest neo‑Nazi group”.
They were joined by Craig Kitts, an Epping local who then ran a vehicle-recovery business and calls himself “the Flag Man”. As part of the Raise the Colours campaign, which began last summer, he helped adorn the streets of Epping with St George’s cross flags. When I visited Epping last month, a new round of union flags and St George’s crosses had been put up by the same campaign group, disguised as workmen.
The ringleader of Epping Says NO was Barker, who describes himself as the “Lion of Epping” and seems ambitious about how far his extreme political beliefs can travel. (Like many on the far right, he has recently thrown his weight behind the party Restore Britain.)
“I don’t want integration, I want entire communities gone,” Barker wrote recently on X, in a typical post. Epping Says NO presents itself as the voice of Epping. But its focus, rather than being on the town itself, seems to be far-right talking points about “migrants” who commit crimes – particularly rape – and how these justify the deportation of entire communities on ethnic grounds.
Through this local media hub, far-right organisers planned a protest for Sunday 13 July 2025. Despite the organisers saying the event would be “peaceful”, two of the hotel’s security guards were assaulted at a bus stop and had to be treated for serious injuries after an attack described by the police as “racially aggravated”. Far-right activists, including Barker and Leppert, were at the event – as were counterprotesters from the group Stand Up to Racism – but most were local people unaffiliated to any political movement.
Another protest was planned for the next Thursday, 17 July, the day of Kebatu’s appearance at Chelmsford magistrates court. Police were informed that attendees had been advised on group chats to “mask up” and bring “rage”. A pitched battle between protesters and the police ensued, with projectiles thrown by masked children, among others. The unrest left the high street blocked off for hours.
Ch Insp Terry Fisher said: “In my 20 years of policing, I have never witnessed disorder of this scale in Essex, and certainly not in a town like Epping.” Razia Sharif, a Liberal Democrat councillor who now serves as the mayor of Epping, had her fence kicked down by protesters and broken beer bottles strewn across her driveway.
The men who lived at the Bell were trapped inside. Ali, an Arabic-speaking Kurd from Syria, arrived there about 10 days before Kebatu’s assaults. At first, he says, “we were happy, our lives were stable, each of us waiting for our papers. But after he committed that heinous act – of course, this is unacceptable to anyone – protests began. We would stay in our room as if we had committed a crime. We couldn’t study or go out.”
Ali communicates with me by social media, as he doesn’t trust his English (which seems to be very good). He came to the UK to flee Syria, which he describes as “almost completely destroyed”. Before he left, he was an IT student facing mandatory military service. “I left Syria because it is difficult for me to kill and fight,” he says.
Live ammunition passed over his head as he entered Turkey. He went two days without food while hiding inside a truck. When he finally reached the Channel, he was at sea for six hours in a small boat carrying 68 people – men, women and children – until the British police arrived. “Anything could have happened; we could all have died,” he says. “I will not allow my family to take any illegal route, because it is a dangerous route; you will see death with your own eyes in the sea.”
His father, mother and brother remain in Syria. He cannot talk to them often, as they don’t have electricity or the internet. “Our lives were filled with worry,” he says of being barricaded in the hotel during the protests. “We feared for our families, who were in the war and had no means of comfort, and we worried about our own fate.”
***
The association of the protests with violence and hooliganism alarmed some campaigners, including Orla Minihane, a financial services consultant who insisted they should be led by local mothers rather than masked men. She made her case through the social media channels of Adam Brooks, a local pub landlord turned hard-right citizen journalist. Minihane formed the Pink Ladies, a group named for the colour of their uniform.
Minihane wasn’t just a concerned local mother, though: she had become the vice-chair of Reform UK’s Epping Forest local branch in late 2024 and was selected as a candidate for the 2025 local elections (which were subsequently suspended). She has since defected to Restore Britain, becoming its spokesperson on women’s and girls’ safety. Her first foray into frontline campaigning at the Bell led her to share a stage with the then Homeland member Barker at an early protest. “We are not happy with these men in this hotel because we fear for our children,” she told the BBC. “If that makes me far right then so be it.”
The protests took place on Thursdays and Sundays for the rest of 2025. They increased in intensity, particularly after the council took the government to court, applying for an interim injunction to stop asylum seekers being housed at the hotel. This was seen by some as a populist David versus Goliath battle between the local people and the national government. Protests outside asylum accommodation spread across the country, leading to unrest and scores of arrests.
Aisha*, a 51-year-old British Bangladeshi who grew up in east London and moved to Epping in 2012 with her husband, who is white, had to start commuting from Chingford rail station to avoid the protesters arriving at Epping station. “We have made a bit of a cocoon for ourselves,” she says of life since the protests started. “We never, ever go out; we don’t hang around Epping on the days of the protests.”
When Aisha was a child, the National Front and the BNP were active. She remembers her mother hurrying her away as racist taunts were shouted from passing cars. The atmosphere feels even more unpleasant to her now. “Having flags up, it’s like going back in time to the 80s, except it’s worse. In the 80s, whether somebody put up a flag or painted a swastika, you knew that generally these were horrible people and the politicians condemned it, the media condemned it. You knew they didn’t have the public on side.” She points to local Reform UK support for the Raise the Colours initiative.
The town was the centre of a dark and volatile moment in Britain in 2025. Fireworks were shot towards the hotel as the asylum seekers tried to sleep; dogs were brought to jump menacingly at the fences. A video posted on TikTok on 19 July 2025 shows a white man chasing a hotel resident, scaring him to the extent that he runs into the high road, to the laughter of those standing outside the hotel. When schoolchildren made a banner in late July that read: “Epping welcomes all … except racists. There’s no place for hate here!” it was taken away and burned in a fire. Another then member of Homeland, Kai Stephens, posted a picture with a caption that read: “SUCCESSFUL HOMELAND PATRIOT PATROL IN EPPING, LEFTY PROPAGANDA SENT TO HELL.”
One protester I speak to says the only way to sort out the “migrant problem” may be insurrection. Lee Collinson, a 68-year-old retiree who has recently taken up bodybuilding, lives in a penthouse apartment on the high road featuring a novelty waterfall and portraits of Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill (the MP for Epping from 1924 to 1945). Collinson says he went to the protests to protect “daughters” and “granddaughters” from people he says were sent to the UK by the investor and philanthropist George Soros to destabilise and take over western countries. Collinson says he has read a lot about it. When I ask where he gets his information, he replies: “YouTube!”
In August 2025, campaigners celebrated when Epping Forest district council was granted an interim high court injunction to temporarily block new arrivals to the Bell hotel and allow the removal of its occupants. The decision was soon overturned by the court of appeal – and all hell broke loose. “As goes Epping, so goes all of England,” wrote Elon Musk on 29 August. Musk is known for his preoccupation with English politics, but the intensity of his interest in Epping still felt bizarre. The next day, he tweeted his latest call to arms: “Every village in Britain will become Epping unless the people of Britain take action now.”
When Kebatu was accidentally released from jail in October, it only added to the hysteria. Epping’s WhatsApp groups pinged with panic when a rumour spread that an asylum seeker had entered the grounds of a school while pupils were in attendance, leading the police to release a statement that day saying the reports weren’t true. In fact, a homeless man had been looking for food in the bins at a school’s playing field. Kebatu was found in London, arrested and swiftly deported.
***
‘How awful for that girl,” says Jane*, a financial worker who lives in Epping, of Kebatu’s 14-year-old victim. “She’s had a horrible encounter with a man. Many, many of us have had it – and it leaves a mark, because it makes us realise that we are vulnerable and that men pretty much can touch us and do what they want. That’s a horrible thing to grow up with as a young girl and as a woman.”
The fact the incident has been used to serve a far-right political point has probably made it worse. “Now, that incident has become rape,” says Jane, referring to the many times protesters have described the incident in those inaccurate and more serious terms.
Jane and I speak in a side room of the local Quaker meeting hall, almost a year after the protests started. Epping for Everyone, a group Jane helped form as a result of the protests, has just held an event. It was supposed to be a community picnic, but sudden, squalling downpours meant it had to be moved inside. It doesn’t seem to matter. Kids chat while filling paper plates with crisps and sandwiches, their parents nursing cups of tea.
Epping for Everyone grew out of righteous anger. “For me, it was absolute anger that these men could turn up in our town and speak for me, speak for women, and talk about our women and girls and do it in such a violent, misogynistic, abusive, aggressive way,” says Jane. “I didn’t know what to do with myself.” At first, she started posting her views online to see if she could find any like-minded people. Her family warned her off saying anything, as the discourse had become so grim. “Obviously, I couldn’t help myself,” she says. She was met with abuse, but also got “lots of positive feedback from people saying: ‘Thank God someone said it, we are too scared to’”.
Around the same time, Amelia* found herself driving back from the shops, listening to Reform UK’s Nigel Farage speaking about Epping on a news bulletin. “I don’t think anybody in London even understands just how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale in this country,” he said. Amelia pulled over and called the radio station LBC, which was hosting a phone-in about the Bell. “I’d never done that before,” she says. “My hands were shaking, dialling the number.”
Jane heard the phone-in, realised she and Amelia had mutual friends and texted her. They arranged an all-female meeting in a park. “I sat on the bench going: please make someone come – and 30 women came and we were all outraged,” says Jane. “Most women who turned up would have had some experience of being sexually assaulted, abused, harassed, whatever, and we were being spoken about. How dare they tell my story?”
A WhatsApp group was formed, a Facebook logo designed. Epping for Everyone was a revelation for locals who felt isolated by the takeover of their town. Men soon joined, including Sherzod, and some members started volunteering at the hotel, helping the asylum seekers and teaching them English. “When I go into the hotel to volunteer, it’s not uncommon for people to drive past and shout: ‘Scum!’ at me,” says Jane.
The protests outside the Bell hotel dropped to once a week, every Sunday between 4pm and 6pm. In March 2026, Epping for Everyone posted a video on their social media channels showing the full effect of the disturbances on a woman and her family who lived close by: “The dog is very stressed out, the baby is stressed out, we can’t sit in the garden because of these people that are full of hate,” she says, as the sound of fireworks and loud shouting through megaphones threaten to drown her out. Rebecca, who I meet at the Quaker hall, talks of the gazebo put up on a patch of grass by protesters. “Sometimes they have prosecco,” she says. “It’s a real party, basically. But a very unpleasant party.”
As winter turned to spring, the men in the hotel were still living under a kind of house arrest, afraid for their safety. But then came a lifeline: a football tournament organised by the charity Care4Calais, scheduled for May. An Epping for Everyone member, Dom, the coach of a local Sunday league team, had been organising some of the Bell’s residents into a men’s team for an occasional kickabout. He says the prospect of the tournament “galvanised the boys. Something quite normal for us, to go out and have a game of football, was massive for them.”
They started training every day. It wasn’t safe for them to congregate in large numbers to play in the nearby park, so they organised training in the hotel’s concrete courtyard. “Drills, little games, learning from each other how they play,” says Dom, whom the hotel residents call “coach”.
They entered the competition as Bell FC. The tournament was held at the east London ground of Clapton FC, with six eight-a-side teams competing in 15-minute games. “It was a crazy day … we had thunderstorms, we had hail, then blazing sunshine,” says Dom. “I said to the boys: ‘Welcome to England.’”
Bell FC lost their first game, despite playing well. “The boys were devastated,” says Dom. “Because, for them, it was just this. There wasn’t a game next week. There wasn’t a league or anything else to do better next time. To them, it was fundamentally important that they did well at this.” That day, Ali had been told his application for asylum had been rejected. Dom says he looked despondent. But then he started banging a drum lying around the stands, chanting: “Bell hotel! Bell hotel! Bell hotel!”
Dom says: “They just got better and better and better.” Despite the setbacks, the weather and everything they had been through, Bell FC took home the trophy.
***
Epping’s high street may seem more affluent than others in the UK, but you don’t have to be here long to hear familiar problems. Outside a greasy spoon cafe, as her kids finish their breakfasts, a woman worries about the lack of council housing. Inside another cafe, nearer to the Bell, the owner is concerned about high business rates and says “they need to sort out all the potholes”.
The irony of Epping is that people have every right to be angry, but the protesters have chosen the wrong target. “Lots of people are just like: well, my children don’t have anywhere to live, there’s no social housing,” says Rebecca. Epping has long been associated with the politics of Thatcherism and privatisation, since Norman Tebbit was its MP. “You’ve been boasting about having the lowest council tax for ever and then wondering why there’s no money to fix the potholes,” she says.
It is only in the past month or so that things have started to calm down in the town. The flags that ran all along the high road and high street have been taken down by residents. Those who were putting up the flags have been discredited by a spate of recent arrests. Kitts pleaded guilty in May to assaulting a woman, while Ben Cullen, a Raise the Colours organiser in Oxfordshire, has been charged with making indecent images of children. He denies the charges.
The battle of the Bell hotel is over. On 11 June, the residents – including Ali, who has appealed against his rejected asylum claim, and the victorious football team – were taken without warning to a processing centre in another part of the country.
At first, the asylum seekers were told it was temporary, while some fire regulations were fixed, but it became apparent that it was part of a national strategy to empty asylum hotels. Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe, among others, has claimed victory, while pushing to make things even more hostile for asylum seekers.
Sherzod is mulling over whether to stay in Epping. Since the trauma of moving day last summer, half his boxes are yet to be unpacked. “The horrible genie has been let out of the bottle,” he says. “It’s like a disease; it’s spread even to people who were not racist before, and I still feel that whenever I go into town.”
I decide to go to Bell Common at 4pm on Sunday 14 June, where thousands once protested. As I approach, there are a handful of people standing by their parked cars on the side of the high road – but, three days after the hotel has been emptied, there are no placards, masks or prosecco. A middle-aged woman pulls an England flag from her car boot and drapes it around her shoulders.
Some are suspicious about whether the asylum seekers have been removed. I am told some of the protesters have gone around the back of the hotel to find out – filming their investigations for social media, naturally. I walk behind the hotel to find them and see police engaging with a group of people dressed mainly in black.
A year after the protests began, Epping is an English town torn in two. While Epping for Everyone has an alliance with the local Quaker church and focuses on community meetings, food bank collections, inclusivity and cohesion, the protesters meet on the side of the road, each arriving in their own car. They have forged their own sense of community that they can’t seem to let go, even though the asylum seekers have left the hotel – a community built on paranoia, the feeling that something is wrong and they are being lied to. The belief in social cohesion and shared understanding on one side is derided as “woke” by the other. But it strikes me as our only hope.
I pass an electricity pylon and reach a wooded area, where an exasperated security guard warns people not to come too close to the hotel. A bearded guy from Romford in a cap covered in “patriotic” badges, who later introduces himself as a former electrician and aspiring YouTuber called Richard Strange, streams while articulating his doubts that the Bell is really empty.
I talk to James*, a mechanic in his 20s. I ask him what a political party could offer to young people in Epping. “Just better support,” he says. “’Cause everyone remembers the good times, where you had a bit of extra money and you could go and buy that nice thing. You just want a better standard of living for everyone.” James says solving the migration crisis is part of that. I wonder how that argument became so successful. Is it because of the lack of an alternative narrative of hope from Keir Starmer’s Labour? I ask James if he would vote for Andy Burnham. “Possibly,” he says. “I try to be open-minded.”
Three young women dressed in black Juicy Couture hoodies, shorts and sparkly sliders are also sceptical that the Bell is empty; they creep up to the open windows at the back of the building for a closer look. One of them brandishes a stick to lift the curtains, while another films on her phone. When they see someone resting on a sofa inside, they all scream and run away. He is probably a security guard, but they say he is “a migrant”. The resulting footage is clipped up and posted on a TikTok account, soundtracked by an AI-generated song called What the Fuck Has Happened to Britain?. On the way back, one of them shows off a prize she has found: Bell FC’s football.
*Names have been changed
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