It’s a slow afternoon in Ipswich town centre, and Ibrahim is predicting the end times outside a derelict Debenhams. Two years living in East Anglia has obviously taken its toll on the Nigerian preacher. “In the ashes of yesterday, we are trying to rekindle the fire of faith,” he says, amid the festering civic decay and nervous shoppers.
Up by the station, there’s a day-tripping exodus in search of a different kind of salvation. They’re heading to Woodbridge, officially Britain’s happiest town, just 10 minutes away on the train. “They’re building an Anglo-Saxon longship,” announces a 60-year-old American Air Force veteran as the train moves from the torpid Ipswich sprawl to rolling Suffolk green. “Today I just feel like I need to touch its wood and feel its magic.”
Down by the riverside, droves of bewildered Ipswich families waddle through this arcadian dream. The 7th-century ship is being rebuilt there, carefully watched over by Georgian houses shrouded in blossom and stern solitude. The last time this idyll was disturbed was in 1915, when a lost German Zeppelin dropped an incendiary bomb on an old lady. “I hope you’re not going to write more nice things about us,” snaps an unnervingly well-preserved woman in her 70s, when I ask for the secrets to the town’s happiness. “We don’t want everyone moving here.”
Thirty miles south of here, Matthew Parris once decried Clacton-on-Sea as a festering boil of resentment on England’s eastern hinterlands — whose reactionary politics would hold back the inevitable progress of 21st-century England. But 30 miles up the coast, in Woodbridge, the columnist ignored an equally retrograde mirror to English modernity. It hosts barely 8,000 people, but Woodbridge is the platonic form of a burgeoning middle-class dream. Forged in the popular consciousness during the so-called “posh turn” of the 2010s, it envisages a new aesthetic for national legitimacy, one now luring a wave of professionals desperate for a glimmer of old England — or indeed escape from a new one. Welcome, then, to a retrograde revolution, one that could upend politics as fundamentally as Reform’s march on England’s post-industrial towns.
While the demographic story of the decade has been about immigration into Britain’s cities, an overlooked trend is this steady scale of internal migration towards rural areas. Countryside semis are now the strongest performing property type, as house price growth in rural areas has started to outstrip Britain’s towns and cities. No wonder. People living in the countryside live longer, are more economically active, happier and less lonelier than those in Britain’s cities. It’s a flourishing Woodbridge flaunts: Santa Monica packs of women in lycra power walk past crooked Elizabethan shopfronts. A red phone box has been converted into a Happiness Hub.
But this is more than just an escape to the country. Speak to the locals, rather, and it feels almost atavistic — a kind of broadband-powered Merrie England, dovetailed by three-day working weeks and evening saunters through the churchyard to yoga. People here explain their world via euphemisms from Sunday Times property supplements. Nice community, good schools, good walks. “Classic Britain, how it should be,” says Greg, rather more pointedly, standing in overalls next to a shipping yard full of forgotten boats. “It’s hard to imagine that’s over there, and that this is here,” he says, pointing beyond the shimmering haze of Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon burial site on the River Deben, and out towards Ipswich.
Greg’s life before Woodbridge, in the England he left behind, is recalled as one long regret: a purgatory of drabness. Stuck in lorries and delivery vans orbiting Birmingham, Leicester, Newcastle. A life punctuated by motorway stations, Wetherspoons and random acts of extreme violence. In Sparkhill, his delivery van was attacked by a gang of ski-masked youths. Two years ago, he broke down outside Woodbridge, “the safe haven” as he calls it. He hasn’t left since.
The town council here reflects a mix of Greens and Liberal Democrats who dominate local politics in the area. It’s a progressive ascendency that has coincided with an influx from London, dramatically reshaping the standard fare of provincial politics. Out have gone the stuffy cabal of port-coloured county solicitors, replaced by middle-aged Gore-Tex progressives. One disgruntled local describes it as nothing less than a “woke coup”. Overnight came climate emergency declarations, bee cafes in rewilded fields, and a Black Lives Matter banner hung on the 16th-century shire hall (the latter lasted just two days before being torn down by assailants in a white van).
Yet as Greg’s eagerness for a safe haven implies, Woodbridge is no less reactionary against the state of modern England than the Reform vote set to dominate the headlines. The New Middle England Ed Davey has said he wants to win over — one formed of Lib Dems and Tory turncoats — share the same concerns around the scale of immigration as the rest of the country. The local party machine, built around Nimbyism, is the scourge of Labour radicals set to arm themselves with new planning powers. But it’s also an effective expression of mistrust and paranoia over further encroachment of what increasingly feels like a different polity altogether, squatting in Ipswich and the growing London swell.
Labour’s proposed devolution changes — the reason elections here are delayed — would see councillors overshadowed by a beefed-up mayoral authority. Locals fear this centralisation of devolved power is a ruse to help Starmer build his New Jerusalem of 1.5 million homes and net-zero infrastructure.
The area has already had a taste of this New England. A suburbanising march from Ipswich has already started to take shape. The city, one of Britain’s fastest growing, has reached its boundaries, and a planned 82% rise in the housing stock conjures visions of the daytrippers staying for good. So too Labour’s plans to triple Britain’s solar capacity, already reshaping hundreds of acres of surrounding countryside. Then there’s Sizewell C, the new nuclear power station, a symbol in concrete of the upheaval reshaping the area.
“People have committed suicide in Leiston [near Sizewell C] because of how their village is changing,” says the Lib Dem county councillor Ruth Leach, still wearing her name badge as she tucks into a bacon roll by the riverfront. It’s a Saturday morning, and the road from Ipswich is already heaving with a fleet of polished vintage cars, battered vans, and 4x4s, the latter reverberating with Kurdish pop. Robin Sanders, the jovial mayor, full of bon mots and local anecdotes, takes a darker turn when forced to consider the town’s future. “We are a frontline on the cusp of huge change,” he says. “My concern is, in 20 years time, we will just become part of Ipswich.”
Harnessing this anxiety was the Lib Dem strategy behind yesterday’s elections — a prelude to the inevitable upheavals of 2029. Theirs is a populism of the village hall, with gains promised from Devon and Gloucester to the Surrey Downs. The formula of this new politics is Reform with an Aga, a reactionary localism hostile to Westminster’s desperate attempts at nation building, leavened by deep contempt for the political establishment and fired by fears over England’s future. Tellingly, Ed Davey bears a striking resemblance to those reassuring busybodies who’ve mounted a civic defence of Woodbridge against New England.
“Ed Davey bears a striking resemblance to those reassuring busybodies who’ve mounted a civic defence of Woodbridge against New England.”
Yet where people like Eamonn O’Nolan differ from the Right is in their vision for the future: less Anglofuturist dynamism, more the Sunday Times property supplement taken to its logical extreme, mixed with a heavy dose of climate apocalypticism. The former mayor was immortalised in 2019, after being arrested in full mayoral robes alongside George Monbiot during an Extinction Rebellion protest, an action he insists was supported by the town. “People have no imagination for how bad things will get,” he says from the Cherry Tree Pub, reflecting on the threat of climate change with the same wistful owl-sad eyes as on that famous day in Whitehall. “People are going to die, they’re already dying,” he tells me, as farmers and teenagers gather by the bar, oblivious to their fate.
O’Nolan’s solution? A provincial autarky of “living within our postcode”. Services to be fully localised, food confined to Suffolk farms, energy secured via micro grids. Cars would be discouraged, the rivers would run clean and the refitted cottages would once again wallow in pre-industrial arcadia. Is this realistic? Perhaps not, but it’s preferable to what O’Nolan sees as being tethered to modern England’s “growth obsessed” 21st century, with Woodbridge dragged into a homogenised “masterplan to overpopulate the area” — all without any consideration for the local way of life.
O’Nolan says this steady descent into overpopulation, civic indifference and a “growth-obsessed” model of living is already overshadowing his town. He says I should travel to the housing estates slowly mushrooming into the soulless torpor characteristic of new-build Britain. Heading east, deeper into Suffolk, I find Rendlesham, where Anglo Saxon Kings first encountered Christianity. Over the last two decades, it’s expanded into a generous housing estate. Georgian pastiches dress themselves up in garden centre attire. Retirement flats look like conference stays in a motorway inn. “It has the atmosphere of a town built in the desert to test a nuclear weapon,” says a resident of one nearby village.
Once upon a time, Rendlesham’s developers imagined a “self-sustaining settlement for the 21st century” replete with theatres, sports facilities and bustling community spaces — in other words, a second Woodbridge. But this vision has gone the way of another archetype: Northstowe, Britain’s newest town, recently singled out by Labour as an example of a flailing developer-driven model in need of “kickstarting”. Rendelsham’s latest development plan, ahead of a new wave of building, quietly laments “a lack of community cohesion and infrastructure”.
On the edge of the village is the vanguard of England’s house-building march, a new Persimmon estate and a desperate pastiche of Surrey serenity. Fathers power-hose their brand new Mazdas, their tidy lawns bordering an ancient forest where scholars believe Beowulf was first performed, and where UFOs have apparently been spotted.
Steve is one the new buyers. He’s a retired ambulance driver from near Chelmsford, an Essex emigre. “It’s not a nice place these days,” he says of his old home. “They want to fight you, stab you, sell you drugs or all three.” He and his wife are the oldest on the estate and love it. Houses — according to the estate agent — are not being bought with mortgages but inheritance and relocation money. A bored policeman stops by and they talk about chaffinches and woodcocks. Anything that evokes the old home before it became part of the London spread. “Eventually,” Steve jokes, “all the property in these parts will run out, and if you want to get away, you’ll have to move out into the sea.”
Back in Woodbridge, the evening dawns. By the river, locals fantasise about the day the 7th-century replica ship will carry them off across the Deben to the National Trust Valhalla of Sutton Hoo. For the rest of us, it’s time to go home. From the magic dusk of Woodbridge, we emerge to a feral night in Ipswich.
Apocalyptic preachers spar with homeless drug addicts (“Demons bro,” explains one of the evangelisers). Boozy farmers out on the piss peacock past packs of Kurdish teenagers. Recently arrived young migrants from Africa stand in doorways of dead retail, looking bored and disappointed. “What the fuck is going on up there?” mumbles an old bloke catching the bus out of town, as a strangled howl echoes past the faded Victoriana of the Corn Exchange.
Leaving Clacton-on-Sea, Matthew Parris lamented it as a symbol of a “Britain going nowhere”. The future, he claimed, lay in turning your back on the “nostalgic and fearful” of the periphery, places alien to the buzz and potential of Britain’s cosmopolitan, glass-towered hubs, gazing out into the 21st century. But now, Britain’s middle classes have taken up that forbidden mood, carrying it into the market towns and villages. Here, politics is a matter of being left alone, to dream of another England.
