Thetford, once home to Boudica, Thomas Paine and the last Maharaja of the Punjab, has an unusual history of dramatic migration stories. The Norfolk market town, where pine-thick forest meets A11 bypass, was Queen Boudica of the Iceni’s base when she drew up her battle plan to overthrow the Romans. It is also where, nearly two millennia later, the population grew faster than any other town in the country when Londoners were moved there en masse after the Second World War.
Home to old East Enders in new-town housing and dissident rural gentry (elements of which were nicknamed the “Turnip Taliban” by the area’s ex-MP Liz Truss), the town is said to be so unequal that there’s a ten-year difference in life expectancy between the Tesco end and the Sainsbury’s end.
Tensions regarding outsiders have always existed in Thetford. In 2004, when England was knocked out of the Euros by Portugal on penalties, hundreds of England fans threw bottles, bricks and bits of paving slabs at the Red Lion pub, which was Portuguese-owned and where Portuguese fans were watching the match with their English friends.
Rioting returned this year in August, when a group of at least 100 people sought out several houses thought to house asylum seekers and smashed windows, fences and a door, threw eggs, rocks and stones, and tried to break in. A list of addresses had been circulating around local Facebook groups, according to reports. Police officers were attacked. At one property, asylum seekers were escorted out by police for their own safety – to shouts of “bye”, “get out” and “refugees not welcome”.
Anger had been mounting in the town since Home Office proposals to house up to 1,250 asylum seekers in a nearby military site, RAF Barnham, were revealed in June. That month, the local Labour MP, Terry Jermy (who opposes this plan), was chased down the street by a mob.
Regular peaceful protests at the airbase had morphed into violence echoing that in Belfast two months ago, when rioters went door-to-door, setting fire to properties as they tried to identify houses occupied by immigrant residents.
Though the violence in Thetford is shocking, it didn’t come as a surprise to me. When I reported last year from nearby Diss, where an asylum hotel became a lightning rod for similar protests, I saw the visceral rage on its genteel high street. I didn’t need to prompt locals to open up about their views on the asylum accommodation. One man saw my notebook and came bounding up to me, begging me to join him in his mission to antagonise the hotel staff.
Attacks on asylum hotels and police guarding them are now a feature of British summertime. But the recent targeting of specific addresses could be a sign that these were just the beginning of our race-riot problem. The government’s mission to close asylum hotels simply means displacing people to house shares in poor areas where rents are cheap.
These are houses in multiple occupation, or “HMOs”. In the case of asylum housing, they are leased out by landlords to profit-making private firms such as Serco – companies that receive billions of pounds’ worth of government contracts. These contractors and their private-landlord business partners win out – one Serco landlord told me he made £1,500 a month on a Norfolk property, plus what he felt was an “unlimited chequebook” for renovation.
The asylum seekers, holed up in often poorly maintained properties, are banned from working and kept in a miserable limbo by the Home Office. Frustration builds among locals who notice rents being pushed up, and feel their new neighbours are jumping the council house queue (though these homes are in the private rental market, not council stock).
As I investigated this system for months following the rioting last summer, I became concerned that as the government tried to avoid further unrest – rehousing asylum seekers not just in HMOs but military bases – the toxic social dynamics we had seen in certain hotspots would ripple across the country. The violence in Thetford suggests this has begun.
Andy Burnham has lamented this outsourced system, suggesting he would stop the poorest postcodes being commandeered for HMOs. But if there’s “no justice until there are Serco houses in Kensington”, as one former Labour minister put it to me, then we will be waiting a long time for a policy fix.
At one HMO I visited in Wigan – where many locals deplore the number of properties being carved up into house shares – I came across a resident called Adebimpe, a 36-year-old Nigerian woman, who sought asylum on a student visa. She had fled a gang-related conflict: her husband had fallen in with “bad friends”, and she left to avoid a “fight” in which they “would come for me”. She chose Britain because she spoke English and had some family here. Back home, she had run a shop selling flour, sugar and butter, as well as Bibles and other Church materials. Her ambition was to open a shop here, but she wasn’t allowed to work. In the meantime, she’d been volunteering in a charity clothes shop. All she wanted, she told me, was “peace in my life”.
[Further reading: Inside the battle to control Labour]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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