| Summary : East Tilbury is a rural community on the north bank of the River Thames, lying to the south of a branch of the main London to Southend railway line, approximately two miles east of the town Tilbury. It encompasses two quite distinct settlements: a historic riverside village and a purpose-built industrial village largely developed between the 1930s and the 1960s for the British Bata Shoe Company Ltd. Rising slightly above its low marshland setting, East Tilbury village is formed of a single street, with a few outlying houses and farms, edged to the east and south by an important group of 19th- and 20th-century military sites. The product of an incremental development, the village retains some historic buildings, most notably the medieval parish church, but is now largely characterised by late-20th-century housing. The factory and housing of the Bata settlement combines Garden-City planning and Modernist architecture (see records 1456932 and 1456875) and was one of a number of similarly designed satellites or colonies that the parent firm, based in Czechoslovakia, was constructing around the world in the 1930s. Post-Bata additions include a 1970s private residential development, a library and school. |