Special East Tilbury: a Czech modernist Utopia on the Thames marshes
There is one corner of England that is forever Czech. If you drive through the open, windswept landscape of the Thames marshes just beyond the eastern suburbs of London, you come to a rather unlikely modernist Czech Utopia. This is the small town of East Tilbury, built almost entirely in the 1930s. When the great Czech shoe magnate, Tomas Bata, arrived here 75 years ago, this was nothing but farmland. It was the time when the Bata shoe empire, which he had built up in the eastern Czech town of Zlin was expanding fast, with a mission to "shoe the world". Tomas Bata was building state of the art factories, and often whole communities, in countries as far apart as Brazil and India. East Tilbury was one of these towns.
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