Protests and Tensions Surrounding Asylum Seeker Housing in Thetford and RAF Barnham

‘I don’t talk to mainstream media,” says a young man in an Arsenal shirt. I’ve just asked what brought him to the latest protest against the housing of asylum seekers in Thetford, Norfolk, and his disdain is clear as he goes to warn other protesters of the Guardian’s presence. This isn’t exactly the unity promised by the flyer advertising today’s march: “Everyone welcome: families, friends, dogs. Including the media.”

The protest is planned as a two-mile march from Thetford’s market square to RAF Barnham, a site just over the border in Suffolk, which is due to house asylum seekers while they progress through the system. It is the latest part of a campaign that has lasted the whole summer. Banners line the square, the largest succinctly describing why people are gathering here today: “Thetford and Barnham says no to asylum seekers.”

Some of the protesters are from Thetford, others from farther afield, but mostly Norfolk or Suffolk. I have been visiting Thetford in the weeks before the protest and, while the reasoning of the protesters varies, many say it comes down to numbers. How can this site house 1,250 people when the nearest village has a population of only 600?

Some say the country can’t afford to keep housing asylum seekers as they wait to be processed, or that there are simply too many coming in, or that we don’t know who they are. Asylum seekers are referred to by some here as “boat people” and “invaders”. The suggestion that Britain has lost control of its borders is nothing new. But new theories still materialise. At a protest the week before the march, one attender suggested that people may be being sent intentionally from Iran. “They say that they are sending some of the terrorists over to the UK and we have no idea who comes off the boats,” a protester, David Goulty, told me. “There’s no control on who comes into the country.”

In opposition, Labour criticised the Conservative policy of housing asylum seekers on military bases. But in October last year, now in government, it changed tack. The sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by a resident of the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, had prompted months of angry local protests against the housing of asylum seekers in hotels. Keir Starmer announced that military bases would be used once again.

Labour was explicit about the reason for the U-turn: “We know that communities don’t want asylum seekers housed in hotels, and neither does the government, and that’s why we are determined to fix the mess that we’ve inherited by getting a grip of the issue and committing to close every single asylum hotel, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds.”

Typically of Starmer’s time as prime minister, the people he was trying to appease with this policy responded: “Thanks, we hate it.”

Now, the Home Office is actively working to expand or open five sites, two of which are already active. MDP Wethersfield, a former RAF airfield in Essex, houses 800 asylum seekers, but could increase its capacity to more than 1,200. Crowborough training camp in East Sussex plans to increase its numbers from 350 to 540; a volunteer vigilante patrol group has been set up in the area to “protect” locals from migrants. Three large military sites are being readied with a reported capacity of 1,250 each: MOD Bicester in Oxfordshire; RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire; and RAF Barnham.

Much of the classic sitcom Dad’s Army was shot in Thetford, including the external shots of the episode that ends with the show’s most famous joke: “Don’t tell ’em, Pike!” The Guildhall on the market square, where the protesters congregate to start the march today, was often used as a backdrop.

The Dad’s Army museum is on the other side of the Guildhall. One of the protesters is an 80-year-old US air force veteran who thinks the UK should emulate Trump’s immigration policy. He sees a group of tourists being led on the Dad’s Army guided tour and invites them to join the march. It’s clear they would rather hear more tales of Jones, Mainwaring and Pike.

On the other side of the square, Anwar Noor, 63, is selling ice-creams from his truck to people gathering for the march. Noor came to Thetford from Kenya in the 1980s and worked in the Thermos factory for 17 years, before being made redundant when it closed. (Thermos moved manufacturing to Asia in 2000. Other big employers, such as the factory that processed Danepak bacon, have since closed, leading to the loss of hundreds of jobs.) Noor started another business, a scrapyard, before joining the ice-cream trade a couple of years back as he started his semi-retirement.

You could argue that Thetford is East Anglia’s capital of integration. In 1903, it elected the first black mayor in the UK, Allan Glaisyer Minns, who was born in the Bahamas and had trained as a doctor at Guy’s hospital in London. There is an established Portuguese community, congregating this morning at a cafe near the square, drinking bottles of Super Bock beer as a very loud wildlife documentary about porcupines plays on TV. The community moved here in their hundreds in the 2000s, after big East Anglian agribusinesses, including the turkey giant Bernard Matthews, set up recruitment offices in the country.

There is a statue of Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, who was exiled to Britain from Punjab and became a favourite of Queen Victoria, living in Elveden Hall, just over the Suffolk border. His son, Prince Freddy Duleep Singh, became a scholar of Norfolk life and gave Thetford the Ancient House, a home thought to have been built in about 1490, which is still used as a public museum.

But, as Ian Jack wrote in 2007, during a visit in which he marvelled at Thetford’s burgeoning Portuguese community, while suggesting the town was already paranoid about immigration statistics: “To compare Prince Freddy with the immigrant ham-slicer or turkey-gutter is of course ridiculous.”

There had already been unrest around immigration when Jack visited the town. In 2004, as New Labour’s second of three terms was nearing its end, Thetford was topping tables for deprivation and child poverty while coming bottom for skills and education. That summer, after England lost to Portugal in the quarter-finals of the European Championship, the Red Lion pub on the market square was besieged by more than 200 hooligans, trapping about 120 people – mostly Portuguese – inside the pub. They pelted the building with bottles and stones, smashed windows and tried to force their way in. Police called in reinforcements from all over Norfolk and several officers and pub customers were said to have sustained cuts from flying glass. It was more than two hours before those inside could leave.

The Red Lion, now a Wetherspoons, feels more sedate today. It sits on the edge of the market square, which, in the sun, feels like a piazza with added pints. And yet Noor, as he doles out ice-creams, says he can understand why people are angry. “You probably noticed as you walked through the town how many shops are closed, post offices gone. All the banks are gone. You can see the centre hollowing out.” Noor says he understands local people’s frustration and that he has never experienced racism in Thetford. But he believes that blaming asylum seekers is “all wrong. We’re all in the same boat.”

At times this August, what has happened in this small Norfolk town has seemed portentous, at risk of provoking another summer of unrest in England, after events in Southport in 2024 and Epping in 2025 led to protests around the country.

At the start of this month, the addresses of some houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) used to house asylum seekers in Thetford were leaked. This led to crowds of vigilantes targeting the properties on 4, 5 and 6 August.

During the second night of unrest, hundreds of people descended on a terrace house on Clover Way in the 70s-built Fairfields estate. Some threw rocks and eggs, smashing an upstairs window, while others attempted to get inside. During these days of disorder, police officers were spat at, while one was hit by a rock and another was bitten. According to police, some of the vigilantes even entered a property and forced out a resident, stealing their mobile phone.

More than 20 people were arrested on suspicion of a variety of offences, including racially aggravated public order, inciting racial hatred and conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary, as well as possession of cocaine with intent to supply, possession of cannabis and driving without insurance.

On the day of the Thetford to Barnham march, I visit Clover Way. The house that was once home to asylum seekers is immediately identifiable by the dried yolk that remains on the windows, almost three weeks after the eggs were thrown.

One of the neighbours comes out to have a cigarette. She tells me she had to flee to a friend’s house over the road on the night the crowds came; since losing her husband last year, she lives on her own. She suggests I speak to her neighbour, John Finch, 91. He says the people who sold the house that was besieged were initially going to sell it to a family, but they were gazumped by a company, which offered more money.

On the night the protesters arrived, the crowds stood on Finch’s flowerbeds and trampled his plants. He saw the melee out of his window, but decided to go to bed. “I slept through it,” he says. He was in the RAF police branch that served in Cyprus when Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots started firing at each other. “I’ve seen worse.”

When the disturbances went viral online, it brought infamy to this quiet street. The next day, film crews arrived, as did people keen to see the newly famous house covered in egg. “There were a lot of people coming,” says Finch. “They were coming in cars and stopping and just looking at it. And I think: it’s an empty bloody house, for Christ’s sake.” He shrugs. “Perhaps it was the highlight of their life.” Thankfully, after those three ugly nights, the violent disorder in Thetford fizzled out. But the anti-asylum protests continued.

The first protest against the use of RAF Barnham to house asylum seekers was in June 2026. Now, every Sunday, they happen like clockwork at 2pm. The week before the march from Thetford town centre to RAF Barnham, I visit the protest camp at the military base.

I park on the dry grass verge and walk towards the protest, noticing a makeshift shed offering drinks to protesters for whatever they can afford. A shirtless fortysomething man with a tan greets me and asks if I want a drink. Clinton Warner grew up across the road from the site and knows its history. He runs a used-car company and each weekend he moves his stock out of the way, so that there is parking space to accommodate the protesters.

Warner tells me a contract worker, tasked with servicing the sewers on the RAF Barnham site, gave him a tipoff about the plan to house asylum seekers there. He decided to blow the whistle. “They were asked to recommission it, so the contractors knew about it seemingly before the councillors,” he says. “We put it online.”

RAF Barnham has been used in many ways over the years. It has been a logistics hub for the RAF, and during the second world war it was a mustard gas and munitions storage facility. After the war, it was commissioned by Churchill to store nuclear bombs and everyone forgot about the mustard gas stored underground. Warner remembers being warned: “Do not remove wildlife from these ponds, do not pick the lilies, do not remove the flowers, leave everything, because it’s all hazardous.”

The use of sites such as Barnham to house asylum seekers isn’t only controversial with concerned residents. Two years ago, the UK parliament’s home affairs select committee wrote that the use of large military sites to house asylum claimants had “generally proved more costly to deliver than hotel accommodation”. Military sites cost more because of the cost of refurbishing them; they are often in a poor state of repair.

When it comes to the asylum issue, the UK government seldom learns the lessons published by parliament. Rather than respond to the evidence, the government seems trapped in a reactionary loop, apparently keen to be seen to do something punitive.

“In policy discourse, there’s this concern about how some asylum accommodation can function as a pull factor,” says Nuni Jorgensen, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. “Politicians often say hotels can work as a pull factor because people imagine that these are fancy hotels and that’s why they come to the UK. But the evidence that we have on that is not very clear.” That hasn’t stopped politicians such as Reform UK’s Nigel Farage making hay with the suggestion. Jorgensen adds, however, that there is a lot of evidence showing that larger sites negatively affect asylum seekers’ wellbeing.

When it comes to housing, asylum planning boils down to three choices. Hotels are cheaper when it comes to housing many migrants at one site. HMOs seem a good option when it comes to integration and infrastructure, but are hampered by the reality of house prices. And then there are military sites, which are notoriously difficult to use for this purpose.

Hotels are easier to source than HMOs, says Jorgensen, but they “have been linked to very poor mental-health outcomes among residents”, as the conditions are often cramped and unclean and isolate them from the community. Dispersal to neighbourhood HMOs has, historically, been the Home Office’s preferred option. “They tend to be cheaper than hotels. They tend to produce the best wellbeing outcomes for asylum seekers. The problem is that they are very hard to find in some areas.”

The failure of the hotels policy and suspicion around private management of HMOs are among the issues that have led to the use of large military sites.

It is clear that these sites are controversial. Along with the volunteer vigilante patrol group in Crowborough, a village near RAF Bicester has voted symbolically to leave the UK over the policy. The use of military sites to house asylum seekers has, in a way, united left and right in opposition, but on very different grounds. Human rights campaigners say they amount to a form of “open-prison camp”, while Reform UK likens them to holiday camps.

On my first visit to RAF Barnham, I meet Terry Curtis, 40, one of the protest movement’s organisers. He was present at the HMO protests in early August, he says, but left “when things escalated … because it’s not what we’re here for”. He says the police were heavy-handed in their tactics; he mentions that a woman on a mobility scooter was pepper-sprayed. No one I speak to who was present at the HMO protests seems to have considered how afraid those living in the affected properties must have been.

Curtis moved to Thetford from south London when he was 15 and still supports Millwall. London accents can be heard all over Thetford. In the 1950s, the town’s