Since I was due to attend a meeting in Thurrock, I thought I would get a sense of the area and visit Bata-ville, the early modernist development in East Tilbury, which was laid out in green fields east of Tilbury in 1932. The local vicar invited Tomas Bata to set up a shoe factory in order to provide employment during the recession. Bata employed the Czech architects Vladimir Karfik and Frantizek Gahura to draw up a masterplan for a company town complete with parks, factories and dormitories for the single workers. There is a heroic statue of Tomas Bata who was killed in an air crash in 1933:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 