East Tilbury

East Tilbury is a community in the borough of Thurrock in Essex, England. The community is in two main parts, being the older village near the banks of the River Thames, and a garden village to the north which was initially called Bataville, founded in the 1930s to serve the Bata shoe factory.

East Tilbury was an ancient parish. It was abolished as a civil parish in 1936 on the creation of Thurrock Urban District, which in turn became the modern borough of Thurrock in 1974. The ecclesiastical parish has also been abolished, and the area now forms part of a Church of England ecclesiastical parish called "East and West Tilbury and Linford". East Tilbury gives its name to one of the wards of Thurrock, which covers a larger area than the old parish of East Tilbury, additionally including the separate villages of West Tilbury and Linford. At the 2021 census the ward had a population of 7,713 and the East Tilbury built up area as defined by the Office for National Statistics (which just covers the garden village part of East Tilbury) had a population of 5,750.

There is evidence of Romano-British settlement in what is now East Tilbury as far back as the 1st and 2nd centuries. The first written record of the settlement was likely in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 653. During the Anglo-Saxon period, it likely formed a single manorial estate of Tilbury, which subsequently fragmented into East Tilbury and West Tilbury. Coalhouse Fort on the banks of the Thames was constructed in the 1860s. From the 1930s to 1960s, the area experienced significant growth with the opening of the Bata shoe factory and the construction of Bataville to house its thousands of workers.