Frinton-on-Sea: a British town haunted by phantom crime

Perched on the East Anglian coast of Essex, with its cricket club, tennis club and golf club laid out side by side along the sea front, Frinton-on-Sea is about as genteel as England gets today.

Until 2000, it was too posh for a pub, although as one resident put it, “you could remain permanently pissed; you just did it in the golf club or the yacht club”.

Today, Frinton has just one pub, the Lock & Barrell, and one fish and chip shop, Young’s Other Plaice. Its spacious, solidly built houses are homes to the prosperous and the elderly – hence the cruel local catchphrase: “Harwich for the Continent, Frinton for the incontinent”.

Beneath this serene exterior, however, Frinton is a roiling ferment of fear. It emerged this week that hundreds of its 4,000 residents are paying £2 a week for a private security firm to patrol its streets every night from 7pm to 7am. Frinton’s police station closed 20 years ago and its closest station today, in Walton, is about to shut because of budget cuts. This will mean the nearest station will be eight miles away, in the emphatically un-genteel Clacton-on-Sea, with its amusement arcades, fast-food joints, busy pubs and raucous clubs.

Security guards

Even without its private security guards, Frinton is not entirely unprotected and the local council spends half its budget employing six police community support officers, uniformed civilians who support the police. According to local councillor

Giles Watling

, their reports seldom include anything more dramatic than a row between husband and wife, or a bit of drunk and disorderly.

“Crime in our area is generally very low-scale.Occasionally we might get a house- breaking, someone is caught, and that’s the end of that. We do have some issues of antisocial behaviour which can be very problematic for those affected, but there is very little,” he said.

Back in 2007, Frinton did face the problem of large groups of youths frightening some older people on the high street. Watling, a professional actor with an easy, friendly manner, started a “Regain the Streets” campaign with his wife, venturing out every Friday night to confront the young culprits.

“They were, as I suspected, on the whole very decent kids, just finding something to do. Over a period of months we integrated with them and I persuaded many of our older residents to join us. We finally had no problem at all – the kids knew us and we them – the fear had gone. Kids are welcome to our town,” he said.

Anxiety

Frinton’s anxiety about crime may owe something to its proximity to Clacton, where cheap accommodation has attracted many newly released prisoners, and the more impoverished Jaywick, further along the coast. All three towns are within the parliamentary constituency of Clacton, the only one in the country with a Ukip MP, the Conservative defector

Douglas Carswell

. Watling stood for the Conservatives against Carswell in a byelection last year and again in the general election in May, cutting the Ukip majority from 12,000 to 3,000.

The biggest issue on the doorstep throughout the constituency was immigration, despite the fact there are very few foreign migrants to be found there. “We have negligible migrants in this district. It’s all impression. And Ukip have been peddling fear, a fear of migration that doesn’t exist,” Watling said. “They’re migrants themselves, a lot of the people who live here. It’s interesting, you knock on a door and people say: we don’t want any more people coming from London. So you say: where do you come from? Dagenham. They don’t get the irony.

Jaywick, the subject of a Channel 5 documentary series similar to Channel Four's Benefits Street, is home to many white, working-class people who left Dagenham in east London after the decline of the car industry. Even the street names celebrate the glory days of British motor manufacturing, with avenues called Triumph, Rover and Crossley.

With Frinton’s fear of a phantom crime wave and Jaywick’s anger at an imaginary influx of migrants, the two ends of the Clacton constituency may have more in common than either imagines. Both yearn for a happier, less complicated world, an imagined England with no crime, no immigration, secure jobs and an established social order.

One Cabinet minister who visited the constituency during the election campaign summed it up: “What do we want? The 1950s. When do we want it? Then.”