Yesterday’s Financial Times featured an interview with former Epping resident Griff Rhys Jones. He wasn’t very complimentary about the town:

His teens were spent in Epping, Essex, which he found “excruciatingly suburban … A high street full of shoe shops and very, very quiet streets where people look behind curtains at people who arrive”. He found it claustrophobic, vowing to get as close to the centre of London as possible: “I’m not a very sit-still sort of person. I tend to think ‘oh, let’s go out for lunch now; let’s go do this now’ or ‘what shall we do tonight?’.”

The shoe shops have all now gone but most streets are still pretty quiet – which I think is how most local people like it.

The attraction of Epping to many residents is that they can relish the shiny lights of London along the Central Line and also cherish the ability to return home to a quieter location with countryside on the doorstep.