Among the crowded shelves of Sacred Heart hardware store in Crowborough, there is a gap on the wall where the kitchen knives used to be displayed.
As the local rumour of recent days goes, that space is linked to the news story of the moment in the East Sussex town: the imminent arrival of hundreds of asylum seekers at a nearby military training camp.
Tom Jarman, the manager, says he was asked to move the knives two weeks ago by police who told him it was part of a knife crime campaign. “Considering the timing, whether that’s to do with the camp, I don’t know,” he says.
It is typical of the confusion and apprehension in the town of about 22,000 people, where local people are fighting plans to house up to 540 “single adult male” asylum seekers at Crowborough training camp, a site used for the training of military cadets.
The location was identified as part of a Home Office pledge to remove asylum seekers from hotel accommodation before the end of this parliament. Though the government says no decision has been made on Crowborough, some people are already preparing for what they see as an incursion on their quiet town. They are doing everything they can to stop it.
Accusations of vigilantism have been levelled at the community after a group set up to patrol the streets wearing hats and hi-vis vests made national news.
Outside Waitrose on Tuesday night, three members of Crowborough Patrol are keen to distance themselves from this “vigilante” label. “I mean it’s just ridiculous,” says one of the founders of the group, Nick Jones, who used to be a scout leader. “I mean, we’re all men over the age of 40 and we’ve even got one 70-year-old who’s joined us. It’s just crazy.”
They are there to respond to community fears of attacks and establish themselves as part of the community before the arrival of the asylum seekers, they say.
Jones says: “We have to wait 30 minutes for the police to get here from Eastbourne. So if you’re being attacked, you’ve got to say, can you just hold on stabbing me for a bit?”
They would only tackle crime in the most serious situations, he says, having had training from a local lawyer in their powers of citizen’s arrest.
Most people in Crowborough who speak to the Guardian oppose the plan, but there are a handful of dissenting voices. Tony Musumeci, who runs Mattia Italian deli, says in nine years in the UK people had been incredibly friendly to him. “I think it’s OK for people to come here,” he said noting that in Sicily, where he is from, there’s a large volume of immigration into the city. “Everyone in Europe takes people.”
But that more relaxed view is not much in evidence on Tuesday night. As Jones is giving his reasons for participating in the patrol, his two-way radio crackles, with a voice reporting that one of the people standing outside the training camp “has been assaulted by a worker, police everywhere”.
A few minutes down the road in a wooded country lane, police escort cars are ferrying workers out of the camp past about 50 activists from the town. Local people have flown drones over and believe these staff are cleaners getting the site ready for the impending arrival of the asylum seekers – which, because of the numbers of police officers present this evening, they are beginning to suspect is happening tonight.
“Because it’s gonna be a middle of the night jobby, isn’t it?” one man says. “They’re not gonna bring them in during the day.”
There is a simmering sense that something is about to happen, though nobody in the crowd – a mix of men and women, ranging from teenagers to retirees – quite knows what. Police officers reply tersely to questions about why they are out in force. As Steve Barnett, a local builder, puts it: “Usually, and I’m not being rude, you can hear a fox fart at 10 o’clock in Crowborough.”
One officer admits they had responded to reports of a hammer attack, which now appears not to be true, though they will now not leave until the crowd are all in bed. Instead, more are arriving.
At 9.15pm, Sussex police issue a temporary section 34 dispersal notice giving officers powers to remove anyone causing antisocial behaviour. That heightens tensions further – for many, it is confirmation that the area is being cleared to move in the asylum seekers within hours.
A rumour spreads that two coachloads of asylum seekers have gone in, but nobody will take responsibility for the claim. One man says he has seen two buses go past carrying asylum seekers, and then moments later, the evidence appears: shadowy faces peer from the windows of a vehicle labelled “private service bus” as it sails along the main road.
“Private service!” one man shouts, as if it were proof.
Andrew Wilson, a local councillor critical of the plan, who says he was driving past when he saw the commotion, reassures the man. These buses are normal on this route. They are carrying not asylum seekers but Scientologists, on their way from the religion’s nearby East Grinstead HQ.
“They’ve been going for years,” Wilson says to the sheepish man. The conversation is interrupted by the eruption of one of many tense exchanges nearby.
“You don’t know who they are! They’re unvetted!” shouts one man at an officer. “The whole tables would be turned if one of your little daughters or something got raped, though wouldn’t it?”
Over the next few hours, tensions rise and fall as local people vent their frustrations at the lack of information from the police, the government, their local representatives. Minor clashes result in people being physically held back by their peers and, later, accusing officers of pushing and shoving them, amid accusations of “two-tier policing”, a quasi-conspiracy theory that white British people are treated more harshly by the police than other groups.
Crowborough residents say they are upset at media portrayals of them, particularly after a flag-waving march at the weekend, attended by about 2,000 people. “We’re not far right, we’re not bloody thugs,” says one woman that evening. “It’s a very affluent area. There might be far-right people who join the protests but we’re just normal people who don’t want it in our village.”
Her friend agrees. “We’re not racist. One of my best friends is black.”
The woman adds: “You’ve only got to see the news and the reports every day of the stabbings, the rapes, the muggings.”
She says the problem was “600 men we know nothing about being dumped here”.
“It’s frightening. It wouldn’t matter what colour, race or whatever, I would still be protesting. They should be locked up until we know who they are, what they’re here for and what’s happening.”
Eventually, the drama of the night fizzles out, with most people leaving by the early hours as it becomes clear that no asylum seekers are coming.
Politically, a toxic blame game is afoot, with the Lib Dem-Green district council accused of co-operating with the Labour government by the Tory MP, who in turn is accused of stirring things up for political reasons.
Nusrat Ghani, the Conservative MP for Sussex Weald and deputy speaker, says local people had “fallen foul of [the council’s] ideology” and describes Rachel Millward, the deputy council leader and deputy leader of the national Green party, as “slightly bonkers”.
She adds: “It’s the bullish nature of the Home Office, picking a location that it knew would be compliant.”
Millward, in response, says Ghani had been “wildly irresponsible throughout” and deliberately misled people with “fake news” that the council was not taking all the necessary legal action, when the opposite is true. “That in itself creates a division that creates fear and anxiety,” she says.
Regardless of the politics, few on either side are happy about the attention brought to the area. A man having a coffee in the deli on Wednesday says that he had a friend who was “ashamed of Crowborough” because of the protests, though the man would be afraid to say it publicly.
On Wednesday lunchtime, the Guardian gets a text from Barnett, who has had word from some activists at the camp: “From what I understand, there is a large police presence up there now, so the migrants are expected from today.”
And so, with no other evidence to go on, the commotion begins again.
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