The TOWIE town where I grew up is known for nouveau riche mansions, lip-filler clinics and celeb residents, but here’s what the people are REALLY like: MIRANDA LEVY
People can be very smug about Chigwell, the nouveau riche pinnacle of the Essex ‘Golden Triangle’ which also includes Buckhurst Hill and Loughton, but in my opinion there could be no better place to roar in a Lamborghini and scare the ponies grazing opposite the private school that bears his name.
Dr. I may have gone to university as fast as my Martens could carry me, but in my fifties I realized Chigwell was the Only Way.
I currently live in north London, a 40-minute drive away, but it wasn’t too long ago that I survived a glorious summer of the pandemic, IG7 style, and I’m a weekly visitor to the cheerfully bland suburb where my father still lives.
Now located in the top right corner of The Tube’s Central Line, Chigwell wasn’t always the home of footballers’ wives, top stockbrokers and Joey Essex.
Chigwell born and raised… but coming from the Essex town wasn’t always a topic that Miranda Levy (pictured) was keen on shouting about.
Nouveau riche, moi? Joey Essex pictured outside the Chigwell mansion on MTV Cribs
Make mine a porn star martini: In 2010 Lord Alan Sugar bought the King’s Head to ensure the city landmark was preserved – then leased it to swanky Turkish restaurant Sheesh (pictured: TOWIE star Yazmin Oukhellou, far right, with her parents)
In the late sixties, when my parents moved here from their East End beginnings, it was a charming little village populated by lawyers, estate agents and newly qualified dentists like my father.
I remember my upbringing in the 70s as pleasant and semi-rural; It’s not embarrassing at all. This came later.
On Chigwell Parade there was a police station closed for lunch and a newsagent with a slush puppy machine. The pride of the village was the King’s Head, a well-preserved Tudor pub built in 1547, mentioned in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.
But even then Chigwell had some star power. Rod Stewart and David Essex lived up the road, as did Alan Sugar, who was not yet The Apprentice’s Sir Alan, but was merely the founder of Amstrad, and more below.
‘What am I going to do…’ The Sitcom Birds of a Feather, broadcast on the BBC in 1989, starred Pauline Quirke as Sharon Theodopolopodous, Linda Robson as Tracey Stubbs and Lesley Joseph as Dorien Green.
But then came the 80s. Along with much of the rest of Essex, with its quick access to the City, Chigwell has become synonymous with ‘load money’, girls in white stilettos, Malibu and pineapples.
The inhabitants of ‘Old Chigwell’ retreated behind their mock-Tudor roofs in despair.
The people who lived around us were actually called Sharon and Tracey; The names of the dubious heroes of the sitcom Birds Of A Feather, starring Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson.
How can we forget their “posh” neighbor, Dorien, played by Lesley Joseph? He was more stylish than anyone I met in Chigwell.
The Only Way Is Essex stars Clelia Theodorou and Shelby Tribble, pictured at Sheesh in 2019
The mansions in the town are pictured. “The trend towards new money has increased mostly since the 90s,” said Miranda.
Dorien summited Peak Essex around the time I was nearing the end of my university degree.
In fact, at the time I was so ashamed of my Chigwell roots that I told people I was from London and that was that.
When I returned home, I settled north of the capital: few of my friends returned and settled in West Hampstead, Florida, Los Angeles.
Despite his mercenary fame, Chigwell was (and still is) always a bit rough around the edges. However, since the 90s, the tendency towards new money has increased even more.
Bobby Moore lived on Stradbroke Drive in the 1970s; now more London club players had moved here. At one point my parents had a (short-lived) Spurs manager next door.
And with the players came their wives: Juicy Couture’s beauties, with names not unlike Chardonnay, were hanging out across the street from the shops at Chigwell’s second bar, King William IV.
Alan Sugar bought the King’s Head in 2010 to preserve it, but it wasn’t long before the pub was let to Sheesh, a wallet-protestingly expensive Turkish restaurant with brown fake crocodile seating and huge faux flower displays, protected by suits of armour, that adorn Pure Chigwell.
Cutlery is served from the boot of a red MGB and the car park is full of Ferraris and Harley-Davidsons (and those are just the ones belonging to owner Dylan).
In Essex terms, Sheesh is as ‘Facey’ as it gets; It’s local parlance for ‘flashy’, but it’s worth a visit to watch lip-filled women sucking pina coladas by the fire pit.
I mourn the loss of a pint in an Elizabethan pub on a Sunday night, but much of ‘Old Chigwell’ remains; My father and his friends are probably the last representatives of that generation.
These days, Parade has two swanky dress shops, three hair salons and a nail bar.
Debra, the clothing store favored by TOWIE stars, has downsized following a disaster in the area and has made room for an aesthetic botox venue. Given the demographics of the place, it will likely be very popular.
I love the tough and sunny women of Chigwell: here people speak their mind and do so with humour.
I always encounter a smile when I pass the subway on the right and the Köy Delicatessen on the left.
See you for porn star martinis at King Willy?
