Tilbury Port

Ask anyone about the town of Tilbury and chances are they won't be able to tell you a thing about it. Ask anyone from the local area on the town and they will probably speak of it in less than glowing terms. Possibly using the term "dump" at least twice in their synopsis. Tilbury is a depressed area in many ways, the deprivation is there for all to see if you walk or drive through it and yet  it has within it an arresting story of growth and dynamism that few would realise.
 
The town may not look in any way on-the-up but the docks attached to it could not be in better shape. The company "Forth Ports" has confirmed that it has bought out a 152 acres plot of land as well as a deep water jetty, all with the primary interest of developing the ports to increase capacity by a 3rd making it one of the primary ports for container traffic in the UK; after Felixstowe and Southampton.
The oddity is that all this expansion has created an estimated 700 new jobs (a number that is expected to grow further in the next 3 years) and yet they have received hardily any applicants! Tilbury has a population of well over 12,000 people and a well below national average in terms of age (so loads of young people) and an unemployment rate that is significantly higher than the national average (around  7%) the local council are actually looking into why this is so as a kind of curiosity as much as an urgent issue to resolve. Jobs with no applicants is, it must be said, not a problem that the country generally faces very often but it is indeed so in Tilbury.
 
If the expansion continues with the estimated 100 million pound investment that goes with it, means it could make Tilbury one of those areas that people wish they bought to live in 5 years from now. Any light research into the area shows that Hollywood discovered its value for its filming potential years ago! did you know the Venice boat chase scenes in the third Indiana Jones movie (Indiana jones and the Last Crusade) were all filmed there? So were the Chinese prison scenes from the first Christopher Nolan Batman film (Batman Begins) and Jude Law's "Alfie". Thurrock council are actually pushing very hard to get more film companies interested in filing in the area. So interesting things happen here. But why there should be so many jobs and so few applicants is a question that for now remains unanswered.