Where is towie made

A strip of shops owned by cast members on Crown Street in Brentwood was once a tourist attraction, but was already struggling before the pandemic hit.

These are all cast members who left the franchise to continue their own spin-off series years ago. Like the Kardashians, many of the Towie lot simply outgrew the show.

Towie has tried to turn the tide in typical Essex fashion; with an injection of something to make it appear more youthful.

After 10 cast members left last year, eight shiny new faces came on to the scene, some as young as 17 years old. A quick fix would be a spin-off for the remaining OG cast who remain above it all, an onscreen retirement home where their show can die peacefully.

Brockett carries the current run on her back, but if the first few series all those years ago are any guide, the rest of the cast may come into their own. To watch Towie take off was bemusing to me and other Essex natives. And it transformed Brentwood. Two-for-one cocktail deals abound. Yet the change could be described as an accentuation, not a reinvention. Photographer Bronia Stewart started coming to Brentwood to document the change in January People across the UK are going to Brentwood to feel part of it.

Approaching people on the street has been hard because they are used to paparazzi. Southend-based tour guide Louise Stanton thinks the critics are just grumpy. Now we run three four-hour tours every Saturday, with 30 people per coach. And they bring the story back to the story producer room, who then put it together to make the show. In , cast welfare on reality TV is paramount. For every dramatic scene there are real people on whom a real situation has taken a toll in lots of different ways, so these kinds of protections are increasingly important.

For this article I spoke to four different cast members and, for most of them, a frequent area of distress is the response they receive on social media.

Cast member Courtney Green, who, at 25, has been with TOWIE for five years, tells me that she hates Twitter so much, she hides the app in a locked-away folder on her phone. People have arguments every day in their lives. People argue with their friends, people say mean things, and we get attacked for doing that. Now the focus is very much on how to deal with it.

They are going to read it, and they are going to react. So a lot of the support now is based on helping them to process and deal with that. I mean, darker than dark.