Stanford-le-Hope is a pleasant south Essex village popular with commuters and slightly older residents. It’s got a decent high street with plenty of amenities and some good pubs which make you feel as though you’re further out of London than you really are. Commuters can get to Barking in just over 30 minutes from Stanford-le-Hope station and to Stratford in about 50 minutes, meaning the cultural institutions the area may be lacking are easily accessible. The Thurrock Thameside Nature Park and Mucking Flats are located just to the south on the banks of the Thames, and provides the local community with plenty of greenery and wildlife a short trip from the town itself. There are also an abundance of schools and a leisure centre in neighbouring Corringham, which makes it a great place for families too.

The village was for many hundreds of years a simple farming hamlet with a small handful of homesteads, named after a stony ford - ‘Stanford’, with the ‘le Hope’ meaning a bay in the bend of a river. Mucking, the area to the south of the village proper, was a fairly extensive Anglo Saxon settlement with accessible iron deposits, making it a popular location. The name alledgedly comes from that of Mucca, the local chieftan. The whole area grew slowly, and thrived during the Victorian period when, like many towns surrounding London, the railway was extended out to it. The area was home to two oil refineries, which shut in 1999 and were redeveloped to make the large London Gateway container port, which can move 3.5 million shipping containers per year.

The village was home to the famed author Joseph Conrad for a handful of years in the late 19th century. He is known for novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent. Stanford-le-Hope has also been home to the comedian Phil Jupitus and musician Scroobius Pip.

Some residents complain about how quiet the village is, but that is a bonus for others. However, what seems to unite all residents is their disaproval of the local Thurrock council, which recently went bankrupt and as a result have cut back dramatically on many of the essential local services like bin collection. The port can also bring lots of heavy freight traffic, and the recent construction work on new apartments can also be a pain for residents.