Deep in the English countryside, at the end of a winding country late… a sign: NO TRESPASS. STRICTLY BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of children playing, carried along by the breeze. Just beyond the hostile sign, there is a place – built around barns, marquees and organic allotments – that is shrouded in mystery.
It has a name… Hope Sussex. A secretive organisation of like minded people who came together with a shared belief that the pandemic was planned – a ‘plandemic’ – that the education system has a nefarious agenda, and that children are being brainwashed.
They say they’re running a community hub, a home education facility, where tutors can teach an alternative curriculum. The Times reported that children learn 9/11 was an inside job, that the stars could be lights, and that the COVID pandemic was a hoax. They say they’re just teaching critical thinking and how to have an open mind.
Ofsted suspected Hope Sussex could be running an illegal school, the media called it… a conspiracy school.
When I first heard about Hope Sussex, I couldn’t get them out of my head. Who are these people? Why have they lost faith in the mainstream? And are they really running… a conspiracy school?
I needed to find out. This is one small group, but their journey to the fringes is becoming more common. Trust in authority has decayed. Shared beliefs have fractured. More and more people are carving out new communities for themselves. I wanted to know what that looked like, what impact it was having, and why they felt they needed a place like Hope Sussex… so I went to meet them.
We Are Not a Conspiracy School airs on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 29th July at 8pm – and again at 11am on Wednesday 30th July. From Tuesday night, you can listen to it any time on BBC Sounds. Click here to catch it.
I will write more about Hope Sussex in the coming weeks – about how we made this programme, what they were like, what I think of them, and what they tells us about the world we live in. For now… I hope you’ll join me on this journey into a new and unusual community.
