Dale Farm is a plot of land situated on Oak Lane in Crays Hill, Essex, United Kingdom.

[2][3] The establishment of the illegal plots led to Basildon District Council conducting a ten-year legal battle in the High Court to gain a clearance order to evict the Travellers from Dale Farm.

The decision to bring in police officers to remove some activists and residents from the site and give safe access to the contracted bailiffs gained international press coverage, with the overall eviction costing the council £4.8 million.

[8] Traveller William Saunders won permission for himself and other family members at the adjacent Oak Lane site after a lengthy legal tussle with Basildon Council from 1987.

At the same time, opposition amongst parts of the settled community towards site residents has become ever fiercer, with parents from the settled community withdrawing their children from the school attended by children from Dale Farm, and the view regularly expressed in letters to the local press that Gypsies and Travellers living on the site are somehow 'above the law'.

[13] An article in the local newspaper, the Echo, quotes an English Romany Gypsy, Joe Jones, that the site was first stopped at by Travelling families during the 1970s.

[14] In 2002 a land dispute allegedly led to the death by shooting of Billy Williams, for which Oak Lane Traveller Paul Saunders was found innocent.

[16] The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that "new evidence has emerged" that some residents have cultural roots in the town of Rathkeale, County Limerick, Ireland, and some own property there.

Robert Home stated in a telephone interview that "the travellers [sic] would normally be on the road between April and October and use a more permanent site over the winter months.

"[22]In February 2009, Billericay MP John Baron urged the priest of the local Catholic Church in Wickford to use his "influence to persuade the travellers to leave the site to avoid confrontations over the eviction".

The priest responded that instead, he would be joining the anti-eviction protests, and that the church had already offered to provide temporary shelter for mothers and children of the community.

[23] In October 2011, a legal process that had taken ten years, reaching as far as the Court of Appeal, concluded with the ruling that Basildon Council has acted lawfully in refusing planning permission for the disputed portion of Dale Farm.

[27] On 4 July, eviction notices were served on some 90 families living on the illegal half of the Dale Farm site, giving them until 31 August 2011 to leave.

speed limit was applied to a two-mile stretch of the A127 carriageway by Essex County Council, anticipating an influx of slow-moving caravans and trucks joining the road when the eviction commenced.

[32] On 15 September the Council asked that the residents "peacefully vacate" the unauthorised site, and stressed that it would meet its duty to house homeless families as the law demands.

[33] On 19 September a mediation offer by Jan Jařab, the regional representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was rejected by the Foreign Office.

That morning, a bailiff addressed the residents, expressing health and safety concerns regarding the barricades and the possibly forceful eviction.

A spokeswoman for the Dale Farm Solidarity group advised on 17 October that the site had gone into "lockdown" and the perimeter had been reinforced around the 49 plots, in order to resist eviction of the families affected.

Local MP John Baron said: "Police are using the minimum force required and when you are being pelted with bricks and rocks you are entitled to defend yourself."

A Labour MEP for the region, Richard Howitt, said: "The smoke above Dale Farm is the most visible sign of the failure of Basildon Council to seek a mediated solution.

[48] On 7 November, an application by Dale Farm neighbour and property developer Len Gridley to the High Court to force the Basildon Council to remove debris from the illegal site was denied.

On 17 May 2012, the High Court ruled that Essex Police could not order media groups to release 100 hours of broadcast and unbroadcast material of the eviction.

The Council development control committee voted in December 2012 to send bailiffs in to move the caravans, subject to a High Court judicial review.

However, in February 2013, Basildon approved a plan for 15 double caravan pitches at a government-owned site in Gardiners Lane South, about 700 yards' distance from Dale Farm.

After the decision to clear the site, the Council prepared budgetary statements for costs, with a worst case expense estimated at £8 million.

the former Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) said:In 2005, we reported that we had obtained leave to intervene in a judicial review case involving a decision by a local authority to evict a large group of Irish Travellers from an unauthorised encampment on the Dale Farm site in Basildon in 2005.

During its 76th session in February 2010, CERD considered the impending eviction of an Irish and Romani Traveller community from Dale Farm in Essex.

The committee expressed concern that the planned eviction of the Traveller community from Dale Farm might imply a breach of Article 5 e (iii), guaranteeing the right to housing.

[55] On 19 September 2011, Channel 4's documentary Dispatches: The Fight For Dale Farm covered the relationship between travellers, residents affected by encampments, and the law.

In November 2011 the BBC apologised to Basildon Council after an investigation found that the One Show had broadcast a clip on the Dale Farm eviction that was biased towards the Travellers.