It was the guilty pleasure that gripped the nation – a cultural juggernaut that sent thousands of women dashing to beauticians for a Gemma Collins-style ‘vajazzle’, while men lined up at tanning salons desperate to emulate mahogany-hued heartthrob Joey Essex.

But as ITV reality show The Only Way Is Essex – ‘Towie’ to its army of fans – marks its 15th anniversary, the dream has turned sour.

Fake tan, dazzling white veneers and diamanté everything are no longer in fashion. And nowhere is the decline more painfully visible than in Brentwood, the once-glittering heart of Towie. The town that once throbbed with star-chasing fans is now in decline.

When I visited it this week, it was unrecognisable – no longer the bustling hub that once acted as the reality show’s set. Gone are the queues outside glitzy boutiques. So are the coachloads of fans arriving for Towie Tours. Today, the High Street is eerily silent.

At its peak, Towie pulled in more than 1.7 million views per episode. Yet last year the show struggled to attract even 50,000 live viewers for its series finale. Though the cameras are still rolling – the show has just wrapped up its 35th series – it seems the love affair between Essex and the rest of the country is over.

Worse still, one of the show’s most beloved – and beleaguered – former stars, ex-cocaine addict James ‘Arg’ Argent, 37, found himself making headlines for all the wrong reasons this week, after pleading guilty to a domestic violence charge against his Swedish beauty queen ex, Nicoline Artursson, 32.

He was handed a six-month suspended sentence and a two-year restraining order after admitting to pushing her down the stairs outside her apartment in the Costa del Sol, Spain.

It’s a far cry from Towie’s golden era in 2010, when the show became one of the first British ‘scripted reality’ programmes. It was at the centre of a reality revolution – each episode was filmed just days prior and aired with the disclaimer: ‘The tans you see might be fake, but the people are all real, although some of what they do has been set up purely for your entertainment’.

Made In Chelsea and Geordie Shore followed soon after.

Towie’s original cast included then club promoter Mark Wright, his girlfriend Lauren Goodger and glamour model Sam Faiers.

Sam and her sister Billie, a fellow Towie star, opened the clothes store, Minnies Boutique, on Brentwood High Street in 2011. It transformed the town from a quiet commuter suburb to a star-spotting haven.

The shop – which soon became a fixture in Towie – was an overnight sensation. Their aunt, Libby Wells, 47, who co-owned Minnies with them, told the Mail: ‘My nieces had just started Towie. They told the producers about my shop and that was it. It catapulted the business.’

The Faiers’ lucrative venture did not go unnoticed by their co-stars, who sought to capitalise on their burgeoning fame. Soon, no fewer than 12 new businesses run by cast members had popped up in Brentwood and its outskirts. Beautician Amy Childs opened Amy Childs Salon in November 2011, followed by a clothing boutique in September 2012.

The headline-grabbing speciality on her beauty menu was the vajazzle – which involves gluing diamantes to a woman’s pubic region. It proved so popular that the salon provided around 350,000 of them.

One of her first clients was another Towie mega-star, Gemma Collins. Back in 2013, Gemma opened her own clothing boutique marketed to plus-size women. It was later revealed that she sourced some clothes from wholesalers in East London before marking the prices up by 300 per cent.

The string of openings in Essex was endless – and not without controversy. Deuces Bar and Lounge in Chigwell – run by Towie royalty Mark Wright and Jack Tweed, ex-con and husband of the late Jade Goody – was firebombed ahead of its grand opening in 2010.

And, in 2013, Sam Faiers’ then-boyfriend, Joey Essex, launched Fusey (meaning ‘cool’ in Essex-speak) – an emporium of T-shirts, caps and mugs. Brentwood’s traders claimed the hordes of fans queuing outside Fusey disrupted the arts and crafts market. Not that it mattered to Joey, who made £420,000 in just one year.

Elsewhere in Brentwood, Lucy Mecklenburgh, who dated Mark Wright, set up Lucy’s Boutique in 2011, while Harry’s World, run by the fabulously camp Harry Derbidge, started selling diamante-studded outfits in 2012.

In the same year, GX2, which sold health and fitness supplements, was opened by lovable twins Dino and Georgio Georgiades, along with an expansion for the card store Bizara, owned by their hard-partying co-star Peri Sinclair.

Lothario Charlie Sims, Joey Essex’s cousin, set up Charlie’s Deli in 2014, and his sister Chloe Sims opened Chloe’s Beauty Bar in 2015. James Argent’s then-girlfriend Lydia Bright, meanwhile, launched a vintage clothing store, Bella Sorella, in nearby Loughton in 2011.

Then there was the jewel in Brentwood’s crown, the infamous Sugar Hut nightclub – the setting for many a debauched night out for the Towie crew. The club, which opened in 2004 and was owned by the late businessman and Towie cast member, Mick Norcross, also hosted celebrities from actress Pamela Anderson to football ace Frank Lampard.

Towie wasn’t just a TV show – it became an industry. And it turned Brentwood into a destination.

But when the Mail visited this week, locals reminisced about those heady days in the early 2010s as ‘madness’. One explained to me: ‘You couldn’t swing a cat on Brentwood High Street without hitting a Towie fan, or shopper.’

Others told me about a ‘Towie curse’ that took hold five years in, as the show’s novelty wore off and its biggest stars moved on to more lucrative ventures. Leases ended. Some shops went into liquidation. Others simply vanished. 

The town’s trajectory is emblematic of a nationwide malaise: the death of the British High Street. Barbers and vape shops now fill the void left by closed retailers. More than 750 barbers opened in the UK last year – some of them, as the Mail has reported, acting as fronts for organised crime.

It has now been six months since Minnies – the shop that started it all – moved wholly online. A Japanese head spa now stands in its place. Sam Faiers, 34, and her sister and Billie Shepherd, 35, left the shop in the hands of their aunt, who tells me the experience has been ‘soul-destroying’.

Libby says: ‘We lasted the longest, but everything’s shutting down. It’s just awful. It’s a sign of the times – people don’t come here to shop any more. Brentwood has lost its soul; it has died a death.’

Sarah Barton, 55, who has lived in Brentwood for 15 years, tells me: ‘Towie brought a lot of business here. It kept the High Street looking nice. There were always girls done up going to the Sugar Hut. Now there are too many barbers taking cash in hand.

‘Town guards have to patrol the High Street and I complained to them because I could smell weed. All we have left is an M&S.’

Gemma Collins’s empire collapsed in 2018, with debts of more than £80,000. The 44-year-old’s eponymous boutique is now a tired-looking hair salon.

The charming vintage boutique owned by Lydia Bright, 34, has closed, too, and in its place stands Totally Wicked, a tacky vape shop.

A nail salon now takes the place of Charlie’s Deli, while Harry’s World is a barber shop.

In 2017, Amy Childs, now 34, was forced to close her salon and boutique after the lease ran out and she learned that an employee had stolen thousands of pounds from her. It has since been replaced by a different beauty salon.

A hairdresser near the site says: ‘We are all struggling along here. Ever since the Towie lot packed up and left, and Covid, it isn’t a High Street any more, it’s just a strip of empty shops.’

Lucy Mecklenburgh, 33, also moved her business online in 2018. The shop was replaced by a ceramics studio, The Pink Parachute.

Joey Essex, 34, shut Fusey in 2016, too. Today it is an organic wine shop. The hairdresser next door tells the Mail: ‘It was mad for a while. They’d always be filming here and people would be coming to look at them in their shops. Some people hated it when Towie came along, saying it was changing the High Street. But now even my older ladies come in and say, “There’s nothing in Brentwood any more”.’

Then came the final nail in the coffin. Last year, the Grade-II listed Sugar Hut nightclub was put up for sale by its new owners for £3.85 million. For years, former owner Mick Norcross insisted that Towie was tarnishing the venue’s reputation – and in 2019 he sold it.

Two years later, facing financial ruin, he took his own life aged 57. His son Kirk, also a Towie cast member, found his body.

The club’s doors are now locked, and a peek through the dirty window reveals litter gathering inside. It is rumoured that the building will be turned into flats.

The tale of Brentwood is not unique in Britain today. But that hasn’t stopped some locals whispering about darker forces at play. They refer back to 2010, when Deuces Bar and Lounge was firebombed. The Towie cast had been partying there hours before.

Every business that has occupied the site since has failed within five years, and locals call it ‘cursed’. Its most recent incarnation, a Japanese restaurant, was torched weeks ago. It remains closed.

Essex resident of 24 years, Arnold, 66, told the Mail: ‘That place has such a cherished history because it was a coach house in 1905 and then the White Hart pub, but it has just been ruined since Mark Wright took it over.

‘It has been plagued with difficulties because of its links to the gangster underworld – that’s why it was firebombed all those years ago. It has never been the same.’

It seems that while, once, the only way was Essex, the show’s stars are going to have to look a little further afield than Brentwood from now on.