Loughton has a long history dating back to an Iron Age hill fort, Loughton Camp. The town also had an important role in the Tudor period when Loughton Hall was owned by Mary Tudor before she became Queen. The hall then became the property of the Wroth family and became the center of an artistic movement which led to one of the family writing the first full length novel written by an English woman. The area was part of Epping Forest and was the site of a series of crimes associated with such a rural landscape such as sheep stealing. Being on the route of regular coaches from London to Cambridge it was also an ideal place for highwaymen. The lure of easy money by robbery on the highway was too much of a temptation for a local butcher, Dick Turpin, who supposedly roasted a local widow over her own fire to find out where she had hidden her money. The area expanded in the nineteenth century with the coming of the railway. However the refusal of the company running the new form of transport to offer cheap workingman's tickets led to the area remaining very middle class.

During the Victorian period Loughton became popular with those of artistic and scientific interests, and some political reformers.It was also at this time that a London charity began to pay to bring large numbers of poor children from London to Loughton in locked train carriages so that they could partake of healthy country air, a service that local people did not appreciate and many of the areas where the children had been were sprayed with disinfectant after their departure. The railway was also to bring other people from London, groups whose aim was to protect Epping Forest by pulling down fences where the forest had in their view been illegally enclosed. Other interesting events relating to local people during the nineteenth century include a London merchant who owned a country residence in Loughton who accidentally shot one of his servants and killed her. A local woman found herself at the centre of a bigamy trial when it turned out that her husband had two other wives. Another local woman attracted widespread media interest in at the end of the century when, ill for two years and believed to have been suffering from consumption, she was cured by Doctor Williams Pink Pills for Pale People to the surprise of her neighbours. These and numerous other stories will be revealed in Secret Loughton .