arts and design

Excellent Essex: in praise of Britain's most misunderstood county

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Casually derided for its loud mouth, bad taste and louche, estuarine ways, Essex is the whipping boy of England. Unlike Kent, the garden of England, and Surrey, its patio, Essex is not softened by ersatz pastoralism or laced with gin-and-Jag smugness. Charles Dickens once described Chelmsford, its administrative capital, as “the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the earth”.

Pinioned by water on one side and London on the other, Essex has a sense of being perpetually under siege from both the sea and the elephantine presence of the metropolis, “a seeping inkblot on the horizon” that over time has greedily gobbled up extremities such as Ilford and Romford. Threats of inundation and invasion have always weighed heavily on the Essex mind, most recently articulated by an unflinching urge to uncouple from Europe. Parsed and pored over by politicians, psephologists and the press, Essex is stubbornly unafraid to make manifest its discontent and go its own cussed way.

But as Gillian Darley’s new biography of England’s most maligned and misunderstood county persuasively demonstrates, Essex is more than the crude caricature connoted by referendum statistics. Excellent Essex: In Praise of Britain’s Most Misunderstood County is a richly nuanced billet doux to a terrain populated and shaped by dissenters, eccentrics, witch-finders, Puritans, plotlanders and punks. Index entries for Colchester alone include: 1884 earthquake; Castle, witches held in; first civil partnership; Monopoly board; Oyster Feast; plague; suffragettes; Yokohama, trade with. You name it, it went on in Essex.

And yes, there is an Essex edition of Monopoly, with the county’s historic houses such as Jacobean Audley End and Layer Marney Tower, Britain’s tallest Tudor gatehouse, up for grabs along with shopping centres and car dealerships. Colchester Castle remains the plum property, priced at £350. And the 1884 earthquake, which measured 4.6 on the Richter scale, remains Britain’s most destructive tremor, serendipitously begetting, as Darley relates, the Crittall window, the metal framed casement window designed by Frank Crittall that became so emblematic of modernism.

Brought up on the Essex/Suffolk borders, architectural historian, critic and campaigner Darley makes a delightfully convivial and knowledgable sherpa. Her command of her multitudinous source material is enviably fluent and always illuminating, from the number of salt pans in Maldon recorded by the Domesday Book to the precise specifications of pargetting. It all fairly whirls along in a blizzard of detail, an experience akin to barrelling through Essex lanes in an open-topped sports car while Darley swigs from a hip flask yelling “Ask me anything!”

In a more raucous and enjoyable way, she follows the path trod, or rather driven, by that other obsessive observer and compiler Nikolaus Pevsner, whose Buildings of England remains the definitive, if slightly arid, catalogue raisonné of the nation’s architecture. Yet unlike Darley, Pevsner was not a fan of Essex, arriving there in early 1950s, three years into his gruelling round-England odyssey, towing a caravan borrowed from Hubert de Cronin Hastings, his editor at the Architectural Review. Thus provisioned, he glumly did the rounds, taking in Essex’s Roman remains, its churches, its Martello towers to repel Napoleonic invasion, its factory towns and the oh-so-bracing seaside modernism of Frinton and Clacton. “He did not warm to it,” Darley drily notes.

The 15th-century St Clement’s church in West Thurrock



The 15th-century St Clement’s church in West Thurrock, ‘framed by the belching shadow of a Procter & Gamble soap factory’. Photograph: Tony Watson/Alamy

What Pevsner would have made of Quinlan Terry’s Roman Catholic cathedral in Brentwood, completed in 1991, a curious chimera of Italian Renaissance and English baroque motifs, is anyone’s guess. As well as Terry’s classical revivalist pile, Brentwood is also spiritual home to The Only Way Is Essex (the infamous Towie), marking, as Darley writes, “one more instance of those strange contradictions and odd bedfellows to which Essex is so cheerfully privy”. Another might be the 15th-century St Clement’s church in West Thurrock framed by the belching hulk of a Procter & Gamble soap plant, a juxtaposition so blatantly cinematic that it earned a spot in Four Weddings and a Funeral, as well as psychogeographic veneration by Iain Sinclair in London Orbital, his paean to the M25.

My fleeting folk memory of Essex is more Pevsnarian than Darleyesque, of a grim, midwinter foray to a pet crematorium near Chipping Ongar. It seemed to confirm Essex’s potential for accommodating kitschly macabre rites in the middle of nowhere. Anything could be going on in those outhouses. And as Darley confirms, anything often was. Now a mildly unsettling tourist attraction, the three storey-deep “indestructible” secret nuclear bunker built at Kelvedon Hatch at the height of cold war hostilities masqueraded on the surface as an “inconspicuous farm cottage with a cosy dormer window in its tiled roof”. Decommissioned in 1992, it still pops up in television dramas that require a menacing subterranean locale.

Britain’s first residential tower block, the 1951 Lawn in Harlow, designed by Frederick Gibberd.



‘The East End of London emptied into Essex after the war’: Britain’s first residential tower block, the 1951 Lawn in Harlow, designed by Frederick Gibberd. Photograph: Martin Bond/Alamy

Existential dread casts a particularly deep and baleful shadow over Essex. Catastrophic flooding in 1953 killed 114 people in Jaywick and Canvey Island, with 32,000 evacuated. The “thieving sea” still nibbles ominously at a 350-mile coastline that weaves its implausibly intricate way along innumerable estuaries and inlets. Since the Romans tussled with Boudicca, Essex has also been in the front line of foreign invasion, and its coast and countryside are studded with concrete pillboxes and other decaying detritus of defence, such as Maunsell sea forts in the Thames estuary. Originally designed to house anti-aircraft guns, their carious hulks now make for especially salacious ruin porn.

During the second world war, Audley End, historically the nearest thing to a palace Essex could muster, was requisitioned as a covert training college for Polish saboteurs, its 17th-century interiors temporarily encased in a protective skin of plywood. After the war, it was suggested this Saffron Walden fastness might become the official residence of the disgraced Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but they quickly found quarters more to their liking in Paris. The less palatial and newly constructed Butlin’s holiday camp at Clacton was also requisitioned as an internment camp for German civilians, while Warner’s at Dovercourt became a reception centre for Jewish children fleeing the Nazis following Kristallnacht.

As the East End of London emptied into Essex after the war, its countryside became an energetic incubator of new towns, with their blissful compensations of light, air and indoor sanitation. Basildon, home of “Basildon man”, the cynosure of the Tory working-class voter, was masterplanned by Basil Spence, while in Harlow, Frederick Gibberd designed Britain’s first residential tower block, the 10-storey Lawn. More radically, the development of Essex’s new towns went hand in hand with a new “plate glass” university on the edge of Colchester. Kenneth Capon of Architects’ Co-Partnership was reportedly keen to disrupt the staid notion of a campus, insisting on “a certain amount of controlled vulgarity”. He described his intention behind the architecture as “to do something fierce”, a wish that was unintentionally fulfilled when its brutalist precincts became a crucible for vigorous student protest in the late 60s.

The University of Essex, Colchester.



The University of Essex, Colchester. Photograph: Rodger Tamblyn/Alamy

Darley’s own odyssey concludes on a more conciliatory note, with a visit to the House for Essex, “a cottage for Rapunzel illustrated by Arthur Rackham”, designed by the architect Charles Holland and artist Grayson Perry, both Essex boys. Like Darley’s book, it is a love letter to the county, but framed through the prism of an Essex Everywoman, the fictional Julie Cope. Set in Wrabness, a pinprick hamlet on the northernmost extremity of Essex, the bijou micro-dwelling is an expressively confected tapestry of allusion, craft and storytelling that finds echoes in Darley’s vivid narrative of reclaiming and resituating. Contradictory and complex, Essex is never quite what it seems.

  • Excellent Essex by Gillian Darley is published by Old Street Publishing, £14.99. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15

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