Fear and loathing in Laindon - Fig, 2012

Until recently, if you asked someone their perception of Essex you’d get a vague jumble of Mondeo man/white stiletto-d Essex girl stereotypes. There’d be very little specifically but the place had connotations. This wooliness of opinion has in most cases been replaced by something more concrete – Grandma Pat, Mark Wright and the other grinning jesters of the ubiquitous Only Way is Essex as a microcosm of the county at large. 

While I’d hardly go around claiming Chelmsford as the Paris of East Anglia, this is reductive stuff. The Sugar Hut exists, this much is true, but Essex is a far larger place than Brentwood (thank Christ). Colchester’s proud Roman castle, Southend’s reminder of a British seaside mostly long-gone, the ancient woodland of Epping Forest, and Constable Country’s beauty – this is doubtless sounding like a misguided brochure from the County Council’s tourism board but there is variety in the area, and it goes further than geography. It’s not all football-belt new money: the east coast (dubbed by the local train franchise, in what can only have been a decision fuelled by hallucinogens, the Sunshine Coastline) sees Jaywick, southern England’s most deprived area, cheek-by-jowl with gated-haven Frinton. There’s a real split in the county’s economic geography: the south-west is commuter towns and industry towards the Thames estuary and London (large-scale postwar migration from the East End providing the characteristic estuary accent), while further north there’s a much more agricultural feel, with towns like Saffron Walden closer to people’s ideas of neighbouring Cambridgeshire than England’s arsehole, or New Jersey.


Essex is far from cultural flat-earth either. Artists as diverse as Billy Bragg, Underworld, Depeche Mode, The Prodigy,  Ian Dury & the Blockheads, and Blur have all called Essex their home, more than I can say for Buckinghamshire or Dorset. Other native sons and daughters include the slightly more stereotype-fulfilling Dermot O’Leary and Denise Van Outen (or as she’s more appropriately known, the fair queen of Basildon town), while 70’s darts hero and all-round absurdity Bobby George lives in a dart-shaped mansion near Ardleigh called George Hall. He taught my mate Harry how to fish. Lovely – take that, Kent.

None of this is to deny that at its worst Essex can be a very depressing place. Basildon can represent everything bad about Britain’s postwar New Town project, possibly the most egregious of the genre. While TOWIE is overdone, people like that do exist. Colchester on a Friday night combines, as one sensationalist documentary put it, “squaddies, students, and fistfights”, a list which I can heartily endorse but to which I’d add a compelling sense of existential woe.  But it’s got character.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that people have preconceptions of Essex – what do you think when someone says Hertfordshire? Bugger all, no doubt. Counties are a funny thing, they’re almost without function. They’re not like American states, or German Länder: hardly anyone has affinity with them beyond their postal address, and politically they’re near invisible. But Essex has a bit more identity to it, and maybe it was this that led Ian Dury’s eponymous character to declare, loud and proud, ‘I’m from Essex, in case you couldn’t tell. My given name is Dickie, I come from Billericay, and I’m doing very well’.