Why is essex crap

It is one of the Home Counties located between Suffolk and Cambridgeshire in the north, Hertfordshire in the west, and Kent to the south. Just think of the shows that are based in the county. Generally they are set in depressing housing estates featuring equally depressing characters. What chance has Essex got with the people portrayed in those programmes?

No hope at all. Hair extensions, fake tans and white stilletos appear to be the standard dress and the county is often held up as some sort of joke place to live. Some of Englands most beautiful countryside and picturesque villages are found here amidst a rural landscape that many people would be surprised at.

We have been amazed at the sheer number of quaint villages and interesting towns that we have been able to see on our housesitting stays. If you get the chance, come up and see some of Essex. Thanks for posting! Like Liked by 1 person.

Like Liked by 2 people. Sounds like a great idea, look forward to seeing your new blog. Essex needs some good PR I think. Like Like. Oh definitely! I mean I used to have a wake boarding membership in Gosfield that cost a fortune…there is definitely a different side out in the country!

I do love Southend and Clacton though, they are a bit tacky but I love them. Nothing wrong with a bit of tackiness, only for a visit though. Now in the employ of the Essex Tourist Board eh? Such a county of contrasts. Bazvegas v Finchingfield and Thaxted. Grays v Castle Hedingham and Burnham on Crouch. Why not give it a go indeed. Lovely county with a few dodgy bits.

Just like Kent and Sussex I guess. One day …. Perhaps a few people fit the profile but most are warm and friendly wherever you go I think. Much too far for you at the moment though. Everywhere you go has those type of places though. Or was that Wessex? It sounds like a very interesting place! Essex does have that terrible reputation, only because of Towie, I think.

There is some lovely countryside there as well. Pleased to hear that you were welcomed with open arms Jessica. Essex is a lovely county and the people very different from London although you are right that some fit the media profile quite well. Southend being one of them. The coastal towns and villages in Essex are really nice. O n the first day of term in , six-year-old Simon Heffer gasped. Before the summer break, his school, in an Essex village called Woodham Ferrers, had backed on to fields.

Now it was surrounded by hundreds of houses. This sudden arrival was part of a sprawling new web of commuter districts that spread across the south of Essex. By the 70s, the constant destruction of weatherboarded cottages and the concreting of country lanes was causing consternation among some commentators. The development that so perturbed the schoolboy Heffer was merely a prelude.

In , Essex county council initiated work on a new development south of Woodham Ferrers, which was imaginatively named South Woodham Ferrers. South Woodham was not built under the watchful eye of an autonomous development company and funded by the state, as Basildon had been. The town centre was dominated by the Asda, which was built to resemble a gigantic village barn, with an old Essex-style clock tower. The retailer, which was purchased by the US giant Walmart in , now owns much of the town centre since Essex county council sold it in My wife, Hayley, grew up in South Woodham and went to the same primary school as Heffer although a couple of decades later.

Before the influx, his classmates were the children of farmers and agricultural labourers, with old Essex accents more akin to the rounded rural burr of Suffolk or Norfolk. But they had something Heffer admired. After Margaret Thatcher became its leader in , the Conservative party ramped up its efforts to win over voters who had moved to places like South Woodham. Britain was in perpetual economic turmoil in the s, yet the economy of the south-east flourished in comparison to other regions, in particular the northern towns.

People who had grown up in pokey London flats were saving for first homes outside London, in return for a bit more space, a garden and somewhere to park the car. The Conservatives were tapping into a desire that had shaped the history of Essex — people had long been moving east in search of space and a home of their own. And yet, in a sense, the Tories were just following the prevailing societal trends.

In , Mike Leigh wrote a play that would come to be seen as an emblem of this moment, a satire of the new individualism taking shape on the edges of the capital — and a seminal document in the invention of Essex. In developing the character, the Liverpudlian actor Alison Steadman drew upon her experiences at acting school in Essex in the late 60s.

These women were the early adopters of the consumer lifestyle that became so tightly linked to Essex. For many observers, it was a warning about where this new assertive individualism would lead. They were far too self-centred for that.

Norman Tebbit was born into a working-class family just over the border from Essex in Ponders End, Enfield. A grammar-school boy, Tebbit preached the gospel of self-improvement from the beginning of his political career; he was already advocating a free-market agenda when first agitating to become an MP in the s. The constituency included the new town of Harlow, with its unionised East End diaspora, many of whom worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham and voted Labour. Yet Tebbit beat Newens by offering Thatcherism before Thatcher, arguing that the government should abolish council housing while aggressively attacking Newens for his leftwing values.

The new policy sparked a grand sell-off along the Thames corridor, stretching from east London to the Essex coast. The Essex-east London border was also becoming a key battleground for the war against trade unionism. After Thatcher made him secretary of state for employment in , Tebbit changed the law to require shop-floor workers to vote in a ballot, effectively leaving the unions unable to force industrial action.

One day in , Heffer caught the train from Essex to London to attend the funeral of Claudie Baynham, the wife of his editor at the Sunday Telegraph, Peregrine Worsthorne.

On the train, Heffer encountered a City trader travelling in from Essex and talking on a brick-sized phone. But instead of making an important multi-million pound deal, or explaining to his boss he was held up on the train and was going to be late, he was on the phone to his bookies. At the wake in Kensington, to cheer everyone up, Heffer told the story about the bloke on the train. Do it, do it! But it was Essex man that would last. B y now, Essex was no longer just a county in south-east England.

It was a shorthand for the way the whole country seemed to be changing, for the emergence of a brash and crass new individualism — and soon, it would become a shorthand for the discomfort with those changes, for a fear about what Essex man and his pushy girlfriend threatened to reveal about the true nature of Englishness. While Birds of a Feather was a warmer and more subtle commentary on class than many remember, the sitcom helped give the world the female counterpart to Essex man, Essex girl.

Over time, the names of its lead characters, Sharon and Tracey, came to represent sexually promiscuous and somewhat dim women from the south of the county.

Essex girl was permitted even fewer redeeming features than her male counterpart. By the mid 90s, the threat of Essex girl was everywhere. The Sharonisation panic peaked when it was reported later that year that Volkswagen had dropped the name for the British version of its new people carrier, Sharan, because it sounded too much like the Birds of a Feather character. In typical tabloid fashion, alongside all the stories poking fun at Essex types, there came the occasional story that relied on the opposite premise: that people from Essex were good-hearted strivers cruelly judged by the old establishment elites.

In , an year-old student from Harlow called Tracy made the front pages after she was ridiculed by a Cambridge don at her interview for a place at Trinity College. When I spoke to her recently, Playle remembered the incident well.

In the end, Playle secured a place at Warwick university — while it came out in the press that Griffiths, who died recently, was the son of a Liverpool docker.

In , the Essex Chronicle commissioned an Anglia University academic to write a report about the way people from Essex were portrayed in the press. And so a new sub-species was born: Basildon man, who was really just Essex man under a new name. But Basildon is where the Essex myth collides with reality.

What it offered instead was an illusory promise. Look how Basildon has changed. Today, Basildon is a poster child of inequality. It contains a quarter of the most deprived areas of Essex, despite housing an eighth of its total population, and is the sixth most unequal town in the country. Pitched against such evidence, the myth of Essex as the great Thatcherite success story says more about the will of the Conservative commentariat than anything else.

A microclimate of inequality existed on our street, separating homeowners from council tenants. No one seemed any richer, just further apart.

History, after all, is written by the victors.