What is it with Essex and makeovers? It was reported that the county council is to invest more than £300,000 to put its best face on and “challenge people’s preconceived ideas of how they see Essex on TV”. Council bosses wanted to banish thoughts of The Only Way Is Essex, fake tan and fast cars synonymous with the south of the county, replacing them with the Constable-country vistas, windmills and nice thatched cottages of north Essex.
We’ve been here before. The council’s drive to combat the Essex stereotype is almost as old as the stereotype itself. In 1997, moves to improve the county’s image were reported in the national press. “Difficulties arise when overseas investors come to the UK, go to competitor locations, and hear jokes about Essex girls having more shoes than books,” said the head of the Essex Economic Partnership, Terry Conder. The council said it often received letters from residents about Essex’s reputation.
As the new millennium arrived, Essex asked the government for permission to spend council tax payers’ money on improving its image and the council started its “Real Essex” tourism campaign. It spent £100,000 on a drive that claimed Essex was, borrowing from the old Mars bar adverts, the place to “work, play and rest”. Like today, they wanted to draw attention to Constable and quaint villages.
As with most disquieting elements of British discourse, Essex’s reputation was partly a creation of the rightwing press. Essex man was invented in 1990 via an anonymously published Sunday Telegraph editorial by Simon Heffer. The High Tory columnist grew up watching a new town, South Woodham Ferrers, being built on the edge of marshland downhill from his village. It soon filled up with Cockney emigres. West Ham United usurped the local passion for cricket. After a chance encounter with a loutish, Essex-based City worker on a train into Liverpool Street, he exacted revenge through a gross caricature depicting vomiting at the station.
Heffer and other Conservatives didn’t hate Essex man, however. After all, he was the future of the party, and typified the age of upward mobility. His invention was useful for the Tories as it claimed working-class social mobility exclusively for Thatcherism, rather than it being part of a longer process you could trace back to the rise of Keir Hardie and Labour in metropolitan Essex in the late 19th century. The editorial freely admitted, too, that Essex was more an ideal than a location bound by geography: “For spiritual purposes, Essex is to be found all over the newly affluent parts of the outer London suburbs.”
Essex man’s less industrious and more materialistic counterpart, Essex girl, soon formed part of the repertoire, rubber-stamped when the Ilford-born Sun journalist Richard Littlejohn ghost-wrote a grim little tome of misogynistic jokes, largely about the promiscuity of women half his age. The power of the Essex girl gave journalists the licence to pry into the sex lives of very young, even underage, girls.
So, does the council have a point? Essex, after all, was the fifth least popular English county, according to a YouGov poll in 2018. Kent, our neighbour just over the estuary from where I live in Southend, is frequently near the top of most-visited lists, Essex languishes nearer the bottom.
Yet, in making this all about image, the council is ignoring other factors. Essex is still agricultural and, despite the excellent walks along its many public footpaths, much of its countryside is earmarked for private use. Thanks to its proximity to London, much of south Essex is either residential land or green belt. People still flock to Southend and Clacton on bank holidays but, more than tourism, Essex is a success story about the idea of making a home, from the postwar plotland dreamers building in former farmers’ fields to the influx of Eastenders to new towns such as Harlow and Basildon.
Essex was inundated by the North Sea flood of 1953, with scores of casualties, and today great concrete sea walls keep the tide at bay in places such as Canvey Island. It is as if the council is following suit, building bigger and bigger defences to keep out the tide of representations.
In truth, the stereotype is being eroded by the passage of time. The term Essex girl was taken out of the Oxford Dictionary in 2020. Essex man, so characterised by his daily commute to the City, has had to diversify into home working since the pandemic started. There is no “Real Essex” to be unearthed if we can just crack through the veneer of the mediated, overdone, “fake” Essex of TV lore. Because – and can I just shock you – I have seen Botox fillers in Constable country, too.
The Invention Of Essex by Tim Burrows will be published by Profile Books in 2023
