2026/034: The Invention of Essex — Tim Burrows

I started to recognise an intrinsic feeling of accentuation when it came to Essex, between sparseness and density, bucolic abandonment and oncoming modernity, realism and poetry, country and city, rich and poor – buzzing dichotomies that meant that, as hard as I tried to pin Essex’s story down, it always somehow slipped away. [loc. 1151]

Burrows was born in Essex^*, and moved back there from London when he and his wife started a family. He has real affection for the county, but a solid grasp of its socioeconomics, and of the TOWIE-fuelled perception of Essex as 'a land of crass consumerism, populated by perma-tanned chancers and loose women with more front than Clacton-on-Sea'. 

Essex has long been viewed as a classless, uncultured wilderness -- apart, of course, from 'Constable Country', which Burrows describes as 'a shambling pastoral scene assiduously cultivated since the days of [the painter] Constable', and which attracts the kind of tourists who would flinch at the raucous glories of Southend seafront. Dismissed as 'the rubbish dump of London', Essex is the site of multiple, often toxic landfill sites where the majority of London's actual rubbish ended up. It's also where working-class Londoners moved in the hope of a better quality of life. And Essex has long been a hotbed of dissent, individualism (utopians, occultists, political and religious extremists), experiments in new ways of living (from communes to worker-oriented 'new towns) and, of course, crime.

Burrows often writes for the Guardian, and his piece on the Broomway and the stranded Amazon van prompted me to buy this long-wishlisted book. I learnt about plotlands, which I'd somehow been unaware of despite growing up with people who lived in them! And about the ecological impact of the London Gateway megaport, dredging for which has destroyed much of the local fishing industry. Burrows is also good at putting stereotypes such as 'Essex Man' and 'Essex Girl' into context, and he's quietly scathing about the superficial glamour, and the underlying classism and misogyny that informs those stereotypes.

Some weird hyphenation throughout -- Basil-don, South-end, Med-way -- but otherwise immensely readable, informative and well-researched.

^*I was also born in Essex, but nearer the edge of the map: Burrows barely mentions the area where I grew up, though it's less than ten miles from his current home in Southchurch.