Rather than dashing farmer-types in flat caps and barber jackets, like the handsome fella pictured at the end of this post, you all think of sportscar-driving loadsamoney guys and stiletto-wearing orange-skinned girls. The county has a really bad reputation for being a bit ……. Is it as bad as you all think? Not a chance. England has 48 ceremonial counties and Essex is one of those located in the south east of the country between London and the North Sea.
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? Another organisation celebrating the county's women is the Essex Women's Advisory Group EWAG , a charitable foundation set up to "challenge negative stereotypes by promoting the confidence and achievements of Essex women and girls". Its chair, Juliet Townsend, said she had heard of young women pretending they were from elsewhere when going for jobs outside of the county.
Silly jokes about it are really boring, and make me judge whoever who cracks them. So what does it really mean to be an Essex girl in ? Emmerdale actress Zoe Henry believes Essex girls are "strong, successful and independent". She grew up in Ilford - part of the London borough of Redbridge since , but still considered Essex in many people's hearts. The stereotype had informed how I felt. We're strong minded, strong willed - and we know how to have a great time. Mrs Thomas and Mrs Sawkins - who were born outside of the county but have lived there for a number of years - simply want people to continue to "reclaim the term" and give it a more positive meaning.
Playwright Ms Hasler believes work should be done in schools in the county to give pupils, both male and female, a degree of assertiveness, and to teach them "it's ok to challenge the stereotype. Bid to erase 'Essex girl' from dictionary. The changing face of 'Essex Man'. Is this really what Essex is about? Image source, OED. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Essex girl. Image source, Terri Simpkin. Dr Terri Simpkin said Essex girl's negative meaning was developed in the s and 90s.
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. Local elections in early June resulted in Labour capturing Southend council for the first time in its history, and Basildon council now also has a Labour leader. But the spectre of Essex man is still haunting our politics — now as a gung-ho hard Brexiteer.
If Essex man has ever inhabited a physical form, it is surely Mark Francois, the arch-Brexiter MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, who grew up in Basildon and worked in the City before entering politics.
His star has risen in line with an increasing demand for polarising soundbites on Brexit: infamous moments include Francois angrily quoting Tennyson behind a picture of Margaret Thatcher, angrily ripping up a letter from the German CEO of Airbus about Brexit on live TV and angrily making a throat-slitting gesture as Theresa May spoke in the Commons.
In , after Francois had become an MP, David Cameron promoted him to the shadow cabinet as a sop to the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party.
The persistent rhetorical power of this invented Essex — as a land of a million Marks Francois, ready to die for No Deal — requires that we continue to overlook the reality of the actual place. Parts of Essex, James says, are more diverse than is widely acknowledged: there were 50 mother tongues among the students at the Southend primary school her youngest daughter attended.
And there is the small matter of the Windrush, the ship that carried about migrants from the Caribbean and docked in Tilbury in Essex is not part of the metropolitan bubble … People have got their feet on the ground. If Essex did not exist, they would need to invent it. Canvey Island,
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