The Guardian: The invention of Essex: how a county became a caricature

More than just brashly consumerist, Essex was also painted as a hotbed of bigotry, the place where white people moved to escape parts of London that were no longer white enough for them. In 1994, Lord Inglewood, a pro-European Conservative MEP, told a newspaper that the “Essex view of conservatism” was threatening the “more generous, less xenophobic historic tradition”. (Inglewood also blamed the influence of Essex for increasing “public bad manners, aggressiveness and yobbishness” in the party.) Essex came to represent “white flight” in the UK, and there is much evidence of xenophobia and racism in Essex: the county was a hotbed of BNP membership during the first decade of the 21st century. [...]

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. In the mid-1980s, my parents bought the Southend council house my sister and I grew up in, but we didn’t feel like triumphant beneficiaries of some economic miracle. A microclimate of inequality existed on our street, separating homeowners from council tenants. I remember my mum and dad refusing to sign one London-born homeowner’s petition to have his sister, a renter, evicted for being the mother of a “problem family”. No one seemed any richer, just further apart. [...]

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. “There is still a conversation, even today, black folk in London saying to me, seriously: ‘What are you doing in Essex?’” says Southend-based artist Elsa James, whose work addresses stereotypes of people of African-Caribbean heritage and those of Essex women. 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. [...]

This, finally, is the magic power of “Essex”. For it allows Jenkin – the Cambridge-educated son of a lord – to confidently proclaim that he knows the desires of the “common man”, merely by the mention of this most misunderstood of counties. If Essex did not exist, they would need to invent it.

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