The Invention of Essex: The Making of an English County

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Essex types are often recruited as comic staples of reality shows such as Love Island, First Dates, Big Brother, X Factor – and, of course, the show that re-energised the stereotype in 2010, The Only Way is Essex. Towie, the 24th series of which started this year, follows a rolling cast of tanned and toned twentysomethings as they act out relationship breakups and holiday romances on screen. The show helped propel Essex to global fame – in 2014, the Oscar-winning American actor Jennifer Lawrence declared herself addicted – and refined the Essex caricature into an extravagantly vapid parody of itself. A roam around the history of England's most infamous county, which dispels lazy myths and reveals a fascinating array of smugglers, radicals and movements. [Tim Burrows] passionately argues that there is much more to Essex than meets the eye' 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 1960s. His 1981 Tory conference speech, delivered in the wake of the race riots in Toxteth and Brixton – with its infamous line that his father, unemployed in the 1930s, “got on his bike” to look for work instead of rioting – is probably the best-known piece of British political oratory on the idea of meritocracy. 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.

The Invention of Essex : The Making of an English County The Invention of Essex : The Making of an English County

Save English Conversation Class at Chelsea Library to your collection. Share English Conversation Class at Chelsea Library with your friends. Save A Girl Beyond Closed Doors Book Launch to your collection. Share A Girl Beyond Closed Doors Book Launch with your friends. I may be biased being from Essex and living here all my life, but I loved this! I found it to be a stimulating and fascinating look at the county beyond the stereotypes that are so often thrown our way! Britain was in perpetual economic turmoil in the 1970s, 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. Home ownership passed 50% in 1970 – not under the Conservatives, but under Labour, the party that built the welfare state.

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If you are interested in this remarkable microcosm of England, the book will grip you; if you aren't, it will make you realise that you jolly well should be.' Simon Heffer, Spectator From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: Discover your next non-fiction read and brilliant book gifts in the Profile newsletter, and find books to help you live well with Souvenir Press. Before Essex was a punchline, it was a dream," writes Tim Burrows, and he shows you the hopes and humanity of a county more often the subject of lazy stereotype. Thoroughly researched yet deeply personal, this book takes in marsh and factory, William Morris and TOWIE - all delivered with a friendly panache.' Essex is a county in the East of England which originated as the ancient Kingdom of Essex and one of the seven kingdoms, or heptarchy, that went on to form the Kingdom of England.

Essex tries to shed its brash image Out with Towie as Essex tries to shed its brash image

Deeply researched and thoroughly engaging, The Invention of Essex shows that there is more to this fabled English county than meets the eye. Burrows digs beneath the sensationalism and red-top headlines to paint a deeply sensitive and engaging portrait of a misunderstood county and its people’County councils were created in England in 1889. Essex County Council was based in Chelmsford, although it met in London until 1938. Its control did not cover the entire county. The London suburb of West Ham and later East Ham and the resort of Southend-on-Sea became county boroughs independent of county council control. Essex. A county both famous and infamous: the stuff of tabloid headlines and reality television, consumer culture and right-wing politicians. England’s dark id. 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. When JB Priestley set off on a tour of England in preparation for the book that became English Journey (1934) he avoided Essex. “I would not set foot in Essex,” he wrote emphatically. He wanted to anatomise England and explain its political culture, but he’d seen enough by the time he got to Norfolk. “I was going home,” he continued, “and by the shortest possible route.”