The Observer - 25.08.2019

36

The Observer

25.08.19

Critics

Architecture

Critics

(the infamous Towie ), marking, as

Darley writes, “one more instance

of those strange contradictions and

odd bedfellows to which Essex is

so cheerfully privy”. Another might

be the 15th-century St Clement’s

church in West Thurrock framed

by the belching hulk of a Proct er &

Gamble soap plant, a juxtaposition

so blatantly cinematic that it earned

a spot in Four Weddings and a

Funeral , as well as psychogeographic

veneration by Iain Sinclair in London

Orbital, his paean to the M25.

My fl eeting folk memory of

Essex is more Pevsnarian than

Darleyesque, of a grim, midwinter

foray to a pet crematorium near

Chipping Ongar. It seemed to

confi rm Essex’s potential for

accommodating kitschly macabre

rites in the middle of nowhere.

Anything could be going on in those

outhouses. And as Darley confi rms,

anything often was. Now a mildly

unsettling tourist attraction, the

three storey-deep “indestructible”

secret nuclear bunker built at

Kelvedon Hatch at the height of cold

war hostilities masqueraded on the

surface as an “ inconspicuous farm

cottage with a cosy dormer window

in its tiled roof ”. Decommissioned

‘A cottage for

Rapunzel

illustrated

by Arthur

Rackham’:

A House for

Essex, or Julie’s

House, 2015,

in Wrabness,

designed by

Charles Holland

of FAT Architects

with Grayson

Perry.

Photograph by

Lynn Hilton/

Alamy

Casually derided for its loud mouth,

bad taste and louche, estuarine

ways, Essex is the whipping boy of

England. Unlike Kent, the garden of

England, and Surrey, its patio, Essex

is not softened by ersatz pastoralism

or laced with gin-and-Jag smugness.

Charles Dickens once described

Chelmsford, its administrative

capital, as “ the dullest and most

stupid spot on the face of the earth ”.

Pinioned by water on one side

and London on the other, Essex

has a sense of being perpetually

under siege from both the sea and

the elephantine presence of the

metropolis, “a seeping inkblot on

the horizon” that over time has

greedily gobbled up extremities

such as Ilford and Romford. Threats

of inundation and invasion have

always weighed heavily on the Essex

mind, most recently articulated by

an unfl inching urge to uncouple

from Europe. Parsed and pored over

by politicians, psephologists and the

press, Essex is stubbornly unafraid

to make manifest its discontent and

go its own cussed way.

But as Gillian Darley ’s new

biography of England’s most

maligned and misunderstood

county persuasively demonstrates,

Essex is more than the crude

caricature connoted by referendum

statistics. Excellent Essex is a richly

nuanced billet doux to a terrain

populated and shaped by dissenters,

eccentrics, witch-fi nders, Puritans,

plotlanders and punks. Index entries

for Colchester alone include: 1884

earthquake; Castle, witches held in;

fi rst civil partnership; Monopoly

board; Oyster Feast; plague;

suffragettes; Yokohama, trade with.

You name it, it went on in Essex.

And yes, there is an Essex

edition of Monopoly , with the

county’s historic houses such as

Jacobean Audley End and Layer

Marney Tower, Britain’s tallest

Tudor gatehouse , up for grabs

along with shopping centres and

car dealerships. Colchester Castle

remains the plum property, priced

at £350. And the 1884 earthquake,

which measured 4.6 on the Richter

Excellent
Essex: In
Praise of
Britain’s Most
Misunderstood
County
Gillian Darley
(Old Street
Publishing,
£14.99, pp342)

Parsed and pored over by

politicians, psephologists

and the press, Essex is

stubbornly unafraid to go

its own cussed way

To Basildon and beyond

yelling “Ask me anything!”

In a more raucous and enjoyable

way, she follows the path trod,

or rather driven, by that other

obsessive observer and compiler

Nikolaus Pevsner , whose Buildings

of England remains the defi nitive,

if slightly arid, catalogue raisonné

of the nation’s architecture. Yet

unlike Darley, Pevsner was not

a fan of Essex, arriving there in

early 1950s, three years into his

gruelling round-England odyssey,

towing a caravan borrowed from

Hubert de Cronin Hastings , his

editor at the Architectural Review.

Thus provisioned, he glumly did the

rounds, taking in Essex’s Roman

remains, its churches, its Martello

towers to repel Napoleonic invasion,

its factory towns and the oh-so-

bracing seaside modernism of

Frinton and Clacton. “He did not

warm to it,” Darley drily notes.

What Pevsner would have made

of Quinlan Terry’s Roman Catholic

cathedral in Brentwood, completed

in 1991 , a curious chimera of

Italian Renaissance and English

baroque motifs, is anyone’s guess.

As well as Terry’s classical revivalist

pile, Brentwood is also spiritual

home to The Only Way Is Essex

scale, remains Britain’s most

destructive tremor, serendipitously

begetting, as Darley relates, the

Crittall window , the metal framed

casement window designed by

Frank Crittall that became so

emblematic of modernism.

Brought up on the Essex/Suffolk

borders, architectural historian,

critic and campaigner Darley

makes a delightfully convivial

and knowledgable sherpa. Her

command of her multitudinous

source material is enviably fl uent

and always illuminating, from the

number of salt pans in Maldon

recorded by the Domesday Book

to the precise specifi cations of

pargetting. It all fairly whirls along

in a blizzard of detail, an experience

akin to barrelling through Essex

lanes in an open-topped sports car

while Darley swigs from a hip fl ask

A delightful new biography of Essex

celebrates a much maligned county

caught between the capital and a

treacherous coastline, with a noble

history of eccentrics and dissenters

• and buildings to match

Catherine

Slessor