Suddenly, in the 1980s, there was "Essex man," with his dog and opinions. More, there was "Basildon man," the walking swingometer-the instant Thatcherite who determined elections. And in the recent Labour landslide there was still an Essex story. What's going on? Did some miasma rise up 20 years ago from the Essex marshes that made working people want to bite the party that fed them? And Basildon in particular-one of the ring of new towns around the capital, part of the brilliant solution to the devastation of the Blitz and the clearance of the East End slums-surely Basildon should have stayed left wing to the last. It has always been a conundrum. The demographic answers are complex. But there are reasons why south Essex is special, hidden by the bricks and mortar of the new town itself.
They go back to land ownership and another Labour landslide. In 1945, the English electorate went politely pink-pinker than at any moment before or since. "We'll make Winston Churchill smoke a packet of Weights a day"-so the marching song urged. Plenty of returning soldiers and their patient, or not so patient, wives felt that the Soviet Union had been our worthiest wartime ally. If the English would never countenance revolution, still the various socialistic, methodistic and reformist strains that made up the new administration saw to it that the break with the past was truly astonishing. Fifty years on, we still don't have to pay our GPs. We can still expect our children to go to school, in decent shoes, without rotten teeth or bent bones. They will never starve. In fact, a crack at university is their absolute birthright. Most will find work, will own cars and houses. Never in history has the state been more provident.
So it should be. Nor was the postwar New Jerusalem a nanny state. The green and pleasant land was a military culture with its sword still firmly in its hand; its new ethic was not domestic pampering but fairness for the ranks. Who can argue with that? Its ideological tool was state ownership of heavy industry-nationalisation. But it was over land that some members of Attlee's administration really did see red. Property was theft. Land meant the old order. The election that removed the much-loved Churchill never cost him his cigars, but effectively it cost his class-the landed class-the privilege of centuries. So it was a cruel irony that the land issue also singled out south Essex and its thousands of tiny plots.
Stand beside the estuary a couple of miles down the hill from Basildon new town, in Mucking. The name is apt: the shoreline is unlovely. Coryton oil refinery dominates and the sky above its pipework is always hard. The Thames itself, lapping up against bits of marsh and concrete flood defences, appears sardonic. From there you can look back to where, 100 years ago, the villages of Pitsea, Vange, Basildon and Laindon witnessed the building of an earlier and odder New Jerusalem.
Up there, one day at the turn of the 20th century, a certain Laindon gentleman farmer decided farming was a mug's game. From his fields, he could actually see the trade that was ruining English agriculture: ships were steaming upriver full of cheap grain, imported from America. He decided to sell up.
An organisation called The Land Company spotted that the new London to Shoeburyness railway ran right past his doorstep, and made him an offer. Their brainwave was to divide his land into plots and sell them off to townies to build on. To own their own homes. For as little as ?5 a piece.
Five pounds was a cunning figure, almost a magical one. For "The Chance of a Lifetime," a fiver was a possibility. Free train tickets were handed out; free champagne was poured. The result was a land rush. All through the Edwardian era the "Health-Giving Langdon Hills" resounded to intensive DIY. If there was no water supply, no electricity, no gas, and no sewerage, there were no planning regulations either. Out of anything they could lay their hands on, East Londoners built shacks, sheds and shanties. They did it at weekends, going out on the train with tools, nails, offcuts of wood, paint, bottled beer and banjos. While Mum and the kids picnicked, Dad fixed something. There were clinker-built homes and boiler-made homes, converted buses and tin-roof cabins with asbestos walls. There were small masterpieces and dire hovels. Cautious souls saw the chance of a holiday retreat; risk-takers saw freedom. They would live off chickens, onions and a pig.
Then other farmers sold plots and speculators got in on the act. Soon, a bizarre-looking frontier settlement was actually up and functioning. Undaunted by the failures, it grew until after the first world war, when the rush became a frenzy. In fact, in spite of the Essex locals, who saw not free enterprise but a slummy eyesore in their backyard, it grew and grew, on into the depression. In due course there were roads, shops, a garage-even a cinema. Freeholdings stretched far over the horizons. Plotlands were about a dream: having your own place. Nowhere else could you hope to achieve it.
It was an adventure. What actually makes a building stay up? How do you filter rainwater? What do you do when the privy is full? Where did that fox come from? New kinds of questions taxed the emigrants. They lived beyond tradition and without guide books. Some plotlanders achieved the good life. Others were half London commuter and half survivalist. In every mad little cabin there was always that intriguing encounter between urban ways and untamed nature. The settlement bypassed the rural-no one in it cared what a squire was, or knew how to milk a cow. They learnt instead how to bolt a meat safe to the back wall, or how to sweep a chimney with a hawthorn bush.
What must it have felt like, this one-horse wild east prairie grab? We can only guess at a thumbnail America, a poor man's promised land. At once ugly and ramshackle, it was also neighbourly, individualist. The very essence of the unplanned, its vulgar sprawl challenged the England of before and the England of after.
Only the depression put the brakes on. When gambles turned into impossibilities, the settlement began to wind down. In fact, in a rash of dereliction, it verged on becoming a ghost town. Then what saved it was the Blitz. Bombed Londoners decamped en masse to long-disused cabins safe in the countryside and, after the war, thousands of them stayed.
Imagine, if you will, your own fretwork house, with a hearth, a stove, a little rainwater well, a tin bath, an outside privy and a riotous kitchen garden. Imagine your next door neighbours living in a converted railway carriage. Imagine a strange and rather wonderful family ethos. Then imagine it bulldozed.
Basildon new town was a vision of justice conceived in Old Labour ideology. It was actually built under Churchill's Tory administration of 1951, which had no wish to deny the masses their promised homes. However, by the time Basildon was finished, nearly 10,000 plotland properties had been cleared to make way for new development.
It is a shocking figure, conjuring shocking scenes. Compensation was offered, under compulsory purchase at market value which was, of course, next to nothing. The government could not understand the fuss. Freeholders could exchange their foolish little shacks for "proper" houses in the new development. According to the vision, only renting would be allowed but the rents would be wonderfully cheap. Where was the problem? Everything would be provided-courtesy of the state.
Thereafter, the re-housed plotlanders had no voice. Even today, the new town's promotion of plotland memory is distinctly low key and sanitised. During the Thatcherite 1980s, however, some thousands who had seen their hopes smashed would still have been living in Basildon. To whom would the politics of ownership, enterprise and a certain revenge speak more persuasively?
A few of the jackbuilt houses do remain, one a small museum. Apart from that, only a certain visual vibe in south Essex still testifies to a mass longing for a bit of ground, whose only beauty would ever be in quirkiness and roses-for roses flourished everywhere in the difficult clay. Basildon is different. Perhaps we should meditate on strip farms and enclosure acts. We should certainly think less simplistically about "Essex man" and try to decode more attentively his angry opinions. n
