Jonathan Meades: The Joy of Essex

MUSIC ON RADIO

-RADIO JINGLE:

-"24 hours a day!"

-RADIO PRESENTER:

-'And here's another one. Wivenhoe vet, Telford Pluck, is

'offering Gloatpack - Botox for dogs.

'Whatever next. You'll remember that last year Dr Pluck launched a range

'of aniseed-scented canine mascaras and poochy fragrances

'that resulted in him being investigated by the RSPCA and OFCOM.

'Now he's facing allegations that he's cosmeticised Karlita,

an award-winning Bedlington terrier hailing from Thorpe-le-Soken,

with Botox that had been pre-loved...

Ooh! Ha-ha!

-RADIO ADVERTISEMENT:

-'Pleasure yourself with a visual brilliance facial, plus

a life-style size oriental scalp grift with pink hair

at Bert Heather Plaza,

Felsted's unmissable one-stop wellness and serenity hub.'

All places, all counties are various.

All counties, all places are, equally, defined by a shorthand

that denies that variety and reduces them to cliche.

The golden age of the flat hat and whippet is long gone...

CHORAL SINGING

..yet in some incurious recess of the collective imagination,

Lancashire still swarms with these items, just as Merseyside

is exclusively populated by cheeky traders in hubcaps,

and the Forest of Dean by incestuous illiterates.

Norfolk too.

And we know for a fact that Bristol's population is entirely

composed of piratical slavers searching for sinus drainage.

And so it goes droolingly on.

Oh, and I forgot the Welsh.

FOG HORN BLASTS

In the recent past, nowhere in Britain has suffered these - what,

institutional lies, blood libels, tribal slanders,

these expressions of placism or even of racism -

to the extent that Essex has.

Look around.

Look - all you can see is piles of bling as big as slag heaps.

Look around. All you can see is platoons of reality TV cretins

who are barely capable of reading their own newspaper column.

Look! Wall-to-wall fuchsia pink stretch-limos,

villas with fibreglass columns

and books by the yard, cherished numberplates,

the victims of vertical tanning.

Totally respected businessmen with interests in the import/export,

gusset therapy,

leisure and glamour sectors.

Look! Surgically-enhanced slappers.

Look! The friends of Richard Desmond.

Look! Footballers' cast-offs.

Look!

Exclusive nightclubs, well-exclusive clubs, diamond geezers,

diamond geezerettes,

molls' blokes' shooters,

4x4s with tinted windows,

and bullbars, natch.

Look! Honest-to-goodness, salt-of-the-earth,

straight-as-the-day-is-long cab drivers who are personally

willing to personally deliver natural justice, in person,

by personally chewing the lungs out of teenage joyriders.

MUSIC FROM RADIO

-RADIO PRESENTER:

-'Have you heard that Braintree oldster Tallis Snutch,

79, it says here in the paper, got a nasty shock

when he bit into an egg mayonnaise sandwich?

He found a two pound coin.

Quipped Tallis, "You could say it's my lucky day,

"but I've only got the one good tooth left

"and I've come close to breaking him.

"So I've got trauma-related issues!

"Oh, I've got trauma-related issues, haven't I?"

Look! Security apes' corrugated necks.

Hair extension executives.

Epping. Nick Buckles.

Theydon boys, Dagenham girls,

Amy Childs, Blingford, Chigwell -

possibly the only town in the world named after a ventrical hairpiece.

This Essex certainly exists.

It's a sort of colony of London, a dependency.

The East End gone a-roving.

There's nothing very new about this wearisomely familiar Essex.

It's as old as the hills, or the marshes.

It belongs to the long tradition of Essex being

shaped by its closeness to London - specifically by its closeness

to what were the poorest parts of London.

The London that bore the brunt of the malodorous stench

carried on the prevailing westerly.

Essex provided refuge for generations

of what used to be called Cockneys.

That refuge has taken many forms.

Among the most dominant were essays in bucolic philanthropy.

These piles are all that remain of a social experiment.

They once supported a jetty, rather grandiosely named Hadleigh Quay.

It belonged to the Salvation Army Land and Industrial Colony,

which William Booth, founder of the Army

and a figure from the Old Testament, established here in 1891.

The purpose of these 3,000 acres was,

according to Booth's supporter Rider Haggard,

the author of She and King Solomon's Mines,

"To supply a place where broken men of bad habits might be reformed

"and ultimately sent out to situations

"or as emigrants to Canada."

The means by which such souls, destitute, drunk, delinquent,

might achieve salvation was, as usual, manual labour and fresh air.

The colony claimed a 91% success rate.

What that meant and how that figure was arrived at are unclear.

At any time, 300 or so men

would have been living in corrugated iron barracks.

They worked in a brickworks, a pottery and a toy factory.

There was a dairy.

Middle white pigs, cattle, and horses were bred.

It was among the first farms in Britain to introduce

Wyandotte chicken from North America.

There were greenhouses, orchards, potato fields.

At this quay, the colony's produce

was loaded onto barges for London markets.

Bricks, vegetables, fruit, hay for the thousands of horses

who caused London's perpetual traffic jam

and who provided something to put on your rhubarb instead of custard.

Returning barges carried metal scrap to be turned into toys

and slaughterhouse blubber to oil machinery.

There were many such piers and quays in Essex.

The riverine traffic was immense and profitable.

So profitable that landowners dug

private canals to gain access to this great highway.

William Booth's critics mocked him as the modern Moses

and claimed that the colony offered slavery rather than salvation,

and that men packed off to the far posts of the Empire

were actually subjected to transportation.

The Hadleigh Colony was exceptional in its extent,

and in having at its centre a medieval castle,

which John Constable had painted in 1829 with his usual licence.

It was, however, otherwise entirely typical of its age.

Agrarian endeavour and communality were commonplace panaceas

in that era of anti-urbanism, whose major architectural expression

was the First Garden City of Letchworth.

They were particularly commonplace in Essex.

In a showy act of expiation,

Frederick Charrington, heir to the brewery fortune,

renounced beer and founded a teetotal community

on Osea Island in the Blackwater estuary,

a community from which the chances of escape were lessened by the fact

that the only access was across a causeway.

A few miles away, the soap magnate Joseph Fels financed

a farm for the unemployed on the Dengie peninsula.

Fabian Beatrice Webb dismissed Fels as a "decidedly vulgar little Jew."

She was merely manifesting the knee-jerk anti-Semitism

which a chapter of the English Left displays to this day

in its enthusiasm for Palestine and Islam.

There's more of this to come.

Fels employed the young Charles Holden,

a devotee of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman.

who would become one of the greatest of English architects,

the designer of the Belgrave Hospital in Kennington,

London University's Senate House

and many distinguished stations on the Piccadilly Line,

to build a group of farm cottages.

Holden belonged to a school of one - the school of Holden.

It was a good school.

CAR RADIO: '61 Fahrenheit, just a light or moderate west or north...'

MEADES CHANGES CHANNEL

'On the run shoplifters Kimella Wince and Jason-Justin Sleath,

'once described as the Bonnie and Clyde of South Woodham Ferrers,

'have turned themselves in. Hooray!

'According to Southend Police spokesperson Donnalynn Cattle,

'they had been lying low in a bungalow beside the A13!

'Who would have known?

'But were increasingly worried by the lion in the next door garden!

'Where was that, then?!'

There were further communes at Ashingdon, Forest Gate, Althorne,

and most notably at Purleigh, outside the town of Maldon.

Christian nonconformity was powerful round 1900.

The incipient Labour party,

its founder Keir Hardie was MP for West Ham, which was then in Essex,

owed little to Marx and much to chapel, evangelism,

and a distaste for international finance, i.e. Jewry.

It was also indebted to what Ramsay MacDonald called,

"Man's creative, utopia-building faculty."

The Tolstoyan settlement which was situated at Purleigh,

a few miles from Maldon, was Christian,

though not attached to any particular denomination.

It was set up in 1895 and was described,

not altogether amiably, as "a Suez Canal to the Kingdom of Heaven."

This colony was an offshoot of the Brotherhood Church,

which had met at a Salvation Army tabernacle.

The communards led the simple life,

that's to say the highly uncomfortable life.

Ascetic, pacifist, socialist, vegetarian, fruitarian, optimistic.

Such escapists were ill-equipped for survival.

The colony's founder, John Kenworthy,

was a typical veteran of intertwined utopian cults.

The same names invariably crop up.

There were as many cults as there were cultists.

New Harmony, the Self-Supporting Village Society,

the Redemption Society, the Ham Common Group, Fourierism, Chartism

and its offshoots, the Cokelers, Owenism...

One year you belong to Ruskin's Guild of St George,

the next year your master is Edward Bellamy,

then on to Henry George and land reform, then the teachings

of Tolstoy, a great novelist transformed almost unwittingly

into a naive shaman whose most celebrated disciple was Gandhi,

of whom Winston Churchill wrote, "Mr Gandhi is a seditious,

"Middle Temple lawyer posing as a fakir."

The Purleigh colony offered shelter to, among others,

many Doukhobors, proselytising Georgian fundamentalist vegetarians

who rejected the Bible, save for the gospels, and who scorned icons.

Tolstoy championed their cause.

They fled tsarist persecution.

Many of them ended up in British Columbia.

Neither they nor the community which welcomed them has left

any trace on this earth, which was, apparently, insufficiently heavenly.

That is the perennial problem of utopia.

Because it tends to reject the poison called materialism,

it is physically frail.

Literally. Its makeshift buildings hardly outlive the departing,

factionally-riven, embittered communards.

Tolstoy's friend, biographer and translator Aylmer Maude noted that,

"Every movement attracts some ill-balanced people.

"There was much insanity at Purleigh.

"A queer colony."

Such places are also intellectually frail because their adherents

vainly presume human perfection, human goodness.

They are victims of angelism. They are eternal Miss World contestants.

They turn the other cheek. Mistake.

They subscribe to the most vapid of ideologies, pacifism,

and to the most delusory, conscientious objection,

a head-in-sand form of cowardice.

Another decade, another communal experiment.

There are no material remains of the Q Camp,

established at Hawkspur Green near Braintree in 1936.

Its legacy, rather, is in its ideas and practices.

Regarded then as eccentric, even as dangerous,

they would become mainstream 40 or so years later.

The tough love and self-governance

pioneered at this therapeutic community

were to become widely employed in the treatment

of addictions in adults and antisocial behaviour in children.

The men behind the Q Camp movement were David Wills,

a former borstal housemaster,

who had become sceptical about the methods used in such institutions,

and the psychiatrist Norman Glaister,

a member of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry,

a non-militaristic version of the Boy Scouts, all tents and logging.

Glaister had founded the Grith Fyrd movement of camps for the unemployed

and was involved in the Suffolk progressive school Priory Gate

which championed nudity and self-expression

over discipline and academic enterprise.

It was run by a former military vet, self-taught psychologist

and inventor of something called a Frigidity Machine

"to unblock primal libidinal energy."

This was Theodore Faithfull, the great diva's grandfather.

# I walk along the street of sorrow

# The boulevard of broken dreams... #

Three quarters of a century on from the Q Camp at Hawkspur,

the same unsentimental philanthropic rehabilitation

of the drug-dependent and the homeless

is undertaken at the Welcome Centre in Ilford.

The architect is the admirable Peter Barber, whose neo-modernism

echoes not merely the forms of first-generation modernism,

but also its social purpose.

This is what early therapeutic communities would have built

had they enjoyed the means,

as the Peckham eugenicists did in south London.

The intention of this architecture,

derived ultimately from the Enlightenment,

was to condition its users, to bring them health and happiness,

Aertex and athleticism. Moral improvement might be affected

by medicine balls and sunlight and whiteness.

White signified purity, cleanliness. Its importance was symbolic.

It is as far as you can get from the blackness of the 19th century,

the blackness of ash, soot, tar, smut, smoke,

and stinging particulates.

Rectilinear rigour, white render, copious glass.

These were the trinity of architectural progress,

and supposedly of moral progress, in the earlier 20th century.

The proposition that our surroundings can improve us

is, of course, unprovable. It's a matter of faith, no more or less.

However, better surely to try than not to try.

Even if humankind, more responsive to the stick,

shows itself to be eternally ungrateful

to carrot-wielding architects full of good intentions.

And even if buildings have no beneficial behavioural effects,

it is surely preferable

that they are made with passionate intelligence, craft,

and an eye for beauty, rather than with clumsy illiteracy

and a fawning accessibility.

Accessibility means nothing more than being comprehensible to morons.

# I heard the streets were paved with gold... #

CAR RADIO: 'And finally, animals at an animal sanctuary near Harwich

'are behaving like real animals,

'according to Harwich's lead bestiality monitor, Doug Loadshedder.

'Doug, apparently, has proposed a controversial scheme

'to chemically castrate repeat offender sanctuary animals.

'They're alleged to have performed amorous animal antics.

'In Doug's opinion, it's the llamas who are the worst.

'As he says, "Llamas are nothing but wolves in sheep's clothing."

DJ LAUGHS 'Here's Queen.'

Britain's pre-war resistance to modernism has been

greatly exaggerated by both its supporters and its detractors.

The supporters find, in its supposed rarity,

a reason to castigate the country for its architectural backwardness,

social conservatism and cultural timidity.

The detractors dissemble what is essentially an aesthetic antipathy.

They don't like the look of it, so they huff and they puff,

and they clamber up to what they consider to be the moral high ground

in order to claim that it was socially disastrous,

that it was imposed on unwilling council tenants, which it wasn't.

That it was foreign, which, as we shall see, is moot.

That it was totalitarian, which, in a way, it was.

Modernism is, anyway, merely a convenient, if lazy, shorthand.

There were numerous strains of modernism. Modern isms.

That plurality is abundantly evident in Essex.

Tomas Bata was the scion of a family of Moravian cobblers.

He brought American industrial methods to shoe manufacture.

He believed that humankind should be well-shod, cheaply.

He believed that his workers should be well-housed, cheaply.

The company he founded at Zlin, in what is now the Czech Republic,

expanded internationally.

He was a utopian, a paternalistic utopian

who believed that in order to make the world a better place

you must first make money.

No point in setting up as a secular saint unless you're stinking rich.

If utopia is to be sustainable, it must be founded in capital.

Otherwise it descends into the slavery called Communism.

Bata globalised the 19th-century industrial village,

dressing it in the modernist garb of the 1920s and '30s.

What was called international modernism

wasn't truly international... it differed according to nation.

International in this context was code,

a pejorative synonym for Jewish.

The Bata factory, the Bata hotel, the Bata hostel,

the Bata cinema, the Bata clinic, the Bata community centre,

the Bata workers' houses, which were indeed designed by Czech architects,

Frantisek Gahura and Vladimir Karfik.

Nothing looked remotely English.

The buildings' proportions, the axial planning, the rows of poplars,

the cherry trees, they add up to a site that is almost exotic.

Further, there was something cultish about Bata.

It was isolated, autonomous.

Workers were sent on pilgrimages to Zlin,

as though it were Mecca or Santiago de Compostela or Benares.

At home were expected to join in.

Sports competitions, gardening competitions, Moravian folk dancing,

Moravian folk singing.

One man's heaven on earth is another's collective hell.

In the 1980s, the Bata company elected to cease manufacture here

in favour of Asian countries where labour costs were minimal.

Not so paternalistic after all.

It was a miniature single industry town

and a single industry is a precarious foundation.

At Mistley, a succession of single industries failed.

Port, spa, brickfield, maltings.

They bequeathed to what is little more than a village

a pile-up of houses, oasts, quays, inns,

and the beguiling remnants of a church.

-CAR RADIO:

-'You're in for a treat,

'but lots of other treats, of course...'

'Five years ago,

'human outsourcing engineer Digby Goodswine from Kelvedon,

'good old Kelvedon, lost his sense of smell

'in a tragic leaving party incident. Aww.

'Well, now Digby, 39, a keen amateur surgeon, has operated on himself,

'to install a device in his nose

'which has restored his sense of smell.

'So successful is it that he has applied for a patent

'and intends to go into production with Third Nostril, as he calls it.

'Would you Adam-and-Eve it?

'And what's his favourite smell, now that the old olfactory gear

'is no longer on the blink?

'He says he'd like to pretend it was the nape of partner Perietta's neck.

'Aww! But if he's telling the whole truth and nothing but,

'it's got to be a sizzling full Spanish with extra hot chorizo!

'Hey, arriba!'

At Alresford, there's a wooden house built by the firm of WH Colt.

William Colt was a German immigrant

who changed his name to that of a gun.

He began prefabricating wooden, kit-form poultry sheds in 1919.

Soldiers returning from World War One were entitled to grants

to establish smallholdings.

They used Colt's poultry sheds as their homes.

-Bugger the chickens.

-SHRILL SQUAWK

This encouraged Colt to prefabricate first bungalows

and then houses which demanded professional construction.

In the alphabet of inter-wars building,

Colt is succeeded by Crittall.

FH Crittall was a Braintree ironmonger who,

if he didn't invent the metal window frame, certainly popularised it.

The first houses that the Crittall company

built for its workers in 1918, have some claim to be

the earliest modern movement buildings in Britain.

Maybe.

Crittall windows would become emblematic

of modernism in its British guise.

As the windows conquered the land, Crittalls moved to a new factory

on what would today be called a greenfield site,

and around it they built the metal window kingdom of happiness,

a flat-roofed heaven on earth

for their ever-expanding workforce, whose members were called pioneers.

They might equally have been known as willing guinea pigs.

Here was yet another social laboratory.

This time with a department store, a farm, an abattoir,

a bakery and England's largest village hall.

The promise of a house with electric light and inside toilets attracted

workers from East End slums and from Scottish and Welsh mining towns.

Further, the village was of course

an advertisement for the company's products.

At the heart of it was Manors, the house occupied

by the philanthropic and paternalistic Crittalls,

whose workers were their extended family, their children.

Needless to say, joining in was compulsory.

Play was work. Obligatory activities abounded.

The full horror of team spirit was enjoyed by all.

'Look, it says here, Moist Groin guitarist Stafford Prance

'is facing an industrial tribunal.

'Former employee Benita Halfhead, 23,

'a junior commis chef at the guitar hero's Great Dunmow mansion,

'alleges that she was wrongfully dismissed. Don't they all?

'Benita suffers from Spackman Brock syndrome. Don't know that one.

'It makes her dribble uncontrollably.

'The rock legend was said to be concerned about environmental damage

'and that food contamination could lead to the cancellation

'of Groin's forthcoming tour of Iceland. Get your tickets now.'

DJ LAUGHS

Although the name Crittall became well-known,

the horizontally emphatic model

which was the firm's most identifiable product

was nicknamed the Daily Mail Window

because it was popularised by means

of that paper's Ideal Home Exhibition.

But while the Daily Mail goes from strength to strength,

bravely providing exclusive coverage

of the bimbocracy flaunting its curves,

and holding to account the most powerful in the land,

Middle England's favourite window maker got defenestrated.

Eventually, it refenestrated -

same name, different company, and once again thriving.

In 1934, an exhibition of prototype houses was staged near Romford.

Utopia is invariably rendered malodorous

by the stench of compliance.

The Gidea Park Modern Homes Exhibition

was described by Noel Carrington, the book designer

and brother of Dora, as "deplorable - as shocking a jumble of styles

"and roof levels as ever were seen together."

The regimented uniformity that Carrington looked for in vain

was the characteristic most prized by those who hoped to improve

the world through design and planning.

The free-booting individualism of the 19th century was lambasted.

Architectural dirigisme was the order of the day.

And so was the socialist autocracy and despotism which the biologist

TH Huxley had discerned in the Salvation Army's land colonies.

A more dilute authoritarianism - regulation by whimsy

and preciousness - is to be found in the aggressively genteel

yet strangely delightful Edwardian resort of Frinton-on-Sea,

a place which didn't have a public house till 12 years ago.

A place where a lawn is called a greensward.

A place where a streaker, when asked why she had done it,

said, "I was SO bored."

# Matelot, matelot

# Where you go, my heart goes with you

# Matelot, matelot

# When you go down to the sea. #

And where the grateful people of Essex erected -

there can be no other word -

a monument to the United Kingdom's foremost spermophage Tom Driberg,

post-war MP for Maldon and subsequently Lord Bradwell

of Bradwell juxta Mare.

This keenly-attended recreation facility is popularly known

today as Uncle Tom's Cottage.

Frinton is where modernism came up against the market

and the market won.

Oliver Hill, a versatile architect and a keen naturist,

was hired in 1934 as master planner of a speculative venture

to the north of Edwardian Frinton.

Frinton Park was to have comprised more than 1,000 houses,

churches, hotels, schools and so on.

It would have been the largest concentration

of modernist buildings in Britain.

As it happened, only a very little of it was built before the developer

went bust - the prospective buyers proved to be shy of modernism.

The sort of people who wanted to live in Frinton - old people -

did not want to live in houses which they considered, reasonably

enough, looked like workers' houses at Bata or Silver End.

Hill quit.

Nonetheless, the tiny fragment of Frinton Park that was built

is a delight.

Hill was not ideologically committed to modernism.

He was less interested in its presumed capacity for conditioning

and its alleged social benefits than in its aesthetic possibilities.

He often imitated the architecture of the Regency,

and he saw that sleek, white modernism

shared Regency architecture's appropriateness to the seaside.

If any further proof of that appropriateness is required,

here's the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club at Burnham-on-Crouch.

Crittall windows, spray, the clank of hawser on mast...

and the illusion that it might one night slip its moorings

and just drift away down the estuary.

Its beauty is of course functional. It was also predictive.

When the building was completed in 1931, it announced,

"This is what the future is going to look like,

"this is what the future will be."

It invites comparison with the footballer Martin Peters,

of whom Sir Alf Ramsey said, "He's ten years ahead of his time."

In which case, the goal Peters scored in the 1966 World Cup Final

had actually been scored in 1956.

RADIO DJ: And here's one from the back pages.

Former international Walton-on-the-Naze

central defender Mel Crudge

- ooh, Crusher Crudge - did the honours cutting

the ribbon at the Holland-on-Sea's new 24/7 minimart.

You know it - it's marvellous. It's open 9-6 every day apart from Sunday.

Little advert for you there.

The Nazals legend,

whose four own goals in the derby against Olympic Harwich in 1991

remains a club record,

was full of praise for the mini mart's range of cleaning products.

"Swarfega's been like a brother to me," he admitted.

Being ahead of one's time is an obligatory condition

of avant-garde legitimacy - along with novelty, progress,

absence of precedent, clear breaks, clean slates, daring to be

different, scaling the unknown's heights and so on, ad vomitum.

And, before we forget, there's also the assumption that

collective currents somehow carry the forces of inevitability,

that things are destined to be.

Here's a way of looking at the world.

A retrospective way, which quite ignores serendipity,

which doesn't accept that it might all have turned out differently

had it not been for this circumstance or that chance,

which fails to recognise that there are no patterns save

those that we self-fulfillingly impose after the event.

When applied to art, this way of looking at the world

necessarily places undue value on alleged mould breakers,

on works which supposedly lead onwards, works

which are deemed to have pointed the way forward, which have come first

in the great competition that art is routinely deemed to be, but isn't.

Art isn't sport. It isn't the wretched Olympics.

The reduction of art to awards and prizes and gongs is risibly dumb.

RADIO DJ: '61 Fahrenheit, just a light or moderate western...'

RADIO DJ: 'Oh, here's one.

'Kiddies at Goldhanger's Hassan-i-Sabbah Primary School -

'this is... The world's gone mad! -

'have been forbidden from using pencil sharpeners, ladies

'and gentlemen. Pencil sharpeners!

'In a statement, head teacher Gwenny Size stated that,

'"the act of sharpening a pencil

'"into a sharpener simulates rotational activities

'"which are likely to incentivise unhealthy euphemism asterix."

'Well, she's got a point. Even if her pencils haven't!'

DJ CHUCKLES

Arthur Mackmurdo was a beardie oddball with several claims to fame.

Utopian economist, architect, craftsman, designer.

The claims have long been staked, but perhaps not fully acknowledged.

Do they have any substance?

He lived over half his life in Essex.

The bulk of his work is here.

And what very singular work it is.

This house, however, is not quite in Essex.

It's on the western side of the River Lea,

at Enfield, in what was Middlesex.

On the face of it, it's an oddity of the 1930s,

a strangely proportioned oddity,

mistakenly balanced, a series of apparent afterthoughts

so maladroitly composed that it might be the work of an amateur.

In fact the young Mackmurdo designed it 50 years earlier, in the 1880s.

Therein lies its interest - its only interest.

It can be said to anticipate the architecture of an era

far in the future.

Does that happenstance make it important?

Were it actually of the 1930s, it would today go unremarked.

Mackmurdo made something of a speciality of predictive design.

Or, to put it another way, of inventing motifs that were

supposedly copied, plagiarised, influential.

Rather, of inventing one motif -

the title page of his book on Wren's City of London churches

is a variation on this chair - the same diagrammatic botanical forms.

This is said to be the first utterance of what would,

10 or 15 years later, in Brussels, Paris, Nancy

and Prague, become art nouveau.

It's a ridiculous claim.

Did art nouveau really derive from this one source?

Or is this simply a case of artistic jingoism?

Mackmurdo quite lacked the genius of such contemporaries

as Gino Coppede in Genoa and Lars Sonck in Helsinki.

But that didn't inhibit his uncanny gift for designing what

looked like the most banal buildings of the day after tomorrow.

This former post office and telephone exchange is one of several

buildings that this most effortfully eccentric man designed around the

then-undeveloped villages of Great Totham and Wickham Bishops...

more or less conjoined villages, which he hoped

to turn into an arty fiefdom, a colony of very sensitive bookbinders

and committed printers who would make the world a better place

through handicraft and deeply-felt smocking.

Not only did Mackmurdo come from a wealthy background,

he also, in Lord Soames's immortal phrase, "got his cock in the till".

He married an even richer woman,

a distant cousin, Eliza D'Oyly Carte, of the family

which promoted and profited from Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas

and which owned the Savoy Hotel - part of which Mackmurdo designed.

Nonetheless, the money ran out.

He had decided to build a country house.

A very grand country house.

The ungainly extravagance of Great Ruffins brought them

close to bankruptcy.

They sold it and lived in what was to have been a gardener's cottage.

This, then, is the centre of an arts and crafts utopia that never was.

It is an appropriately dotty building.

Mackmurdo's most grandiose.

As ever, it's clumsy, as though one hand doesn't know what the other is

up to, as though it's the work of someone who was entirely untutored,

which was far from the case.

The only remotely comparable contemporary architecture

in England was that of a man who was indeed untutored,

but who had looked at Coppede's work in Genoa.

Richard Harding Watt changed the face of Knutsford in Cheshire,

another county besmirched by footballers.

But...Watt's work is charming.

Mackmurdo's is merely weird and desperate to be different -

and, for all its busyness, bereft of energy.

The same qualities are evident in his prose.

He described the Century Guild which he co-founded as: "A mighty upheaval

"of man's spiritual nature in her attempt to throw off the depressing

"materialism which shrouded her limbs when industry and commerce

"tore away her garment of beauty, and cast it upon the scrapheap."

Mackmurdo's writing was in the tradition of utopian Essex -

a failure. He claimed to have been driven by what he called

"an overmastering discontent with things as they were."

An early work, entitled, The Immorality Of Lending

For Payment Of Interest, Or For Any Usurious Gain,

all too evidently fell on deaf ears.

A late work, The Human Hive: Its Life And Law

proposes that mankind should follow the cooperative example of bees.

This was pretty much in keeping with a wider vogue

in the early 20th century for idealistic, xenophobic,

anti-semitic, third-way schemes

such as Social Credit and Guild Socialism.

RADIO DJ: 'We're back with Digby.

'Look, Kelvedon inventor Digby Goodswine is fighting for his life

'in a Dutch prison hospital. Poor old Digby.

'What it says here is that, according to partner Perryetta Scratchsore,

'an early evening drink at Rotterdam's Sugar Baby Love Bar

'turned into a waking nightmare that she has still not awoken from.

'Oh, wake up! The keen amateur surgeon, 39,

'entered the bar wearing his soon to be patented Third Nostril device.

'Well, we all want one of them.

'According to early reports, a police officer mistook him

'for an off-duty terrorist and shot him from less than three metres!

'Although the bullet struck one of the steel plates that he had inserted

'in his head and did not enter his brain - there we go.

'It says, er...

'Oh. Digby is in a deep coma.

'Well, we're all thinking of you, Digby.

'We're all thinking of you, mate.'

Anti-semitism took many forms.

Conrad Noel, for instance,

saw Jesus as a Jew who had abjured his Judaism -

an apostate, or a kind of heretic.

This fascinating and infuriatingly wrong-headed man -

one of the best-known clerics of the early 20th century -

was for many years incumbent of St John the Baptist, Thaxted.

A living which was in the gift of the Champagne socialist

and horizontal socialite Daisy, Countess of Warwick.

Noel was both an Anglo-Catholic ritualist

and a Christian Socialist activist -

that's having your cake and eating it.

It wasn't enough, though. Noel wanted the entire bakery.

So he was also a fellow traveller

of Fenianism and Stalinism - which will be why his tomb proclaims

that he loved justice and hated oppression(!)

Then again, he was a hey-nonny-no folkie who wrote that,

"Heaven was not to be sought beyond the skies,

"but to be established upon Earth.

"I began to see what a hell men had made of this earth."

Replacing hell on earth with heaven on earth meant folk music,

folk song, folk dance, folk craft,

folk weaving, folk building, folk bunting, folk banners,

folk folking.

Well, someone has to invent ancient customs and forgotten mores

and ancestral practices of the pre-industrial past,

and in Thaxted, that someone was Noel, who was surely familiar with

the time traveller in William Morris's A Dream of John Ball,

who states, "I come not from heaven, but from Essex."

'Oh, this will cheer you up, this will cheer you up, Ethel.

'Great new from Holland's Haageland Prison.

'Inventor Digby Goodswine, 39, who was shot in the head

'in a controversial bar shooting

'when mistaken for an off-duty terrorist, we remember,

'has regained consciousness

'and is enjoying a hearty canteen lunch of pork-style product

'in the company of three Liberian government ministers,

'facing cannibalism charges at the International Criminal Court.

'I don't know why I read that bit. Anyway, moving on.'

Philanthropists' model villages, paternalistic industrial villages,

milord's estate villages, ideologically-founded colonies,

therapeutic farms, temperance coralls,

transcendental bivouacs, serenity workshops, rehab hamlets,

happiness garrisons, uplift development spas,

spiritual utopias and utopian-ish settlements.

No matter how diverse they were,

they all suffered pre-planned regulation.

They were ordered, controlling.

They might be quasi-military or religious or pedagogic.

In every case, they were pettily proscriptive of something or other.

They fostered dependency and resentment.

The rules were not made by the people who inhabited them.

Them, an impersonal construct made the rules and Us,

obeyed them, on pain of exile.

Liberals want everyone to be like them and to be grateful to them.

Utopias are almost by definition bound to fail.

Modest projects which set out to do little more than improve our lot

are, however, liable to succeed.

Democracy is evidently all pretence.

It belies the literality of its name.

But that pretence is important.

It offers some hope of self-determination.

When Adam delved and Eve span,

then, there was no Them - we were all Us,

and disorder asserted itself.

It still asserts itself.

It was the same proximity to London

that had made Essex the site of so many

philanthropic essays that caused it to become the site

of post-war new towns, overspill towns such as Basildon and Harlow.

This was the formal Essex, official Essex, planned Essex.

That closeness to London had another side to it.

There was, and gloriously still is, a different Essex,

an Essex on the sly, an under-the-counter Essex.

A cockney shangri-la, a homemade heaven on earth,

a place that arose without, so to speak, benefit of clergy.

Illicit, unwanted, save by the people who wanted to be there,

the people who wanted to create it.

Above all, abhorred by planners

because it pays no heed to zones and usage-belts, to macro-parks

and bio-scapes, to sectoral methodologies

and cranium drainage drivers.

Pathological taxonomies and obsessive neatness are AWOL.

Planners are people, who, like scum-of-the-earth politicians,

are life's prefects, social and or emotional cripples,

whose mission is to tell us what to do

and what not to do.

Essex is notorious in this regard.

The Essex Design Guide was first published almost 40 years ago.

It ordained a simpering, winsome pseudo-vernacular, neo-traditional,

bogusly folkloric style of architecture for the county.

South Woodham Ferrers was the earliest but by no means

the most saccharine example.

The guide presaged what came to be known as the new urbanism.

Its example was gradually copied elsewhere,

notably on the eastern seaboard of the United States and in Dorset.

The Thomas Hardy theme park for slow learners called Poundbury,

owes much to its example.

The Essex Design Guide was, in some degree,

a reaction against monolithic modernism.

But the major cause of its velvet gloved authoritarianism

was places like this,

places where high-minded haut en bas utopianism was notably absent.

Places where DIY resourcefulness

and bricolage were employed in service of a better life.

No grand plans, just chalets, make do and mend, recycled components,

lashings of asbestos and corrugated iron and, in special cases,

a kit form house like the Cottabunga, delivered for £250.

A lot of money, that, between the wars when a building plot

might be bought for a fiver.

Add a tosh of paint. Make it bright.

And sit back and relax and await the brickbats of the National Trust,

the Council for the Preservation of Rural England,

bien-pensant environmentalists of all shades

such as the tireless ranter, James Wentworth Day,

who described Essex as the dustbin of London.

One-nation technicians of welfarism, public health officials,

await the accusations of defacing rural England,

of a gangrene spreading through the land,

await the council's bulldozers.

For this is genuine folk art, people's art,

unmediated by the design guidelines which volume builders'

ersatz rural boxes obediently adhere to.

And because it is unmediated, it is deemed offensive.

And because it was owned by little people, people who don't count,

poor whites with no voice, it can be swept away with impunity,

like the century-old allotments sacrificed for the Olympian festival

of bling and brawn and steroids.

Who is Essex for? Who is England for?

Successive planning acts have granted local authorities

draconian powers to effect, what are essentially, modern-day clearances.

Much of the Essex coast was once like this.

Today, nature - whatever that is - is fetishised,

So reptiles and wildfowl are granted greater rights than homesteaders.

The disappearance of the people's Essex is a matter of great regret.

But we must grudgingly accept that it's a graphic lesson

about the inevitability of dissolution.

It signals how conditional the notion of the land actually is.

It's forever shifting.

Permanence is an illusion.

It tells us how short our term is.

Because it's so susceptible to the sea,

because it's pervious to the pull of the moon,

because it's so strangely fragile, Essex is a sort of exemplar.

A place where all kinds of philanthropic essays

and stabs at hope have been attempted,

even though it must surely have been obvious

that little would come of them.

Better to have tried than not to have tried.

The sea, formerly known as the German Ocean, is the enemy,

the bounteous evil against which all defence is ultimately in vain.

The devil, disguised as the sea, will breach all dykes.

The name Grimsdyke derives from the Norse for devil.

Elemental change is accelerated here, it's more evident.

That change serves as an emblem of human powerlessness.

No matter how dogged they may be, the questionably spiritual

and the physically practical are both revealed as provisional.

Everything decomposes. Everything fades, rusts, rots.

Everything returns to the immemorial ooze.

Everything.

Absolutely everything is swallowed up by it,

swallowed, for it's a voracious sump inhabited

by an eternal and mutating Driberg.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd