The second day of my stay at The Community (capitalized but left unnamed; more on this in a future post), I talked to one of the locally-based volunteers in an attempt to situate myself in this part of the country. I’d learned from Theroux that there’s an oral tradition around various locations in the UK—people often have very strong opinions about places they had never been, at least according to him, and I wanted to see how much this was true. By complete serendipity, I saw an article about an exhibit at a nearby art gallery in Colchester, Firstsite, which explored one of the most infamous local figures, Essex Man. I asked the local volunteer about it.
“You’ve heard of Essex Man?”
“Well I wanted to check out some of the local history. We’re in Essex here, right?”
“Suffolk, actually. We’re right along the border. The river cuts the two counties in half, but people on the Essex side often claim they live on the Suffolk side. Essex has a pretty miserable reputation.”
Getting to Colchester without a car wasn’t easy. The direct bus doesn’t run on Sundays, so I “was forced” to walk along a series of scenic footpaths through the English countryside to a small village called Dedham. Unlike the US, where the majority of walking/hiking paths can be found in public parks, the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the UK consist mostly of private property, with public footpaths bordering and intersecting pastures and farmland. Dedham boasts a six hundred year old church and a five hundred year old tea room. Puritan dissidents led by John Rodgers fled the village in 1635 and ended up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the area they settled, just outside of Boston, still bears the name Dedham. Spending time here, you run into a lot of the places that leant their names to towns and cities in New England.
A long wait in the tea room and a short bus ride later I was in Colchester. It was once called Camulodunum, and it was the provincial Roman capital of Britain. Remnants of this history are wedged into the structure of more “contemporary” architecture. Stone is scarce in the region, so Colchester Castle is built on the foundation of a Roman temple. The volunteer I spoke to said that the Romans planned on coming back, so they buried their belongings when they fled, and every now and then someone digs up their treasure.
The beautiful old architecture (largely spared from the blitz) cannot hide the creep of modernity. There are not one but two American candy shops. The Community members are exasperated to hear this when I return. I buy some Twizzlers and a Moon Pie to remind me of home.
In the lobby of Firstsite you meet him. Eight meters talk, thick neck, ill-fitting suit, pint of lager gripped in his hand. Cousin to Loadsamoney. Thatcher’s bruiser. The Essex Man.
Since the time of the Romans, the reputation of Essex has changed dramatically. It’s home to London’s nouveau riche. It’s known for gaudy houses with lions at the end of the driveway. There’s a long-running reality show called The Only Way is Essex that draws heavily on the stereotype. Even the local accent reflects this. The stereotypical Essex accent retains much of the quality of an East London working-class accent, except every word is deliberately enunciated. The forces of capital overthrowing the aristocracy, and everyone feeling that it’s incredibly tacky.
But there’s also something of a sacrificial landscape here, like the land bordering the oil refineries on the Louisiana delta or the people who have to live down wind of North Carolina hog farms. There are a number of landfills here. London used to dump its trash in the estuary. There’s an arms testing site, too. Working in the garden at the Community, you can hear the distant rumble of explosions from miles away, too evenly spaced and too consistent to be mistaken for the sound of thunder.
The broader consequences the British Empire were explored in the second exhibit by the Singh Sisters. Outside the exhibit proper, the museum displayed reference material for their work, Indian textiles, the fantastical and unreliable travel narratives of John Manderville, and an account of a slave rebellion by the Dutch soldier John Gabriel Steadman, along with other ephemera, like an image titled “The Graces in a High Wind.”
These influences were incorporated into complex collages, which were digitally printed into textiles and hung with backlighting so that the work glowed as if it were stained glass. The pieces, while often beautiful, were rarely politically subtle.
There’s a side of American history that slowly emerges if you spend enough time looking. There’s the romanticized events and noteworthy atrocities they teach in school, but over time moments of strangeness, beauty, and shocking and banal cruelty emerge out of the conventional narratives. The UK—and the long decline of the British Empire—has a parallel history, which is much more visible when you’re actually there. Essex Man is the symbol of a regressive conservative government, but it’s also a snobby caricature of a people refusing to stay in their place. In an interview shown alongside the exhibit, the author of the original “Mrs. Thatcher’s Bruiser” article where the image first appeared comes across as elitist and posh. Likewise, the Singh Sisters clearly lovingly poured over the materials that influenced their work, and they highlight the beauty and humanity in these original pieces—even if the result is a tapestry of Donald Trump as the Devil.
Frequently We Sort the World Out 