An extraordinarily well camouflaged butterfly in a rewilding garden somewhere in Essex. Look closely and you can see its eyes and antennae.
The slogan of the Essex and Suffold water company is “living water”. In current circumstances they might want to chnage that.
One of the people I argue with on the Next Door site goes under the moniker “Brick Oboe”. I find it hard to believe that that is his actual name. It sounds like the most obscure of the seventies rock bands who named themselves after the slang for an erect dick: Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Brick Oboe.
In the distance in the playing field opposite my parents house a strange figure dressed in a pink and white hazmat suit and medical mask looks as though he is prospecting for metal, or perhaps mines; sweeping his device from one side to the other, slowly, cautiously, systematically. As he gets closer, it turns out he is mowing the grass. The PPE seems a bit extreme for that. Perhaps he has a serious grass allergy.
A week later, the whole field gets done by a tractor; which makes you wonder what the point of the bloke in the Hazmat suit was. Perahps he was just doing the irradiated grass…I take a deep sniff as I walk past for that fresh cut grass smell. A job with aromatherapy built in.
The ambulance worker in the non emergency hospital transport taking my Dad to Basildon goes to get a hospital wheelchair when we get there. This is a clunky, heavy device that looks like it was designed to carry industrial goods by a Soviet tank designer. An altogether more robust vehicle than the onboard wheelchair, which has a comfortable seat and at least the impression of suspension. He explains that the industrial design, and weight, of the hospital wheelchair is deliberate; to stop people stealing them. The long poles at the back of some of them are “to stop people getting them into cars. You’d be amazed.”
His colleague on the way back is so annoyed by the bossy recorded posh voice from the in vehicle safety monitor telling him to drive safely and do his seatbelt up that he does it up behind him and sits on it.
Listening to one of the carers chatting to my Dad about his life this morning, it struck me that carers – taken together- have a massive store of oral history about the area they work in.
Chatting to one of them, she said that she felt she had to get the job to stave off permanent boredom after moving to Purfleet from Central London. “Its so QUIET in Purfleet”.
As the stair lift is Dutch, perhaps the music to accompany an ascent should be the Flying Dutchman Overture. The chair goes slowly enough to get quite a way into it.
On the way back from the pharmacy back in NW9, a battered looking yellow football bounces down the path from the estate on Stagg Lane heading swiftly towards the road. I swing my gammy leg towards it and, in a miracle of luck, my dyspraxic slice at the ball conjures up a magnificent banana shot that takes it safely back into the estate and behind the hedge.
One of my Dad’s carers, who used to do ballet, having finished dispensing pills and tea, suddenly breaks into a spritied performance of Knees up Mother Brown in the living room.
Knees up Muvva Brown, knees up Muvva Brown
Under the table you must go, E,I,E,I,E,I,O
If I catch you bendin’, I’ll saw your legs right off!
Knees up! Knees up! Gotta get a breeze up!
Knees up Muvva Brown!
Oi!
Makes you wonder about the lyrics. Under the tabke you must go! Definitely some coercive control going on there, but to what end? And, If I catch you bendin’, I’ll saw your legs right off! Seems a bit extreme. What’s that all about?
Crooning in the Chemists
At the top of Grays High Street, just before you get to the station, there is a slightly eccentric chemists. The pharmacy is at the back, looks swish and modern, is well staffed and stocked and has done a steady trade every time I’ve been in there. But you have to approach it through an empty front area that at one time was a cafe, now closed but still with its counter intact, scattered with a few random leaflets from the health side of things. This gives it a slightly random and precarious feel, with what could have been a lively addition to its operation left derelict as a reminder of its failure. A battered looking bloke in the queue behind me grins and starts singing, tunefully, at one of the pharmacists… “Hello…Is it me you’re looking for?” …and she joins in.
Maybe they’ve done this before…
Poetry on the tube
On the Northern Line on the way back home, one of the wonderful poems on the underground – pasted up where the adverts for all sorts of forgettable things usually are – makes me visibly well up. A few people look momentarily concerned, so I compose myself to maintain the social solidarity of mutual indifference.
This one by Marjorie Lotfi.
Packing for America— my father in Tabriz, 1960
He can’t take his mother in the suitcase, the smell of khoresht in the air, her spice box too tall to fit. Nor will it close when he folds her sajadah into its corners. He can’t bring the way she rose and blew out the candles at supper’s end, rolled the oilcloth up, marked the laying out of beds, the beginning of night. He knows the slap of her sandals across the tiles will fade. He tosses photographs into the case, though not one shows her eyes; instead, she covers her mouth with her hand as taught, looks away. He considers strapping the samovar to his back like a child’s bag; a lifetime measured in tea from its belly. Finally, he takes her tulip glass, winds a chador around its body, leaves the gold rim peeking out like a mouth that might tell him where to go, what is coming next.
The world’s weirdest Gooner dancing by the subway
Outside Hendon Central Station, at about tea time, an eccentric Arsenal supporter has erected a structure framing a couple of AFC banners, topped off by a Charles III Coronation flag; all flapping in a brisk breeze. He stands to one side of it with a serious face, leaning over the fence to the subway below and dancing jerkily to an eruption of rhythm from a busker playing the sax. The busker looks like Bob Mortimer on a slightly rough day, but is enjoying himself enormously, bopping about from side to side. The tune is a hurtling series of distinctly East European staccatto sounds, flowing with an incredible velocity. Up tempo to the point of mania. As little squads of tired and dusty workers, who have just knocked off for the day, walk into the tunnel at the far end, their weary trance like expressions turn into surprised smiles as they are ambushed by the music; and the workaday functional passageway from one side of the A41 to the other is turned into an unlikely venue for a moment of joyful reprieve that creates a complicity in everyone there as people turn to each other seeking eye contact.
Stair chair fanfare
Having a stair lift put in is like having the world’s slowest Thorpe Park ride on tap. The chair is made in Holland, and I’m told by the engineer – who comes to uplift the bannisters so they don’t knock knees or pinch hands as the chair progresses onwards and upwards with its air of inevitable gradualism – that the speed is set by EU regulations. At some point, no doubt, the Daily Telegraph will cotton on to this and campaign for speedier chairs, to express the exhilarating freedom of the Brexit experience that we have all, no doubt, shared. And to cut the Nanny State red tape that stops it moving without the seatbelt done up first and dispose of that health and safety gone mad emergency stop button. As it is, this is a chair that pauses and thinks before it does anything. And clunks very deliberately when it does. Operating it is a school of patience. But thats cool. It is slow, steady and inexorable. It should have a musical accompaniment.
The tall, relaxed Dutch bloke who delivered it first thing on a misty morning – with the kids drifting slowly past, up the road towards the Hathaway Academy – had driven it from the factory in Holland. As he lifts off the huge box that contains all the smaller boxes with components in, I feel there should be a fanfare. On a two day UK tour, delivering bespoke stair lift systems to houses up and down the country – then back across the North Sea on the Harwich ferry with the empty van, he delivers all over Europe; Italy, Spain, Germany. I chat a bit about visiting Amsterdam last year and he says “EVERYBODY visits Amsterdam”. I think I manage to persuade him to visit Keukenhoff in the end, with the line that the effect of all those flowers is almost hallucinogenic, even though he starts of by saying “Visiting there is almost TOO Dutch!” and “no one who actually lives in Holland ever goes there”.
Odd scenes in North West London and South East Essex
Walking past the Thameside Theatre and a woman is furtively picking what looks like lettuce leaves from the flower beds at the front. I assume that she is wild scavenging, and now that I look like a harmless old geezer, complete with arthritic limp and shopping trolley, I feel emboldened to talk to strangers, so I ask. “Are those edible?” Waving them to underline her point, she says, “They are for my tortoises”. In Todmorden this is what everyone does. For over ten years they have encouraged people to plant food on any vacant and unused land, and for anyone who needs it to pick it. This brightens and greens up the streetscape, creates community – as loads of people plant things in all sorts of places – and provides extra fresh food, in season, for anyone who needs it. This has been picked up in lots of other small towns, but Hull is about to try it out on a city wide scale. We should all do it. Why can’t our High Streets be orchards too?
Three shops in Rainham. Vape shop. Fried Chicken shop, Undertakers. In that order.
As the C2C train arrives at Dagenham Dock, the small girl wearing a blue jacket with white angel wings designed onto the back – who has hitherto been exploring the physical space around her Mum, who sits a bit careworn in her mac and hijab, and elder sister, who is glued to her phone – lifts her head and listens. Perhaps its because the recorded announcement is done in posh. Emphasising all three syllables – “Dag-en-ham”, not the local version that makes the middle one redundant – “Dag – nem”; thereby bringing out its full rhythm and range of sounds. The drum beat of the syllables too; Dagenham Dock, boo, ba, bum – BOM! The percusive consonants at the start of Dagenham, the extended hum at the end Dagenhmmmm– the sharp crack of “Dock!” She seems enchanted by it and, all the way to West Ham, she keeps repeating it in various forms – stretching it out, making it jerky and jumpy- making it an impromptu nursery rhyme with no meaning but a definite music.
Of course, the part of my brain that still thinks in Lesson Plans started working out how to canal this spontaneous exploration into a rhythm game: sit in a circle and clap and chant the the names of stations; always ending at Mornington Crescent obviously…
Outside the Magistrates Court on the Edgware Road, a couple of pararazzi snipers with huge photolens cameras lurk in ambush, presumably waiting for a celebrity wrong ‘un to emerge at the top of the steps; the name of the Court photogenically framing them in more ways than one. One scopes out a shot from behind a tree, perhaps nervous of being seen by his mark.
A boy of about seven carrying a large backpack walks along Orsett Road chatting with his Dad. Where might they be going? Church? Seems unlikely. Serious though they look, the dress code for the new wave of Black Evangelical Churches in Grays ranges from the Handmaiden’s Tale look (white robes and squashed chef’s hats) to the distinctly snazzy. The Dad was wearing camouflage cargo shorts, which probably wouldn’t make it past the divine bouncers on the doors. On the same stretch of street a couple of weeks ago I saw a sharp looking young Pastor who was offsetting his stark black shirt and gleaming white dog collar with a spotless, figure caressing, bright mustard camel coat. He had a confident, world conquering walk. Hot priest, indeed.
Just past the Magistrates Court onto London road, the Dad stops and checks his phone, letting his son walk ahead to his destination. The Grays Tuition Centre – “Your Child … Our Priority” (next door to Divine Styles and Cosmetics and Tahmina & Co Criminal Solicitors – not a place to hang out, you never know who you might meet) and offering courses to get you through the tests for Maths, English, 11 plus.
As the boy gets closer to the door and further from his Dad, his pace slows and his mood deadens. He slowly mounts the steps and quietly enters the building, seemingly in the hope that if no one sees him, he won’t really be there.
In the market, a bloke is selling gift bags with four top of the range brand perfumes for a tenner. Ask no questions…
Outside the Eastern European Deli by Clarence Road a crowd of people gather round a man playing an accordion and sing the Rumanian version of Felice Navidad. Rumanian being a Latin language, the first word is the same. As is the tune. They seem to be having a good time. People passing by smile, even though they don’t understand the words. They can pick up on the good feeling.
Hurtling on a mobility scooter down George Street towards Morrisons at about 4 mph, a wild haired man with a rubbery twisted face mutters and gurns at passers by like Mick Jagger with Turettes.
Inside a tiny Rumanian owned finance shop on the riverward side of the level crossing by the station, a full scale service is going on. A priest in a cylindrical black hat, wearing an utterly gorgeous scarlet cloak covered with ornate gold embroidery with an icon like picture of the Virgin Mary on the reverse collar at the back of his neck, waves a heavy gold cross in one hand, while crossing himself with the other. Sometimes facing his small congregation of men with nylon suits and short haircuts, sometimes facing the wall behind him. This has an plaque celebrating the company’s Platinum award for HR successes, so it sometimes looks as though they are worshipping that. To his left, and facing the gawpers in the street through the plate glass windows, an attendant in an equally heavily gold embossed crimson robe stands guard with a serious look on his face. The overall effect is positively Byzantine in its mystical magnificence; humanised by the small table of snacks and orange squash along the wall.
At the bottom of Cromwell Road a tiny boy wearing one of those animal head hats that make him look like Max from “Where the Wild Things are”, is being pushed along by his Mum on a little purple plastic three wheel scooter which flashes lights as it trundles onwards. He is standing rigidly erect like a little Emperor, hands firmly on the handlebars, one of them grasping a sharpened pencil that he holds pointedly upwards like a staff of office.
Coming out of the Church of Christ Celestial, a young woman dressed all in white like a cross between a pastry chef and a woman from the Handmaiden’s tale, bustles off down the road on Godly business. The Church is installed above the St Luke’s Hospice shop in what used to be the Burton’s Snooker Hall. Burton’s was a popular off the peg suit emporium that ran a snooker hall above the shop in the middle of the last century. My Dad told me that this was considered something of a den of iniquity among respectable folk – as in The Music Man song:
Oh yes we’ve got trouble
Right here in River City
With a capital T
And that rhymes with P
And that stands for Pool.
The logo for the snooker club – a triangle of racked balls – can still be seen faded but legible on the most southerly window. Hopefully the Church won’t disapprove as much as my grandparents did, and will leave it in place.
Although my Dad was forbidden to go in there, he’d sometimes surreptitiously nip up the stairs, not because he wanted to be Thurrock’s answer to Fast Eddie Felton, but accompanying a mate who’s Mum ran the tea bar as an alternative to the London Road Cafe on a Saturday night; for a heavily stewed tea and slice of “yellow cake” (a late 40s austerity version of Madeira, and nothing to do with Uranium…so they said).
Down Hathaway Road marches a small, slow, stately procession of elderly black matrons, all in their best church hats and sombre business like handbags, led by one of their number carrying a museum piece of a tall vertical banner in dark red with something Biblical in black written on it that could be straight out of the Shankill Road circa 1887. The strong influence of Black Evangelicals on the local Conservative Party indicating that the Saints might not be marching in, but they are definitely marching on; resolutely in the wrong direction.
Outdoor household Xmas decs look a bit sad in daylight, even before the day itself. Lights at night are one thing, but shopworn bows and slightly deflated snowmen and Santas blowing a bit desperately in the wind, are something else. Especially as seen from the top of the 100 bus to Basildon hospital, trundling through Stanford le Hope and Corringham, on a local road for local people, running alongside the huge six lane A roads that slice through and coil around the old towns like Boa Constrictors, with most traffic passing them by, trucking mountains of containers from the docks at Tilbury and Thames Gateway on up to the M25 and across the country. The relatively small and discrete railway line from Southend to London probably carries as much, or could, and makes a far lower impact on the landscape. Blink and you might miss it. You can’t miss the roads, making Stanford and Corringham feel by passed by their by passes. Both have a slightly tired and accidental higgeldy piggeldy feel to them, with no real centre, or heart, just successive layers of improvised development, clustered beyond Stanford’s handsome old church, with matching pub across what might have been a village green once.
Along the river run a row of giant cranes and gantries and the containers pile up 6 storeys high looking like the Martian machines from War of the Worlds. The sort of job done by my grandfather and great uncle consigned by them to rapid oblivion in the early 70s. An old family friend drops in and tells me that her job as a copywriter has gone the same way. At the beginning of last year, she had a waiting list and steady work with regular clients. ChatGPT comes along this year and wipes her out. She hasn’t had work for two months.
My Mum had quite a few cousins. Two of them had rhyming nicknames. Donk and Bronc. “Donk” because he would donk people on the nose if they were getting on his nerves too much. Bronc because, as a child, he was always playing cowboys.
An aspect of US hegemony is the extent to which the films and TV series we have watched all our lives make people think of them as the good guys. This is despite everything we have lived though, from Vietnam to Chile to Central America and the 4.5 million people killed in the war on terror, with Abu Ghraib and the Fallujah Free Fire zone providing a model for the IDF now in Gaza and the West Bank, while the US supplies them with the bombs and bullets to do what they are doing. All played down and deflected in our media of course.
The cavalry charge bugle call that heralded the goodies (white soldiers) arriving at the gallop at the end of so many Westerns to deal with the “savages” (native Americans) to the cheers of the Saturday matinee crowds of children in the 50s and 60s was played in a way intended to be darkly ironic at the end of that decade in the Helicopter gunship scene in Apocalypse Now, where the music shifts to the Apache helicopters playing Ride of the Valkyries through loudspeakers as they swoop in to strafe the Vietnamese village, and their commander comments, “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning”. Only the ironic intent and impact is inappropriate, because, think it back and project it forward, in the “war of civilisation against barbarism” (B. Netanyahu) its a call for the same armed forces to do the same damn thing over and over and over again.
Squadrons of Mods in sharp suits on Italian motor scooters
Lambrettas and Vespas,
With little Union Jacks and floppy plastic tails hanging limply from their aerials
Disrespectfully patriotic RAF roundels on the backs of their parkas
Parked in a pack between the War Memorial and the Wimpy Bar
That little slice of American Modernity
– formica table tops
-frothy coffee
-table ketchup in real plastic tomatoes
wedged in between the dusty deserted grandeur of the Queens Hotel to the Right
and the Coop Department store on the Left.
September 2014
Bit of a false memory when I wrote this. I couldn’t recall what the Wimpy Bar looked like above ground floor level. Looking at the space I imagined it was in was even more puzzling, as there didn’t seem to be room for it. Scouring the internet turned up a photo that showed it was wedged between the Coop and the Queens Hotel, it was wedged into the Queens at the corner of its northern most end.
“Congress House” was the name of the Coop Department store. The Selfridges of South East Essex. It looked like the future in 1963. Sold everything from furniture to clothes to electrical equipment and hyperreal pottery shrunken heads of exotic types of person you might encounter on a holiday from a farther away place than Westcliffe on Sea. A great place to play hide and seek in after school. It even had lifts. There was a competition for the name. They chose the same one as the TUC HQ, which showed what a Labour sort of place this was.
A look at two housing developments in Thurrock from the last 100 years, and one for the next 100, which show how the places that get built for us to live in reflect and reproduce the dominant ideas, and the relationship of class forces, in society at the time they are developed.
1920s: “Homes fit for for Heroes“
In the immediate aftermath of World War 1, and with the Russian Revolution haunting their imaginations like a nightmare, the powers that be in Britain embarked on a period of mass affordable social housing for rent run through local authorities to maintain decent standards and accountability. Council houses. Until widely denigrated in the 1970s in the run up to “Right to Buy” a solid, affordable and secure place to live, generating an income from the council that paid off the initial loan taken out to build them, pay for maintenance and improvements, and provide a steady income once the loans were paid off.
The Grays estate of over 1,000 homes pictured above was built in the mid 1920s and was one of those. I have to declare an interest at this point. I grew up on this estate. One of my great uncles knocked in the posts that laid out the road plan. My Dad was born on it in 1930, my mum moved to it as a toddler; and they still live there now at the age of 93.
These were standard designed “family homes” with three bedrooms – a big one, a middle sized one and a little one, a bit like the Three Bears. There was an outside toilet for each house – not shared like they would have been in a tenement, a small front garden and a more substantial allotment out the back for people to grow vegetables, like nearly everyone did at first, and, in some cases, keep chickens, as some still did as late as the 1960s. Early on, nearly every one had substantial posts for washing lines, many acquired one way or another via the docks; many of them, like ours, former ships masts. Nearly everyone did washing on a Monday and there was almost a competition to get the washing up on the lines first; almost like flying a flag.
My Mum as a child shelling peas in the back garden of her parents house, circa 1936 or 7.
Smack in the middle of the estate was a recreation field with a small set of children’s play equipment in the North Eastern corner. Until after WW2 the influence of Sabbatarianism meant that every Sunday a Council employee would clank through the field wreathed in chains “like Marley’s ghost”, as my dad put it, and chain up the swings and merry go round; so the Sabbath would not be defiled by the satanic influence of children having fun. And, although there was one off licence in a small parade of shops, grocers, chippie, Co-op, post office, there was no pub. This may have been because the Old High Street down by the river – and easily in staggering distance -was full of them, but it gave the place a sober character; no one reeling home singing after closing time.
Built long before mass car ownership, the streets gave access to van or horse and cart delivery for the coal merchants – as heating was from coal fires – and groceries. Each road was bordered by a grass verge planted with trees at regular intervals, with every other tree a flowering variety like Horse Chestnut. This arrangement is still intact in places, as in the picture above. In the picture below more than half of the trees have been cut down, and the grass verges have been paved over in the last 30 or 40 years to provide parking bays for cars; which makes the streets feel more bare, less nurturing. This goes along with privet hedges being grubbed out and either replaced with fences or left open so paved over front gardens can provide space to park even more cars.
This coincided with the impact of Right to Buy. In 1979, the Council had upgraded the whole estate, remodelling both floors in each house to build in (two) inside toilets, open up the kitchens and take out the pantry storage spaces that had been superseded by most people having fridges by then. This was done by decanting tenants into other, similar houses while the work took place, block by block, on a standard model using economies of scale. It was a triumph of social provision. Paradoxically, this made the upgraded houses a very desirable purchase when the Thatcher government went on its “Property Owning Democracy” drive in the early 80s. As houses were sold off, with no right for the Council to use the proceeds to replace the stock, little marks of difference started to appear. Different front doors or windows. The occasional column. Some stone cladding. A little lion on a gatepost.
This did not have the desired political effect. The ward this estate is in has always – always– returned Labour councillors; and still does, by some margin. Not that it was ever politically homogenous. Even in the sixties, when the whole area was industrial working class and the Labour vote was weighed as much as counted, there were clearly identifiable Tories here and there – having the Daily Express delivered, wearing blazers with silver buttons, putting Pirate Radio Station stickers in their car rear windows (while looking like the sort of people who wouldn’t listen to them in a million years). During the 2017 election, when Thurrock was a three way marginal between Labour, Conservative and UKIP, a walk through this estate turned up so many Labour posters and garden stakes that it looked like a shoo in for Polly Billington. In the end, she came second, 500 votes behind the Conservative and a little ahead of the Kipper. Close run thing, but indicative the widely polarised political character of different localities in the same Constituency.
This estate was, and is, also buttressed by allotments that are still well used.This is a view from Hogg Lane, with Chafford Hundred, the alternative universe viewed below, behind and out of sight on the other side.
A final point to note is that a substantial minority of the houses have been enveloped with insulation and look oddly fatter and, being painted white, almost continental. Its not clear how many of these are remaining social housing and how many are those that have been bought. But it is clear here as well as in most other streets you can walk down in the UK that most people with limited wealth at the lower end of the “home owning democracy” can’t afford to make the changes that are socially necessary as individuals; meaning they have higher carbon emissions than they need have, and the higher bills to go with it. An eloquent demonstration of the limits of the market, and transition by piecemeal consumer choice. A wholesale retrofit doing all the houses in one go, with all the benefits of economies of scale on the same model as the 1979 refurb, would be more effective; and is another example of what neo-liberalism has cost us.
1980s: Chafford Hundred, by contrast, is almost an embodiment of what might be called Late Thatcherism. This is a huge development of 5,600 houses built on the land above the old worked out chalk pits on a derelict farm, between Hogg Lane in Grays and Lakeside by the Dartford Crossing; and is a classic piece of late 1980s urban redevelopment, named after an ancient Anglo Saxon County division that once extended from Brentwood to the river, Ongar to Childerditch. It sounds reassuringly retro with undertones of chaffinches and chaff from wheat fields. Almost rural and bucolic. An Essex echo of dreamy little towns in the Chilterns.
But, what’s in a name?
The architecture is box pastiche – standard boxes with historic local style flourishes to give “character” and instant “heritage” – all jammed together a bit too closely for privacy and ease, but too separate for community – snaking around curving roads that lead nowhere but to each other. There is no real centre to it. It feels like an American suburb shrunk to meaner English dimensions.
A few little shops and a doctors surgery with everything retail sucked into the enormous commercial gravitational field of the Lakeside Shopping Centre, on the far side of a foot bridge over the railway line.
There’s only one tiny park for the kids, unless they want to trek off down the pits, which have been remodelled as nature reserves, so the developer – a consortium of Blue Circle, Tunnel Holdings (the old cement firms that worked out the pits) and West Thurrock Estates – could cram on as many units as possible for sale.
Its saving grace is that is has a railway station that connects it to London (Fenchurch Street) and Southend, and everywhere en route. As a result many of the people who live there commute in to work in the City. More a place to be stored in when not working than a place to live. In the property crash of the early 90’s house prices halved and more than half the homes were repossessed; which must have been a shattering experience at the time.
Politically, Chafford was represented solidly by Tories, with Conservative councillors winning every election from 2004 to 2021, displacing the Lib Dems, who won in 2002. In May this year – after the Council’s Conservative leadership had managed to bankrupt Thurrock with unwise commercial investments – Labour won a seat there for the first time.
2020’s New Town Centre?
In the 1970s there was an attempt to boost the High Street, which at that time still had a Woolworths and Marks and Spencer, by building a small shopping mall with attached multi story car park to the rear of it. At a time when the car was still considered the future and places like Leeds were carving themselves up with urban motorways, the idea was that people would drive in, have a place to park in the multi story, and load up.
This was never fully realised even early on, the multi storey being decidedly underused, but when the Lakeside shopping centre opened 5 miles up the road by the Dartford crossing at the end of the eighties, everything shrivelled. Lakeside had big flagship stores, a wider range of everything and was not much harder to get to. Everything in the town centre moved downmarket. The vibe in the centre now, if you walk through it, is decidedly sparse. Even the Wilko has now gone.
This was the future once…
So the owners, like the owners of retail space elsewhere, are looking to realise capital and build in a customer base by building high above the shop. The ongoing income from retail however, is dwarfed by the enhanced value of the real estate. Similar schemes in North West London include the Edgware Road Sainsbury development at the Hyde – that is proceeding apace -and the Broadwalk Centre in Edgware, which is generating some opposition from people used to living in a sleepy greenish suburb, suddenly about to be overshadowed by 20 storey towers.
The Grays Plan is not quite so gargantuan, but envisages, modern high rise blocks around a square. You can see an idealised version in their video here, complete with weird holograms of oddly shaped people doing strange things.
Their description of their plan has the same slightly corporate unreality as the holograms in their video.
Key features of our proposals:
Enhance and revitalise the town centre and public square
Re-invigorate the retail and leisure offer
Boost the night-time and leisure economy within the town
Create space for community use and independent-focused retail
Create a vibrant and safe public realm with open spaces and increase biodiversity in the heart of town
Bring forward new homes in an accessible and sustainable central location
Improve pedestrian connectivity across the town
Introduce design-led, landscaped spaces for the whole community
Facilitate pedestrian linkages with the Thameside neighbourhood
Support the creation of new jobs and opportunities
All this is currently being discussed and I think the apposite questions are these. So, I have sent them in, and await a reply.
How many people, roughly, do you envisage will be living in the development?
What proportion of the development will be social housing for affordable rent? If there are any, will these be of the same quality as the rest of the development and integrated into it?
Related to that, what proportion of the apartments will be for sale at what sort of prices?
Will there be a residence requirement to avoid people buying higher end flats as an investment and leaving them empty (as is far too common in London).
What does the proposed “space for community use” consist of? Will the public square be public or will it be privately owned?
How will the development increase the biodiversity of the town centre?
Will the apartments be zero emission ?
I note that you say that, given the proximity to good public transport links, many people will have no need of a car but, if enough of the flats are high end, most of the people who live in them would probably want one, especially for leisure use. Would you consider building a car share club into the development to minimise the amount of space needed for car parking – and help pull the residents together into a community?
The developers will probably want as many expensive flats as they can get, which will build in a well heeled consumer base above the remaining retail space on the ground floor and maximise their revenues from sales. But this will be in a tension with the pressing housing need in a fast growing borough, with people spilling into it from London in a very steady stream* looking for somewhere more affordable to buy or rent. How this tension works out will determine what this development becomes.
*The ONS used to produce a migration flow maps for local authorities – sadly discontinued after 2020, which showed that when people leave Thurrock they go all over the place, but nearly everyone who moves into it does so from London.
Its a little known fact, and not a lot of people know it, that from 1896 to 1898, while he was writing “Heart of Darkness”, Joseph Conrad lived in Stanford Le Hope in Thurrock; initially in a house he described as “a damned Jerry-built rabbit hutch”.
Thurrock has a habit of playing down its historically illustrious residents. At the back of Grays Hall was an arboretum attached to the house that Alfred Russel Wallace built near a worked out chalk pit; after working out the theory of evolution around the same time as Charles Darwin. The story goes that Darwin, having agonised about his hypothesis and hesitating to publish it for about twenty years was bounced into doing it when he heard that Russel Wallace was about to do so himself, securing himself the popular historical status and making Russel Wallace a more obscure figure that only people interested in Natural History will have heard of.
Russel Wallace lived at The Dell for four years from 1872 to 1876, describing the arboretum below it as “a bit of a wilderness that can be made into a splendid imitation of a Welsh valley“. The house was made of concrete, as a tribute to the burgeoning local cement works, flourishing at the time and scouring out bigger, deeper pits progressively to the West; with factories getting ever larger all the way up to the huge excavation that now houses the Lakeside Shopping Centre, filling the air with dust and giving the town a definite sense of nominative determinism.
However, once he left, the arboretum fell into gloomy disuse, becoming an adventure playground, known as “the big woods” to generations of kids plucky enough to scale the 6 foot high walls (which got easier as time went on, as footholds became more secure from repeated use and the bits of broken glass set on the tops, which cut my Dad’s bottom as he tried to get across on one occasion in the mid 1930s, wore away) or brave the tunnel that was like a portal through from the playing fields of Treetops School – running through the gloom listening for the voice of outraged authority heat seeking our trespasses – which we were sure would not be forgiven.
None of us living near Russel Road, or Wallace Road on the estate alongside had a clue who Russel or Wallace were, let alone that they were the same person. And there has, possibly thankfully, been no movement of Social Russel Wallaceists.
The White Hart, shortly before it closed.
This is the pub that gave the town a bad name. A selection of Gollie dolls hanging behind the bar, like as the landlord put it “they used to hang them in Mississippi years ago“. After the notoriety gained from a Police raid that confiscated the dolls last month, they tried to carry on, replacing them with new ones, claiming that the police were over reacting, that there was nothing racist about it, that the landlord being seen wearing a Britain First T shirt was the kind of thing anyone might do – as the landlady said in an odd echo of Prince Andrew logic, “I don’t think Chris is a supporter of Britain First, he was just wearing that shirt because it was convenient at the time” – because, who wouldn’t wear one of those if it just happened to be lying around, and, indeed, who wouldn’t have one just conveniently lying around?
When I took this photo about a month ago, the pub looked stone dead already. No one was going in or out. A contrast with the Theobald’s Arms just over the road, that had a set of lively customers spilling into the road. A disgruntled looking middle aged man with a sour expression, and a face that seemed to be made of red brick dust, was staring balefully out of a first floor window like Mr Rottcod at the beginning of Gormenghast.
They shut two weeks later after two of their beer suppliers – Heineken and Carlsberg – and the company that cleaned their barrels and lines decided they didn’t want their products associated with this and boycotted them.
Probably the best boycott in the world.
Riverside Ward, where The White Hart is, a densely populated area of former council flats built in the seventies and the sort of recent flats shown in the photo above and cookie cutter housing stretching down towards the Wharf. It is the seventh most deprived of the 20 wards in Thurrock. It is 75% White, 13% Black, 8% Asian and 4% other ethnicity, with fewer pensioners and more young people than most. It has a higher incidence of smoking and binge drinking, adult and child obesity and hypertension than national averages; and life expectancy a year lower for women and three years lower for men. It has a much higher crime rate than Thurrock averages, but well below national. Only 43% feel safe going out after dark, but 49% are generally happy with the area. (1)
It returned a Labour Councillor with 1,191 votes to her Conservative opponent’s 386 in the local elections on May 4th this year. Riverside has been consistently represented by Labour, even though at the high water mark of Brexit mobilisation, the combined Conservative/UKIP vote was some way ahead. In 2016, the successful Labour candidate polled 857 votes, just ahead of UKIP on 748, with the Conservatives at 379. The turnout then was 27%. This May it was down to 19%, so nothing to be complacent about. The Conservatives have stood Black evangelicals as their candidates for several elections in a row, which might be suppressing their vote among the white racist component of their supporters.
One of the odd things about people acting as though the COVID pandemic is over is that it increases the number of people who keep catching it. My Mum and Dad, both 92 and who very rarely go out, recently picked it up on a visit to Hospital, after sitting in a waiting room for quite some time surrounded by people without masks on. Both have got through it, Mum without symptoms, Dad being quite bad with it for three days, underlining again the relative vulnerability of men (weaker sex and all that). Both of them are as vaccinated as you can get and we’re all very thankful for that, as the death rate for people over 80 who are fully vaccinated is 1 in 68. If you have had fewer than 2 vaccinations your chances drop to 1 in 7. Residual vaccine sceptics please note. I’m not saying this to score a point.
So, I went down to Grays and did a very brief socially distanced drop off of some chicken soup my daughter made for them – “give ’em some chicken soup”. “But madam, that won’t help” “It wouldn’t hoit!”
Wandering back through town I stop off for a Capuchino and strudel at Lu Lu’s Cakes and Bakes on the High Street opposite where the Queen’s Hotel used to be. A little gem of a cafe full of pastries and caffeinated smells, staffed by Eastern European women busily doing accounts, with a couple of other grey haired geezers sitting at the tables outside, quietly taking in the breeze and the pale October sunlight. They have a sign on the counter which gains a bit from translation, proclaiming that all of their pastries are freshly made in “our laboratory”. “IGOR!The Strudels!” But the lab does good work. Recommended if you are ever in Grays High Street.
The precinct is busy but determinedly down at heel. An attempt to revive the High Street in the 1970s, complete with multi story car park and killed stone dead by Lakeside opening up in the 80s. The old status stores, M&S, even Woolworths, either migrating there or shutting down. A Poundland. A Burger King. A “Gorgeous in Grays” store. There seem to be a lot of Sacred Heart Jesus posters on sale, a counterpoint to the evangelical revival on display at the mega church at the Eastern end of what used to be Congress House, the old Coop Department Store that we thought was terribly modern in the sixties. The design of these varies, but the Jesus is always very white. In one he points to the blazing heart in his chest with the same sort of understated gesture that a gangbanger might point to a gun – “you don’t want to mess with this”. In another he holds up two fingers in benediction but has a reproachful expression – “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m deeply disappointed”. The fingers are crossed. A woman walks past talking to her mate “He was so fucking rude to me…” The classiest and coziest place in the precinct is the Costa cafe by the High Street entrance, where I pick up a sandwich for the train journey back. Most tables full. A buzz of conversation. A barista straight outa’ Shoreditch, all massive mane of curly hair and beard, brews coffees in a chilled sort of way.
On the way up to the station a tiny black girl gives me a conspiratorial grin as she zooms past on one of those three wheeled scooters.
The journey back goes up the Rainham line. That means we pass Wennington, the small settlement hit hardest by last year’s wildfires during the 40C heatwave. Wennington is one of those unobtrusive landmarks that you tend to take notice of without making a note of. Out beyond Rainham proper and built, presumably, on a bit of land higher and dryer than the big sweep of marshland that surrounds it and sweeps all the way down to Purfleet, so it stands on the horizon. Even expecting to see damage, the state of it is quite a shock. The stubby stone church tower stands at one end like a squat exclamation mark, next to it several houses that have been gutted, just their dividing walls and chimneys pointing blasphemously upwards, then a few houses that look untouched, then several more completely burnt out, blue sky showing where their living rooms and bedrooms should have been, then some more, seemingly normal. Not built back better. Or even built back at all. It stands as a memorial and a warning. We got off lightly in that heatwave, even though the Fire Brigade had more calls than on any day since the end of the Second World War. The winds were light. Next time, and there will be a next time, we might not be so lucky.
The flowers look much brighter in real life!
A sign of hope as I sit at Tower Hill and eat my sandwich somewhere scenic. The moat around the Tower, filled eight years ago with scarlet ceramic poppies in a striking memorial to World War One, is now running riot with wild flowers. The same sort of recreated meadow we have in our local parks but on a grander scale. The sea of colour waving in the wind somehow gentles down the still, grim old fortress, with its thousand year terrible history and hinting that maybe we can do better than we’ve done and, if we don’t, the flowers will still be here when we are long gone.
We live in a distinctive but tutti putti flat; designed and built by a locally famous architect and builder called Ernest Trobridge in the late 1920s. Trobridge believed in using natural, local materials and had a real thing about compressed wood. His houses and flats are scattered around NW9, the earliest ones heavily thatched, and include the Castle Flats on the corner of our road; which appeared with Sir John Betjeman standing on top of them in his Metroland documentary in 1973 (and the Madness “Our House” video nine years later… from what feels like a very different time). His designs are part Tudor, part medieval, with imaginative twists – particularly tall, spirally chimneys – that make me wonder how many spoons of magic mushrooms he took in his tea. All the fireplaces in our row of flats are variations on a theme of decorative brick that look hefty and solid. But, the structure of interior walls (and some exterior walls) was described in our pre sale survey as “exceptionally flimsy”. So, though they don’t look just the same, they are, in parts, definitely made out of ticky tacky.
A while back, one of us knocked into one of the bedroom walls and a hole appeared. Pulling away a layer of wallpaper revealed a 6″ x 9″ rectangular cavity with an air brick at the end, that the previous owners had just papered over. Brushing out the dust and cobwebs revealed several rusted nails left over from 1927 and an air brick at a visibly wonky angle; implying that 1920s craftsmanship wasn’t all that it has been cracked up to be. Definite sense of “that’ll do” combined with an undue haste to get done. With the impending energy price rise putting a premium on closing off sources of drafts, I bought an air brick grille. This, like all good Christmas toys that arrive without batteries, arrived without screws; but with the instruction to use “Grade 6 round headed screws of appropriate length”. I needed four of them. The only packs they had in Wickes contained 50. So, having screwed them in, I am left with 46 spare. In the absence of another 11 and a half grilles to put in, I’ve just put them in the tin box that contains all the other packs of screws and nails; where they will stay unused, possibly forever.
When I was growing up in Grays, there was a tiny shop on the corner of Orsett Road and Derby Road that was run by Mr Flint. Flints was a bit like the shop in the 2 Ronnies “For…k…andles” sketch, but much smaller and qualitatively neater. In fact, it might be best described as a shrine to the most anally retentive possible kind of man cave. Presided over by Mr Flint: a small, bald, bird faced man in one of those brown coats that proclaimed that he was a tradesman and proud of it. He sold all sorts of DIY related bits and bobs, and a nice little side line in Airfix plastic models and armies in a box, and the dinky little tins of Humbrol paints needed to paint them. One line that seemed to sell quite well was models of the ships involved in the Battle of the River Plate – probably recalled in plastic because it was a moral boosting early victory for the Royal Navy at a time when everything else was bleak; or, given that it was on Dec 13th 1939, hadn’t properly kicked off yet. The German pocket battleship Graf Spee and the British and New Zealand light cruisers Ajax, Achilles and (rather more prosaically) Exeter; of the sort that were strikingly described as “eggshells armed with hammers”. I’ve known people like that. Me, sometimes. These were on display above the counter, as a sort of decorative flourish. But the main trade of the shop was tools, screws, nails, nuts and bolts and such. You could buy these in exactly the quantity you needed. If you wanted 4 Grade 6 Round headed screws, Mr Flint would sell you 4 Grade 6 round headed screws. And charge you a ha’penny for it. So, you got what you needed, no more, no less; no waste, no overconsumption, no pointless storage.
Mr Flint from memory circa 1964
In the middle of the parade of shops in Kingsbury, there is a large store to let. That is the sort of space that we need for a Library of Things, one of the Repair Workshops the Council is planning and possibly a free book exchange. The main shopping drag is part of the Roe Green Green Zone, along with the Park, the Primary and Secondary Schools and the streets to the North, which will be the prototype for local transformation. Early days and the Council has limited resources, but we should be thinking big.
Urban ramblings 