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uncleworry's review
4.75
This book really did it for me. I’m from Essex - Harlow, specifically - and this feels like the kind of writing about my county that I’d been waiting a very long time to read. The tone is prosaic, fluid and emotionally/politically-compromised enough to avoid reading like so many factual and detached run-throughs from Boadicea to Basildon (if they indeed bother to go as far as the 20th century), while a steady, measured dose of sobriety keeps the thing from crossing the line into the cloying hyper-romanticism of wistful antiquarians.
I loved learning everything that this book offers to teach, but what really elevates it is the connections the author makes between all the disparate points of time and place in the history of our complex county: Constable held up against TOWIE, the Woodham Ferrers plotlands analogised with distant yet more-or-less contemporaneous American frontier towns, and Anglo Saxon heroes compared to urban housing campaigners of the modern day. None of this conceptual webweaving ever feels contrived or overwrought, perhaps surprisingly, and I found myself feeling energised and jubilant at how convincingly the reconciliatory connective tissue is confected between apparently unrelated or even contradictory aspects of us as a place, a people and a state of mind.
This is a great and unexpectedly moving read which I insistently recommend to anyone wishing to learn, or perhaps just think, more about Essex - and how its containing socket - England - can be defined as much by it as against it.
As a final point, I’d like to add how touched I felt, as a Harlowegian of almost prescriptive stock (Irish, Cockney, Brummie - few-to-no known Essexian antecedents), to get a great deal more than the standard passing mention in this book. I and my family are proud to be from (or of; I can’t quite decide on the preposition) Essex, and we feel no less so for our lack of deep roots. A bottom-up approach to identity is a common feature of our character, unless I have imagined it, which means that I feel Harlovian (I reserve the right to rotate between unofficial demonyms) above all else, and I feel a great deal more East-Saxon (a chronic lack of satisfactory adjectives is apparently also a defining trait) than I do English, or British, for that matter. I, perhaps we, cling onto Harlow as an identity like a spinning log in a river, because we have been relegated into that corner; the geographic origins of the diverse branches of our families have become muddled and faded, and Essex itself all too often rejects us, quite hurtfully, in an ironic reproduction of the way Essex is then rejected on grander stages. All this is to say that it was a relief and an honour to read this and not feel ignored or resented, but included without question, it feeling as much my story as that of the umpteenth-generation custodians of bucolic Constable Country.
I loved learning everything that this book offers to teach, but what really elevates it is the connections the author makes between all the disparate points of time and place in the history of our complex county: Constable held up against TOWIE, the Woodham Ferrers plotlands analogised with distant yet more-or-less contemporaneous American frontier towns, and Anglo Saxon heroes compared to urban housing campaigners of the modern day. None of this conceptual webweaving ever feels contrived or overwrought, perhaps surprisingly, and I found myself feeling energised and jubilant at how convincingly the reconciliatory connective tissue is confected between apparently unrelated or even contradictory aspects of us as a place, a people and a state of mind.
This is a great and unexpectedly moving read which I insistently recommend to anyone wishing to learn, or perhaps just think, more about Essex - and how its containing socket - England - can be defined as much by it as against it.
As a final point, I’d like to add how touched I felt, as a Harlowegian of almost prescriptive stock (Irish, Cockney, Brummie - few-to-no known Essexian antecedents), to get a great deal more than the standard passing mention in this book. I and my family are proud to be from (or of; I can’t quite decide on the preposition) Essex, and we feel no less so for our lack of deep roots. A bottom-up approach to identity is a common feature of our character, unless I have imagined it, which means that I feel Harlovian (I reserve the right to rotate between unofficial demonyms) above all else, and I feel a great deal more East-Saxon (a chronic lack of satisfactory adjectives is apparently also a defining trait) than I do English, or British, for that matter. I, perhaps we, cling onto Harlow as an identity like a spinning log in a river, because we have been relegated into that corner; the geographic origins of the diverse branches of our families have become muddled and faded, and Essex itself all too often rejects us, quite hurtfully, in an ironic reproduction of the way Essex is then rejected on grander stages. All this is to say that it was a relief and an honour to read this and not feel ignored or resented, but included without question, it feeling as much my story as that of the umpteenth-generation custodians of bucolic Constable Country.
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