Small World's Stories - 24/04/2020

Scenes from the Passion: Valentine's Day 2004 George Shaw

These pieces were written during the lockdowns of 2020 and originally published via TinyLetter. 

Essex is one of my main obsessions. Born in utopian New Town, Harlow, I've spent the rest of my life criss-crossing the border with Hertfordshire, a county defined by its blaring lack of definition (however, the ghost of the Herts failed utopia, Stevenage and its roundabouts, would be a whole newsletter in itself). I'm always struck by the shape-shifting nature of Essex, from the pastoral work of the Great Bardfield artists, the coastal outliers of Clacton, Frinton and Foulness, to the New Town experiments of Harlow and Basildon.

I felt this recently, as I sat being driven to my Grandma's funeral in Harlow, and we weaved through the quiet streets of the neatly organised topography that made up the original masterplan for Harlow - austere, dull rows of houses, but punctuated with pubs such as The Drinker Moth - all the original pubs of Harlow were named after butterflies or moths. Something so quaint and colourful was meant to bring these estates to life, but has instead attained a level of irony over the years of austerity and under-funding (in money and in vision), and places like Harlow have slipped into hidden decline. Ten minutes down the road is the now notorious Terminus House, an office building (where I did my driving theory test) that has been turned into temporary, prison-like housing for those on council house waiting lists or shipped out of London because of "redevelopment". The post-war dream of decent housing for all, a maxim Harlow was built on, has truly withered and died.

Bishopsfield Estate, Harlow

Essex has always been a zone of concealment, a place to prosper away from London's surveillance - from Tolstoyan anarchist settlements in the 19th century and modernist architectural experiments in the 20th (Harlow's public sculptures - Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, Silver End, Bata estate etc) to the estuarine metropoles of Canvey and beyond. And like for many people on both sides of my family, it offered respite from the slums of East London, the trauma of the Blitz; firstly in days out to the 'People's Forest' in Epping, later in newly built housing estates with gleaming consumer appliances.

My own fondness for Essex is rooted in the monotonous blur of suburbia, captured best by British artist George Shaw. His paintings capture the in-between places, turning locations of no purpose, into subjects. His work highlights why I find dreary places so engaging, as Mark Fisher says about the eerie, 'why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?'. As a teenager I would traverse deserted streets, alleyways that lead to more and more streets, rows of houses identical to those in the streets adjacent, asking myself these questions.

Contrapuntal Forms - Barbara Hepworth on Harlow housing estate

Much-aligned but little explored, Essex has offered many a blank canvas. Yet, as many Essex immigrants have discovered, it can be an illusion. The stereotype of wheeler-dealer turned minted broker and TOWIE-inspired visions of glimmering late capitalism, offers a fantasy of untold riches but as per the Sirens in Homer's Odyssey, there are grave risks involved. The gravest risk is the monotony, what we will see in this week's poem Lavinia Greenlaw calls, 'the curse of this place' - the eerie sense of things happening without being seen. Life beyond the city occurs, life is lived and love is lost and found, but does it really?

In George Shaw's incredible The Sly and Unseen Day, there's an interview he did with Gordon Burn, where he talks about the absurdity, or the 'banality', of post-war council estates being built around trees that dated back from the last century and perhaps even further - the past always determining the present and thus the future. Shaw's work is so penetrating of the nature of time, as well as memory and place, where the familiar becomes extraordinary; there is beauty to Scenes from The Passion: Under the Railway, a concrete underpass, and there is the uncanny capture of time and voice in the spray-painted Jim is a twat, in Sticks and Stones. In suburbia, these totems remain in place for what feels like eternity. They are as immovable as the land itself. 

The Back That Used to be The Front George Shaw, 2008

I first came across Lavinia Greenlaw's work in Deryn Rees-Jones' brilliant Modern Women Poets anthology - and I love her poem Love from a Foreign City: 

The one-way system keeps changing direction,

I get lost a hundred yards from home.

There are parts of the new A to Z marked simply

‘under development’. Even street names

have been demolished.

The poem has always made me think about our dizzying sense of 'home', and how in particular, maps of the suburbs very rarely tell you anything, even if there was something worth telling. It was to my satisfaction to discover that Greenlaw spent her teenage years in an Essex village, which she explores in her collection Minsk. The title of the collection always sounded far away to me, reminding me of that line from Barton Fink: 'I'm not one of these guys who thinks poetic has gotta be fruity. We're together on that, aren't we? I mean I'm from New York myself - well, Minsk if yo' wanna go way back, which we won't if you don't mind and I ain't askin'. We end up in far flung places, but there are remnants of where we're from, that are hard to shed.

Essex is by no means unique in this regard - but there's an energy to Essex, or as Jonathan Meades calls it, the 'joy of Essex'. Essex is weird - it's an iconoclast county that is bullish about its bounds, but it is also intrinsically an outward looking organism, the world arriving via its docks, as much as its own inhabitants are trying to escape at the same ports. Conrad's Heart of Darkness starts here in those ports, not in the Congo, but in Canvey Island - its narrator looking back to London, 'the monstrous town . . . a lurid glare under the stars'. Essex looks to London, but does London look back?

And that is Essex - a contradiction. Insular, but global. Shiny yet tarnished. Provocative yet self-conscious. Its inhabitants die 'bursting out of a quiet life' washed up on the shores of other cities, be it London or Rotterdam - but Greenlaw is also aware of the often overlooked bucolic nature of much of Essex, 'the brightness or sweetness' of the ploughed earth and hedges - Essex embodies as much of a sense of escape as a sense of staying put, doggedly, marking territory. It truly is a county of dialectics.

But moreover, Greenlaw knows, we Essexians and fellow travellers, are 'written into a small world's stories'. We are carved into the farcical tale of Essex and its place in the world, and nothing can save us from our fate.

--

Zombies Lavinia Greenlaw

1980, I was returned to the city exposed

in black and white as the lights went on and on.

A back-alley neon sign, the first I'd seen,

drew us sweetly down and in to brightness:

A doll's parasol, a spike of green cherries,

the physic of apricot brandy, actual limes

and morning-to-night shades of rum.

Newly old enough and government-moneyed,

we knocked them back, melting the ice

between us and the unaccustomed looseness

of being legitimate and free. What possessed us?

Was it the kick of spirits or the invisible syrup

In which they swam that worked in our veins,

charming us into a car and forty miles east

to the fields of our years of boredom …

Did we not remember the curse of this place?

How Sundays drank our blood as we watched

dry paint or the dust on the television screen.

How people died bursting out of a quiet life,

or from being written into a small world's stories.

Who can see such things and live to tell?

How we hunted all night for noise and love,

striking out across the ploughed and frozen earth,

lurching from rut to rut until at the edge

we smashed our way out through a hedge, to fall

eight feet to the road. Of course, we felt nothing.

Was it not ourselves who frightened us most?

As if brightness or sweetness could save us.