The Great Elsewhere - Alec Scragg

The Great Elsewhere The Experience of Landscape & Property in Essex Suburbia

Alec Scragg

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to Mark Campbell, Ingrid SchrÖder, Alex Warnock-Smith, Aram Mooradian, Jeff Barda, the students of the MAUD course and the wider Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. I would also like to thank Irénéé Scalbert, Ken Worpole, Robert Wilson, Jonathan Manns, Melville Dunbar and my family, whose more specific conversations helped formed the content of this thesis.

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text.

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CONTENTS

Introduction Suburbia as Enclosure From the ‘Immoral Suburb’ to the Essex Design Guide Visualising the ‘Indigenous Dream’ The Architecture of Enclosure

Suburbia as Utopia ‘Openness’ and the Space of Polity ‘Subtopia’ and the Preeminence of ‘Things’ Production and the Utopian Method

Suburbia as Process The ‘Essex Man’ and the ‘Morality of Improvement’ ‘Perseverance’ and the Emergence of Property Bricolage, ‘Make-Shift’ and ‘Gardening’

Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

For Nikolaus Pevsner, Essex is tainted by associations with the appalling architecture of Liverpool Street Station. As the gateway to the county, Pevsner asks who would endure the ’suicidal waiting room on platform 9’ to go ‘touring and sightseeing’ (p.1 1974). Although the station has substantially changed since the 1970s, this viewpoint from London looking eastwards has continued to epitomise interpretations of Essex as a hinterland to the city. This relational understanding between centre and periphery frames Essex as a region subservient to the dominant economy of London. Throughout its history it has gradually evolved into the site of the city’s unpleasant but necessary services through the continued expulsion of waste, industry, and even population out towards the East. Through endless acts of relegation it has become identified with a series of derogatory stereotypes of both its landscape and people.

Its reputation has suffered to the extent that until recently it remained the only county with a commitment to central government to improve its public image, acknowledging the damage of its negative perception in deterring tourism and skilled workers (Winterman:2010).

As a contested site of Englishness and social construct of national identity, Essex has been increasingly re-evaluated in recent times in popular culture and more established scholarship. On the one hand, popular media representations such as the television reality show The Only Way is Essex (2010-) celebrate the stereotypes of the county as legitimate variant of English identity. While on the other, studies of the Essex landscape and its urbanism by Colin Ward, Dennis Hardy and Jonathan Maedes have engaged in a re-discovery of the county as a national site of architectural, social and political experimentation expressed through practice and the physical. This latter trend, as epitomised by Ken Worpole’s The New English Landscape, has tended to focus on the Essex landscape as an aberration to previously held assumptions of the aesthetics of the English pastoral. This has been particularly centred on the re-discovery of the Lea Valley which, as the ancient border between Essex and London, became a key site in the definition of Englishness with its redevelopment for the 2012 Olympic Games. As an edge condition, between London and Essex, city and country, and an uncertain post-industrial future sites such as the Lea Valley occupy marginal and ambiguous positions in which to question and resist the continuing dominance of the city and its logic of growth and progress. As an inherently indeterminate context, Essex as periphery enables a continuing debate around identity through exposing many of the polarised conceptual frameworks through which we understand the city and its impact beyond its physical bounds.

Despite its indeterminacy, recent architectural projects within these periphery sites tend to adopt similar aesthetic schemas. Projects such as Rainham Marshes by Landroom tend to reference industrial motifs, detritus, obsolescence and an emphasis on wildness.

This “periphery-esque” unwillingly solidifies an image of the periphery as a territory with a strong and resilient identity, capable of holding its own against the constant threat of disappearance through encroaching urbanisation. However, this enforces a polarisation

Figure 1.

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Figure 1 (top): Purfleet Classrooms, Rainham Marshes Nature Reserve. Designed by Peter Beard and LANDROOM. Figure 2 (bottom): The House for Essex, Warbness.

Designed by FAT and Grayson Perry.

between the city and its periphery by ignoring the hybrid interactions between the two in which both environments are called into question as contested edges. Other attempts towards an identification of Essex-ness adopt a threatening strength of personality which attempts to position the country as resolutely static and knowable, epitomised by the recent ‘House for Essex’ by the post-modernist architects FAT and artist Grayson Perry. Through an appreciation of glamour, surface detail and an eccentricity in opposition to established ideas of good taste; this architecture seeks to celebrate the popular, but frequently derided, identity of Essex as a distinct and recognisable singularity. As a broader strategy of identification, this basic principle embodies county planning policy through the 1973 Essex Design Guide, which described a prescriptive aesthetic for residential schemes. In all these cases, an appeal to a visual aesthetic of Essex veils the darker side of regional urbanisation through a forgetting of the continued acts of alienation, dispossession and expulsion which have formed London’s periphery.

Figure 2.

These attempts to define a coherent Essex character diminish an understanding of the periphery as a complex site of difference at a time when structuralist oppositions of centre and periphery are becoming increasingly obsolete in favor of more networked understandings of the city region, epitomised in the continuing decentralisation of London.

A static understanding of the city as built form is replaced by a phenomena of flows which blends the experience of the everyday with the infrastructural. Personal trajectories move across and between prior distinctions of London and Essex, city and country, centre and periphery on a daily basis. This is captured in the symbolism of the ‘House for Essex’ as a memorial to the mythical Essex inhabitant Julie May Cope, whose search for belonging and the ‘good life’ resists a straight-forward territorialisation of identity in favor of a personal journey framed by the mobile conditions of decentralisation which formed Essex as a city periphery. Beginning in Canvey Island, a characteristic example of speculative ‘plotland’ development at the start of the twentieth century, Julie’s story traces the major history of urban decentralisation between London and Essex. Moving first to the New Town of Basildon, a Modernist expression of national re-alignment following the second-world war, Julie marries and settles in the planned private town of South Woodham Ferrers, epitomising a shifting ethos from the public creation of settlements as part of the welfare state to an increasingly reliance of private development and the emergence of the neo-liberal ideals of the self-made subject. Julie’s journey highlights suburbia as a key nexus between grand relations of London and Essex in everyday experience. Individual concerns of belonging and aspiration are played out through an appeal to notions property and their scaling within structures of polity and ideas of Englishness.

Essex as a site of transient flows and processes ultimately leads to a fragmentation of Englishness as a coherent identity embedded with particular attitudes to the notion of the good society. This indeterminacy of Essex has made it an important test-bed for alternative models of living. The space between the easy access to the metropolis and the

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frontier landscapes of wilderness providing a fertile ground for experiments in community which challenge the hegemony of the metropolis, in the form of model industrial towns, land colonies and political communes. With the increasing restriction of development in London’s periphery through policies of urban containment, Essex design policy and the predominance of housing provision through the status quo of the “garden suburb”, the fruitful possibilities of Essex as a site of experimentation are being increasingly eroded in favor of a singular regional view which proliferates a distinction between centre and periphery while ignoring the regions more nuanced workings.

This leads to a question of identity in Essex and how its articulation can reclaim Essex as a site of difference against the continuing erosion of its polity. Fundamental to this is a notion of Englishness, and how it is expressed physically in the space of the everyday within Essex through the mythic qualities of the English landscape. As a group identity the physical expression of Englishness is used to mediate relations between the individual and wider notions of polity through an intervention on notions of proper conduct and aspiration. As such it becomes a critical concept for understanding personal trajectory within the periphery of London which is associated not just enforced expulsion but voluntary one in which personal processes of social mobility are enacted. This leads to a tension in the framing of the individual between one that is subservient to abstract ideas of social organisation, and one which values sovereignty and decentralisation as a controlled retreat from the metropolitan condition. The suburb becomes a critical site in these negotiations, where relations between the individual plot and the wider suburb address these larger questions through the ideals of home-ownership and the experience of property through the production of immaterial custom and physical edge-conditions such as the hedge, the wall, the fence and the demise.

In brief, these issues raise the question of what we mean what we talk about spatial identity in Essex, and how does this shape the conduct of the individual through the way property is materialised and experienced.

The first section of the thesis will explore the Essex Design Guide and the status quo of current suburban development and design in the county. It will explore its architecture as one of enclosure, in which the physical demarcation of property as private promotes an aggressive individualism superseding more collective definitions of polity. The second section examines the counter-points of subtopia and utopia, in the form of the modernist urbanism of the new towns and the wider phenomena for utopian architecture in Essex, to outline a potential vision for the commons within the county while acknowledging the problems of territorialising identity. The third section describes this conflict between place and process through a redefining of aspiration and its relationship to the architecture of the plot, through a discussion of the Essex Man stereotype and the architecture of the plotlands. Finally, the conclusion frames these lessons for today while asking of Essex’s role within the English body politic and an attempt to define an appropriate landscape aesthetic for the county.

Inset Drawing 1: Decentralisation Between London and Essex 1900-2016

Key New Towns

LCC Out-of-County Estates

Current Boundary of the Ceremonial County of Essex

London Overspill (70s)

Plotlands

Essex Design Guide Exemplars

Proposed Garden Suburbs

River Lee, the historic boundary between London and Essex until 1967

ESSEX

SO U T H WO OD HA F ERRER

BASI LD ON

MET ROP OLI TAN ESSEX

LCC Boundary N

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GLA Current Boundary

WA RBN ES S

COLC H ES T ER

Julie May Cope

H AM RS

CA N V EY ISLAND

unitary authorities in 1994

Inset Drawing 2: Edge

Key Metropoitan Green Belt

EUStat London Larger Urban Zone

Travel to Work Area

London Stansted

Larger Urban Zone

GLA Boundary

Built-up Area

M25

Metropolitan Green Belt

M25

London City Airport Port of Tilbury

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London Gateway Port

Haven Gateway Ports

London Southend Airport

SUBURBIA AS ENCLOSURE

The Design Guide for Residential and Mixed-Use Areas (also known as the Essex Design Guide or EDG) is a policy document whose emergence is linked to the continuing fragmentation of the defined polity of Essex and the perceived erosion of its regional identity.

As a set of principles for developer-led housing schemes within the county, the EDG reflects an important switch in the nature of design control from a standards approach to one where design guides actively promote an aspirational idea of development (p. 23 Punter & Carmona:1997). The guide was first produced by Essex County Council in 1973 shortly after the absorption of metropolitan Essex into the GLA, and has undergone two further editions whose publications have coincided with political realignments with the boundaries of Essex.

The second edition of 1994 mirrored the transformation of Southend and Thurrock to unitary authorities and introduced further policies regarding sustainability and ‘mixed-use’ within larger developments through a range of urban typologies which rejects an original emphasis on cul-de-sac development. The third edition produced in 2005 has a further emphasis on sustainability and begins to reference built examples based on EDG principles. As a book, the EDG is structured around: physical design, visual design (or ‘building form’) and a set of illustrative case studies. The guide defines quantitative objectives of urban design, mostly concerning density and road types, and qualitative ‘visual’ ones based on ideas of architectural and landscape aesthetics. Its importance lies in its explicit illustration of an ideal for Essex, not just in terms of housing but also in terms of the identity of its landscape and character.

While the guide has legal standing as justifiable grounds for refusing planning permission, it impact has been more profound through a more implicit and long-term shaping of the culture of private house-building nationally. The EDG’s guidance was frequently repeated by other local authorities without regard to their own issues of locality (p.7 Chapman & Larkham:1992). If the EDG reflects a general cultural practice in the production of the residential environment does its wide and popular adoption not lend it a legitimacy that overrides its neglect of public participation and emphasis on authoritative prescriptions? But what may seem as popular due to uptake, may in fact be an apathetic acceptance of the status quo. There is a need to question the environmental ideal of the EDG to determine its limitations, and whether its advantages justify a lack the proliferation of difference in residential forms within Essex.

This section explores how these subjectives ideals of the English landscape within the EDG attempt to reframe the identity of Essex and articulate relations between the individual to collective polity through the experience of property. This will begin with the context from which the EDG emerged and its criticism of the suburb, before exploring the nuances of its design detail and its application in practice.

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Great Notley

South Woodham Ferrers

Chafford Hundred

Noak Bridge

Map 1: Existing developments emblematic of the culture of the Essex Design Guide, and the location of proposed Garden Suburb developments which share a contemporary design ethos.

From the ‘Immoral Suburb’ to the Essex Design Guide

The Essex Design Guide adopts a discourse which views the suburb more generally as a contested site of Englishness. In particular, speculatively-built suburbs are seen to represent the worst-case scenario of urbanism in Essex as examples of mass-housing; in which the delivery of large numbers of units tend to feature typical plans on simple orthogonal layouts, using modern construction materials and techniques of pre-fabrication and standardisation.

Criticism of these spaces was focused primarily on their physical qualities: ‘…wide open spaces dotted with dwarf trees, anywhere type houses - ignorant of the local vernacular tradition - packaged together in a manner devoid of identity or sense of place.’ (p.19 ECC:1973) These critiques framed the speculatively-built suburb as a generic development, emphasised through illustrations which adopt photographic conventions that emphasise a space dominated by homogeneous roads with an absence of natural landscaping (p.167 Gold & Gold:1989). This formed part of a wider cultural criticism of the suburb extensively described by David Matless, whose Landscape and Englishness (1998) provides a cultural interpretation of the English landscape and the use of planning control upon the suburb in terms of discursive expressions of power upon the English body. The EDG’s criticism can be compared to the “preservationist” discourse as described by Matless, which attempts to assimilate emerging trends of modern urbanism within historic English landscape traditions.

Through an appeal to a “morality of settlement”, a structuralist binary of Town and Country supersedes indeterminate models of growth characterised by continuing policies of urban decentralisation and rural disintegration (p.33 Matless:1998). The EDG develops this morality into a wider spectrum between the acceptable extremes of urban and rural, in which the suburb is deemed indeterminate and therefore inappropriate for Essex: it is placed within this grey-zone since it is seen to conforms to neither an idea of buildings containing space (urban) or landscape containing buildings (rural).

This indeterminacy is interpreted within the “preservationist” discourse as “immoral”, which embodied a crisis of the English landscape requiring judgment and action against the forces of their production. In particular, dichotomies of Town and Country are conflated to moral opposites of good and evil, order and chaos, beauty and horror to make a conservative ideals of preservation a matter of unquestionable national principles (p.26 Matless:1998). In the case of the EDG this discourse is enacted specifically through the processes of official planning over the private developer of residential areas, but this removes the inhabitant from the discussion of design. This is not to say that the visual bias of the EDG is presented as a clear authoritative expression, but its codification within a county-wide planning initiative is justified by a popular appeal to a notion of common-sense which argues that all design can be valued objectively based on adherence to observable systems of principles embodied

Figure 3.

Figure 4 & 5

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Figure 3: Examples of specultaively-built suburbs, illustrated in the Essex Design Guide as worse-case scenario in Essex urbanism.

within popular examples of the built environment (p.61 ECC:1973). This idea of a single design consensus seems particularly problematic within its mandate of suburban residential development, where it seems not unreasonable to suppose that one person’s ideal house may be completely different from another. Common-sense is used within the EDG to undermine individual judgments of taste in favor of an authoritative singular which ignores the subjective and cultural visual basis on which this criteria for design is founded upon.

This authority promotes a moral landscape of the suburb, through which an adopted ideal of the Essex landscape is used to intervene in both their production and in the conduct of those that live there. As Matless describes in the context of Englishness, the appeal to a moral landscape: ‘…emerges wherein structures are to embody moral principles and offenders are to be cleared out. Loudness, vulgarity, impertinence on the one side, dignity, composure and fitness on the other, provide a lexicon of architectural (and human) conduct for English landscape.’ (p.47 Matless:1998).

The moral landscape makes a judgment and subsequent action on behaviour, through the territorialisation of proper conduct. Hence, within ‘preservationist’ discourse the suburb was seen as immoral not just due to its blurring of Town and Country, but its ability to blur conservative distinctions of class and gender. The suburb reflected a rise in home-ownership amongst the emerging professional classes, blurring distinctions of class, and a site of sexual indeterminacy in which gender relations were being transformed. This hybridisation between nuanced identities transform the suburb into a contested site of Englishness which fragments an assumption of national identity as a coherent totality, hence is seen as ‘impure’ and not open to difference. In response to this ‘immorality’, the EDG adopted a new ideal presented as a particular vision for the environment of Essex to which all residential development should aspire under a shared notion of ‘regional character’ (p.15 ECC:1973). Yet in a similar appeal to a ‘common-sense’, this evocation of the existing environment allows the EDG to make generalisations in which Essex becomes both the site of design control but also the means through which to control design. Authority begins to construct a particular powerdynamic within the territory of Essex, as the interpretation of ‘regional character’ by the county council as a moral landscape is an act of identification, determining not just what but who is deemed to belong within Essex and who is to be excluded.

More specifically, this power is exerted over the body of the East Londoner as emblematic of the ‘urban’ inserted improperly within the ‘rural’ and reflecting a wider resentment against the infringements of London into Essex sovereign territory. Whereas previously this criticism was leveled primarily against the more enforced national policies of decentralisation, as suburbs became increasingly produced and occupied through private home-ownership, accusations of immoral settlement, and therefore conduct, fell increasingly

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Figure 4 (top): Spectrum of development from rural to urban, with suburban as indeterminate zone, from the 2nd edition of the Essex Design Guide.

Figure 5 (bottom): The morality of settlement from the 1st edition of the Essex Design Guide.

on the individual as an ‘anti-citizen’ (p.68 Matless:1998). For the “preservationist” discourse, this embodied a paradox as the desire to control design and conduct through an appeal to notions of Englishness had to confront the Englishness of sovereign homeownership, requiring a restyling of private rights through the metaphor of the nation-estate (p.28 Matless:1998). In reframing suburbia through the analogy of the estate, the property relations of the individual are mediated through a hierarchal arrangement in which the processes of taking ownership over space by private individuals are permitted by authoritative structures.

However, this reformulation of private property is justified through an appeal to an idealistic model which stems back to an ‘indigenous dream’ in which an interpretation of the English landscape is both emulated and enforced.

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Visualising the ‘Indigenous Dream’

The design vision of the EDG exhibits an plethora of inter-textual references which maintain continuity through the values they represent as symbols of Englishness. Through an appeal to a regional character, the visual appearance of new-build homes become part of a singular reading of the Essex landscape as a coherent interpretation of Essex identity. Central to this strategy is an appeal to history through the description and implementation of an “Essex vernacular”. Descriptions of this vernacular focus on brief historical interpretations of building form and montages of relevant local materials, without a serious consideration of traditional building processes. In this respect this cannot be termed a true vernacular, which Rappoport defines as typified by a small number of building types adapted to various needs, arranged with emphasis on the connections between volumes rather than the volumes themselves, integrated with the site, and constructed in local materials by members of a defined culture who build in a tradition agreed upon by all (p.6 Rappoport:1969).

As suggested by Raphael Samuels, the EDG promotes a “neo-vernacular” which aspires to legitimacy by reference to a popular memory of the English house while assimilating it into contemporary concerns for the modern dwelling. The “neo-vernacular” prizes a visual aesthetic of heritage, indigenous materials and styles associated with national identity with a respect of materially older elements in the environment. Such developments seek to emerge fully-formed with a patina of age and use already inscribed as a historicisation of the appearance of the built-environment rather than a return to history (p.39 Samuels:1994).

The “neo-vernacular” does not take from the historic built examples of Essex architecture but reinterprets more commonly-held myths regarding the ideal English home tied up culturally to a collective notion of Englishness. This is particularly present in the image of the suburban home, which the EDG invests with the qualities of a shared ideal. While the suburban reality is portrayed as a physical dense scenario occupied by many households in close proximity, the suburban dream is shown as a single detached household within a landscaped setting in which internal privacy is emphasised. There is an allusion to historic rural forms of domestic architecture together with a visual camouflage (but not outright exclusion) of modern technologies.

There EDG suburban dream is comparable to the building type of the “Picturesque Cottage” which Sutherland Lyall relates to an ‘indigenous dream’. As a mythical vision of the rural home, it is associated with a particular historical affiliation to English notions of self-reliance, independence and the comfort of home (p.18 Lyall:1988). Its emergence within the EDG corresponds with a national reinterpretation of the nature of “progress” in which the English house is invoked as an image of stability. Samuels situates the “neo-vernacular” as a reaction against the austerity and paternalism of Modernist housing of the 50s in which “progress” based on collective achievement through industry and the production of things and buildings (exemplified by the New Towns) address the nation as the source of prosperity.

Figure 6

Figure 7

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Figure 6: The definition of the Essex Vernacular, from the 2nd edition of the Essex Design Guide.

As Charles Leadbeater notes, there was a continuing shift, reaching its apogee during the Thatcherite 80s, to notions of “progress” based on international markets and the financial services which emphasised a culture of insecurity and risk-taking, in which “progress” rested on individual freedom and aspiration which: ‘…forces people out into the market, but as compensation offers them retreat into a secure, private world’ (p.404 Leadbeater:1989).

EDG emerge out of this rise of neo-liberal ideas of the self-made subject which led to a subsequent attachment to stable symbols of a shared Englishness embodied in the “Picturesque Cottage” as a potent symbol of aspiration.

Architecturally, this was driven by a visual interpretation of the English landscape in line with the philosophy of the English Picturesque, which promotes the design of spaces as if they were paintings. These Picturesque conventions promote judgments of taste based on individual visual experience and the faculty of imagination rather than reason. When these qualities are made to seem universal, they become a taste-based system of aesthetics in which a relatively small elite of people have put forward certain principles of design as widely-acknowledged, universal and popular truths (p.182 Forty:1996). Far from offering an accepted basis for residential design, the taste-based system of aesthetics within the EDG places the architect in a position of power through virtue of his or her professional status (p.61 ECC:1971). As a result, the dweller is excluded through a strictly professional relationship between the speculative developer and the local authority; a relationship where design is mediated and judged by the architect visually as a connoisseur. However, these appeals to a popular ideal do not take into account the particular notions of social structure that initially informed them.

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Figure 7 (top): The suburban ideal versus the reality of the speculatively-built suburb, from the 2nd edition of the Essex Design Guide.

The Architecture of Enclosure

The reference to the Picturesque embodies a deeper reading of its philosophy as a propriety aesthetic. Bermingham notes how its introduction sought to naturalise the dispossession of common land during a time of agricultural enclosure in which more nuanced practices of collective ownership were superseded by notion of private defensible property (ch.2 Bermingham:1986). This model separated a visual interpretation of landscape from an economic one in which design was used to mask substantial structural changes to both the English landscape and wider society. Cosgrove notes that this created a hierarchy in the visual realm by an appeal to the ‘lordship of the eye’ which promoted an individualist way of seeing and organising space according to the concerns of a single viewpoint, embodied in the landowner (p.196 Cosgrove:1984). The EDG sought to reevaluate the suburb through this notion of the hierarchical estate through an architecture of enclosure as an act of exclusion, where the relationship between the owner and the things owned veil a more important relationship between owners and non-owners.

Through the use of hedgerows as defensible demarcations of individual plots, this enclosure enforces property as private while making this transformation appear “natural”.

Blomley’s acknowledges the agency of the hedgerow historically as part of a material understanding of property which manifested in the real world through the employment of things rather than abstract notions of ownership (p.4 Blomley:2007). In detailing a complex shift in English relations to the land from tenure to territory, notions of ownership expressed through complex and overlapping customs based on the idea of commons give way to physically bounded interpretations of space in which the hedgerow acts as both sign and instrument of dispossession. Whereas enclosure in itself does not necessitate physical transformation of land, it facilitates the production of edge-things like the hedgerows which transformed relations by no longer allow transgression in a non-violent way. As a boundary the hedgerow makes private property violent as exclusion is enforced, rather than implied through customary practice (p.126 Blomley:2005). In the context of the EDG suburb, property becomes depoliticised by ignoring how the ‘indigenous dream’ for home-ownership generates a wider systemic inequality between those that have property and those that do not.

The dominance of the private view of property obscures the way the many varied ways that people lay claim to property, invoking the idea of the commons in which resources (whether natural or cultural) are accessible to all members of society. When applied in the physical creation of settlement, this appeal to notions of private property can generate damaging social effects in which the rights of the individual begin to expand and supersede notions of responsible and shared ownership of space. This can be seen in South Woodham Ferrers (SWF), a planned community enabled by public processes of planning and compulsory purchase but delivered and owned in its entirety by private interests with the EDG as its design basis. The Picturesque approach and associated historicisation of the

Figure 9 & 10

Figure 8

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Figure 8: Ilustration of best-case design for suburbia, featuring a plethora of vegetation as a visible demarcation of private property and an act of exclusion, from the 1st edition of the Essex Design Guide..

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Figure 9 (left): ‘Unacceptable suburbia’ featuring a large ‘public zone’ as visually transparent common ground, from the 1st edition of the Essex Design Guide.

Figure 10 (top): Proposed enclosure through vegetative demarcation of plots, from the 1st edition of the Essex Design Guide.

built-environment sees the town modeled with motifs of the popular idea of the English village. In this respect, the use of the EDG as design policy limits flexibility and has created a town which is now struggling with resilience and lacking a coherent strategy for growth. This is particularly notable in the town centre, where architecture of enclosure employed within the civic spaces of the settlement entail more fundamental acts of exclusion through which the public nature of the town as a place of togetherness is compromised.

Residents take ownership of their town through a process of collective identification in everyday practices enabled in the centre as a moment of intensity, while at the same time creating a forum through which external difference can be encountered. The architecture of enclosure is effectively anathema to these aims since it seeks to promote the individual aspiration above collective cohesion. In SWF this entailed a duplicity in which the use of traditional images of the English town as a community veils a requirement of privatisation to ensure delivery of what would be considered public spaces. In seeking a private entity to both build and own the town centre (Asda), the initial planners opted for a policy of attracting a more significant regional use whose larger-scale pull can ensure economic viability for the town as a district retail centre. However, the resultant model of ownership has become an issue for many of the residents of the town, which note Asda’s aggressive business policies and minimal maintenance regimes as responsible for declining quality in the town centre (p.11 SWF:2008). In superseding the more nuanced ways in which residents of the town enact ownership within the town centre, the EDG’s attempt to naturalise the ownership and production of such civic spaces as private create a subtle exclusion of the resident population from a meaningful encounter of the polity they form a part of.

The creation of polity through real and everyday encounters between residents engaged in shared and practical activities is instead replaced by an appeal to notions of Englishness while denying the emergence of the town as a space in which differences meet productively. The marketing videos produced for the town portray a contradiction, a brandnew settlement with the charms of an ancient historic English village. This appeal to an ‘indigenous dream’ is also an act of forgetting, which ignores the large-scale dispossession of an plotland settlement to make way for the town, known as the Champagne Estates and characterised by an informal patchwork of building types and degrees of ownership (p.225 Hardy & Ward:2004). Through processes of compulsory purchase, the architecture of enclosure reallocated physical land but more importantly crowding out of a diversity of practices of ownership in favor of a singular notion of private property enabled by central authority.

In this respect, the enclosure of Essex corresponds to the continuing restrictions to development within the periphery of London (most notably through the Green Belt) and subsequent diminishing of housing procurement methods in favor of a single process of private development. In order to reclaim Essex as a site of difference the commons must re-

Figure 11

Figure 12 - 19

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William De Ferrers School

Queen Elizabeth Square

Asda Superstore

Figure 11: Aerial view of South Woodham Ferrers Town Centre, dominated by Asda superstore.

Inset Drawing 3: South Woodham Ferrers Master Plan 1973

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emerge in the creation of housing which are inclusive and accessible rather than simply visually appearing so. Customary management of the commons has been frequently described as a recipe for inevitable disaster due to the self-interest of individual parties, notably by Garrett Hardin (1968). While the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is frequently used as an argument for the necessity of privatisation, it in many cases is used to justify a dispossession of a valuable resource or practice which in the case of Essex would be alternative models of housing.

While the EDG presents the suburb and the individual as a territorial entity it ignores the ability for individuals to co-operate successfully for the benefit of each other. This is not to rule out the possibility of enclosure as a desirable way of protecting resources at the larger scale, since the enclosure of one notion of commons could protect another. This is not to replace the predominance of the EDG within the county with something more effective, but to acknowledge and enable the creation of housing markets which are varied and diverse. The issue emerges when you consider how this principle of common cooperation can be scaled into effective regional identities in which the hegemony of the city’s growth is questioned.

David Harvey has noted a basic scale problem when it comes to a basic idea of commons management in which hierarchy is subverted (p.102 Harvey:2011). This requires not a single solution but what Elinor Ostrom terms a ‘rich mix of instrumentalities’ (p.14 Ostrom:1990) in which close relationship between polity, individual and land can be enacted at a nested range of scales which moves from the concrete issues of housing on real sites, to the more abstract landscapes of Essex and its relationship to national and landed visions of Englishness.

Questioning the status quo of Essex suburbia has uncovered its relationship to a described ideal in terms of a moral landscape based on a distinction between Town and Country, a vision of the English landscape based on the propriety aesthetic of the Picturesque and an appeal to the cottage as a stable image of Englishness. However, the mechanisms of this appeal creates a vision of property in suburbia which fragments polity to singular individuals whose position are defined and enforced centrally through the ideal of the wellmanaged estate. The production of a subsequent architecture of enclosure naturalises acts of dispossession and alienation in which property as exclusion supersedes a notion of commons.

As a predominant status quo in housing policy within Essex, the model of the EDG suburbia acts through enclosure to crowd out alternative visions of housing and society through an appeal to an ‘indigenous dream’. In attempting to find both the space and locus of potential alternatives within Essex, we can consider the role of utopia and its manifestation in a string of experimental communities within the county. Through a description of utopia as a method based in the here and now, we can question the role of the ‘indigenous dream’ as a veiled aspiration for society.

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Figure 12-19: Screen shots from a promotional video created for the new development of South Woodham Ferrers.

SUBURBIA AS UTOPIA

In recovering Essex as a site of difference there is a need to reverse enclosure as a crowding out of possibilities in favor of a reintroduction of commons as a diverse set of practices of ownership, identification and belonging. This requires an understanding of the individual and their role within wider definitions of polity, how it relates to landscape as a richer notion of territory and how these are nested within varying scales. In seeking to enact radical transformations of society and the role of the individual, the utopian becomes a relevant method for articulating alternatives to the status quo, as it requires us to project forward and ask of ourselves what is a good society. Ruth Levitas argues for a utopian sociology as the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (p.300 Levitas:2007), in which the questioning of what we are aiming for supersedes directed attempts at problem-solving of the status quo. This implicit provisionality helps redefine the long Essex tradition of utopian communities away from a historical oddity to a continuing project of societal reevaluation. At a time in which a singular status quo in housing has failed to deal with issues of quality and communality, the utopian impulse becomes vital in the articulation of alternatives through built example addressing current context.

The utopian as method helps us explore the qualities which make Essex a fertile ground for experiments in living. As a site determined by the logic of London’s growth and continuing globalisation of development practices, the ‘here and now’ becomes the only possible locus for utopian experiment (p.6 Levitas:2006). Indeed, attempts at utopian alternative tend to reclaim or find space in the institutional and contested spaces between global flows and clashing idiosyncrasies of urban growth. In this respect, the indeterminacy of Essex as a physical and economic space lends itself to this sort of colonisation by alternative visions no matter how fragmentary as an opportunistic act within a contested idea of landscape and a reclamation of land against the dominant ideologies which seek to control this space.

No matter how historical or niche, the utopian impulse in Essex adopts the indeterminacy of its territory as a serious tool in the struggle for social transformation.

To that end, this section will focus on three examples of the utopian impulse in Essex, Basildon New Town, Silver End and the forthcoming Jehovah Witness community at Temple Farm. All three examples talk less of the notion of periphery residential housing to a more general idea of life within a periphery condition. This will begin with an exploration of Modernist urbanism within the county in the example of Basildon New Town, and how a landscape of openness attempts to shift the Picturesque to a vision of national collectivity, but fails to articulate a relationship between the locality and the nation. This is criticised through Nairn’s notion of ‘subtopia’ which seeks to rephrase utopia away from a wholesale transformation of society to one which acknowledges the smaller distinctions of environment through an emphasis on the thing. However, Nairn’s territorialising of place through ‘things’ act in an exclusionary way in which edges of landscapes become ambiguous and protocols of

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Silver End

Temple Farm

Model Industrial Villages

Agrarian Colonies

Moral Communities

Anarchist Communes

Modernist Experiments

Map 2: Location of known utopian experiments, historic and existing, within Essex.

inclusion are regulated subjectively. This is contrasted to the example of the model industrial town of Silver End in which the production of things, rather than their location, become the defining element of agreed polity. This relates to a notion of decentralisation through a more nuanced understanding of the thing and its relationship to the network. In this instance the Jehovah Witnesses’s plan to create a new colony and production facility articulates Essex as an important nexus between the lived space of everyday experience and the wider systems of global infrastructure which characterise the periphery.

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‘Openness’ and the Space of Polity

The most prominent utopian aspiration within Essex is its legacy of Modernist urbanism embodied in the New Town of Basildon. With the creation of the welfare state and the movement towards ever increasing social democracy, a desire for more accessible and transparent institutions was mirrored in architecture through analogous qualities in the design of towns and spaces. The provision of generous public space re-imagined the setting of public life within a more inclusive and pluralist idea of society in reaction to the image of the nineteenth century city plagued by overcrowding and claustrophobia. The desire to open-out the city acted upon the body through a concern for health through the benefits of sunlight and fresh-air (p.9 Worpole:2000). The creation of Basildon as a sun-drenched and rational city hence acted as an imaginary reconstitution of society whose adoption within official planning policy ultimately became the national status-quo.

Within this Modernist urbanism, the English landscape was viewed as a commonground for all English people in which the quality of “openness” becomes an analogy to ideals of common accessibility and shared notion of belonging. The English Picturesque was transformed from a propriety aesthetic into a template for visions of social collectivity to combine this desire to relate to the Englishness of the landscape with cosmopolitan concerns for accessibility (p.31 Hebbert:2008). This shift from an aesthetic of enclosure to one of openness, was theorised by Christopher Tunnard whose Gardens in the Modern Landscape sought to familiarise the rationality of Modernist open space to English sensibilities. This requiring a careful bridging of the relationship of the individual towards the wider polity, and focused on the private garden as the basic English sociological unit to be combined within the wider English landscape (p.139 Tunnard:1948). At the larger scale, “openness” begins to disintegrate the “morality of settlement”, with the Country penetrating deep into the Town.

The lack of functionality and effect on density throughout the New Towns led the physical manifestation of “openness” to be roundly criticised as homogenising the idiosyncratic distinctions of the landscape. The accusation of ‘prairie planning’ by Gordon Cullen criticises openness as a failure to achieve communal patterns of living and a worsening of a cult of isolationism (p.34 Cullen:1953). This sense of alienation mirrored the more nuanced social effects of decentralisation in which large numbers of mostly East Londoners increasingly moved out of the capital in favor of improved housing quality. Their displacement from previous networks of family and social connections reflected substantial social costs however, as recorded in Wilmot and Young’s Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Internally, this utopian impulse for collective identity to a shared base on England reflected a reverse trend for the domestic sphere as the most important space of togetherness. At the same time, this description of the English landscape based on an appeal to national and shared values did not ensure the successful participation of the individual within a vision of social democracy.

The English landscape made synonymous with the scale of the state and centralised form of

Figure 20

Figure 21

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Figure 20: Contemporaneous images of Basildon town centre show extensive open space bathed in a vision of Modernity as sun-drenched and well ventilated.

governance overrides the more nuanced ways in which polity enables the demarcation of scaled units of administration throughout Essex and the wider nation. Kenneth Olwig provides an understanding landscape as polity which criticises the position of Cosgrove and others which emphasis landscape as a deception, a representation used to hide deeper material changes to the land (p.xxv Olwig:2002). Olwig returns to the origins of landscape in ‘land-schaft’, a definition of a administrative unit which is defined socially rather than physically. Landscape is not created through representation, but enacted through customary law which physically shapes and administers place and hence cannot be understood quantitatively through scale, but qualitatively and conceivable at differing levels of abstraction, in which nested units form together a body politic (p.16 Olwig:2002). Power is naturalised over the English landscape not so much through processes of veiling but masking, in which one authority speaks overtly but under the guise of another. While appearing as a consistent vision of national unity, the design principles of “openness” were the product of a less coherent, London-centric culture of design professionals through a Modernist vernacular which was then transplanted wholesale into the provinces (p.176 Glendenning:2010). Their manifestation sought to supersede notions of polity as defined through local custom and the binding of memory to landscape.

With the utopian discourse of the Modernist New Towns, the edges between landscapes as distinct visions of local polity disappeared.

In this sense, ‘openness’ adhered to Picturesque principles of locating property within the visual realm, emblematic of the “ha-ha” or sunken boundary which sought to create a false distance and project an improved vision of landscape as property outwards onto the country as a whole. While serving its purpose as an invisible boundary for those with the privileged perspective of the mansion, the ‘ha-ha’ continued to act as a reminder of dispossession and movement away from custom to more defined notions of property as exclusion. Olwig places the “ha-ha” within a wider redefinition of the notion of estate, which previously related to a social unit bound by custom and fundamental part of the body politic, to one associated with a bounded parcel of land in which each social group was located in scenic space (p.123 Olwig:2002). Property becomes associated with propriety, the concept of knowing ones place within a hierarchy of power in the English landscape.

Figure 22

The Modernism of Basildon and its general application throughout the English landscape acts out a tension between ideas of the nation and that of locality and the edges in which they meet. Whereas the Utopian discourse attempted to remove the edges of locality in favor of a national program of transformation, it failed to accomplish its collective aims of identification. This emerges as a central paradox for the Utopian vision in Essex, a prefigurative space in the here and now which attempts to herald in a comprehensive vision of society at the larger scale which ultimately crowds out the possibility of utopia as inherently alternative. Through an examination of Nairn’s counter-point of ‘Subtopia’ we can drawn further conclusions about this tension between national interest and local identity.

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Figure 21 (top): Christopher Tunnard’s Modernist interpretation of the English Picturesque, a fragmentation of private territory through an appeal to the English landscape as a common-base.

Figure 22 (bottom): The ‘ha-ha’ as a quasi-object, both purifying the ‘morality of settlement’ while simultaneously projecting ‘improvement’ outwards.

‘Subtopia’ and the Preeminence of ‘Things’

This tension between national design principles and local approaches was the essential impetus of the EDG, which saw the erosion of a regional character as the fundamental flaw of modern suburban development. Wider criticisms of these projects within England did not explicitly attempt to reject the ideas and forms of Modernism but sought to transform them into a way which acknowledges English customs. This was a readjustment of the relative merits of the abstract national scale and the concrete local place, in which the perceived dominance of the national mode sought to create homogeneous environments throughout England at the cost of local nuance. The criticism of ‘subtopia’, a portmanteau word mentioned in the EDG (p.19 ECC:1973) which emerged from the Architectural Review (AR) was part of this critical attack on post-war British urbanism, led by Ian Nairn through his 1955 special edition called Outrage in which he defines:

Figure 23

‘Subtopia: Making an ideal of suburbia. Visually speaking, the universalisation and idealisation of our town fringes. Philosophically, the idealisation of the Little Man who lives there (from suburb + Utopia)’ (p.365 Nairn:1955) This was an attack on decentralisation based on two fallacies; that England was of unlimited size and that comprehensive standards of design would be used flexibly and intelligently (p.372 Nairn:1955). The standardisation of road design through the 1966 Department of Transport ‘Roads in Urban Areas’ was a particular example of nationally imposed standards superseding local variation with subsequent effects on housing density and the appearance of the English landscape (p.533 Robinson:1976). Whereas the EDG sought to introduce a more nuanced system of road hierarchy and widths, Nairn took a more fundamental critique towards the approach of authoritative systems of design based on a codification or standards approach.

‘Subtopia’ sought to redress a balance between the authority of central planning with the experience of difference within local spaces through a re-articulation of the English landscape through a practice of embodiment. While this broadly correlated to a “morality of settlement” as explored by Matless, Nairn exaggerated this to encompass a dichotomy between nature and culture which becomes the responsibility of the English citizen: ‘His duty to his background […] is twofold: on the one hand, to bring to the highest pitch of effective life his man-made environment - the ‘city’ - on the other, to put such limits to it as enable him to keep contact with the wild - the ‘country’.’ (p.367 Nairn:1955).

For Nairn, the distinction between nature and culture through the spatial separation and purification of the city and the country allows everyone to engage in ‘acts of personal re-

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Figure 23: Gordon Cullen’s illustration of ‘Subtopia’ through the proliferation of man-made paraphenalia in the landscape and subsequent homogenisation and dominance over ‘nature’ represented in the dismembered tree trunk.

creation’ in which wilderness allows a direct connection to the unconscious while the city helps form behaviour as the civic basis of an effective society (p.366 Nairn:1955). Although Nairn adopts a similar spectrum to the EDG of defined environmental types, his approach is one of active improvement through acts of identification and subsequent exclusion of objects viewed to be foreign and a general emphasis on inherent qualities according to a more general idea of environmental type. The remedy for Subtopia becomes itself a utopian method, which follows Levitas’s phases of the archaeological, the architectural and the ontological (p.300 Levitas:2007). Nairn promotes the gradual improvement of areas shaped by a vision of a dystopia which must be avoided through a direct appeal to the here and now and things which inhabit them.

Central to this strategy is an appreciation of the design of ‘things’ rather than ‘objects’. This is a distinction drawn by Heidegger who views the ‘object’ as sharing an ideal on a higher abstract plane and hence distanced from the world as embodied, and the ‘thing’ as encountered directly through embodied experience and hence adopts a quality of ‘nearness’ which the abstraction of the ‘object’ obfuscates (p.175 Heidegger: 1971). Much of Nairn’s publications, notably Counter-Attack (1956) and Your England Revisted (1964), are effectively catalogues of ‘things’ in the English landscape, featuring photographic surveys and critique of fences, street furniture, telegraph poles and other paraphernalia anchored through a criticism of functionality in favor of more cultural interpretations of place. Nairn’s rejection of the generic shares Heidegger’s criticism of the abstraction of the ‘object’ through its link to a Platonic ideal (epitomised by national road standards), his affirmation of the qualities of ‘things’ relate to a subjective notion of authenticity which prizes the particular over the general.

Relating the ‘thing’ to place infers a more subjective and embodied reading of location. For Heidegger, the quality of nearness which ‘things’ provide enacting a gathering through allowing locations to become meaningful through use, experience and association (p.152 Heidegger: 1971). In this sense, places are identified through centring, rather than through the edges in which they encounter difference, and as a critique of the limits of Cartesian coordinated understanding of space. Places become instead defined by individual association which may have real boundaries such as walls or fences, but may not, instead relying on subjective process of demarcation and identification. In a more concrete terms, this appeal to place by notions of memory, the authenticity of ‘things’ and emphasis on locality allows processes of exclusion in which definitions of what belongs to a place entail expulsion of those ‘things’ and people deemed inappropriate. Both Nairn and Heidegger embody a provincialism which can actively diminish the accommodation of difference through a rhetoric of authenticity and dwelling. Neil Leach describes this as a territorialisation of identity which becomes mythic through relation to more abstract notions of nostalgia (p.33 Leach:1998).

Stable and provincial images of the home have largely been redefined as property in which the promotion of authenticity becomes a marketable commodity in the privatisation of place-

Figure 24

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Figure 24: A page from Nairn’s catalouge of ‘things’ from Counter Attack (1956), emphasising the particularity of everyday items in the English landscape.

making. The historicisation of the ‘thing’ as something to be discovered in a place generate processes of identification in which belonging becomes a discursive practice.

Whereas the thing could be construed in the context of a territorialisation of identity, it can also become a nexus for belonging in which place becomes secondary to notions of collective action. Whereas Heidegger talks about the edge as an amorphous presence of the inherent qualities of site, Olwig shows how collective rituals of memory, repeated performance in the landscape and the production of edge-things become important ways in which polities based on sophisticated commons define their extent in a way that is measurable and defensible without recourse to the violence of physical boundaries (p.34 Olwig:2005). In this sense, the production of things rather than their location in space becomes the nexus for the processes in which effective polities emerge in an inclusive way. Processes of production entail ideas of management and co-operative action in service to a defined goal, mediated and produced by site as a nexus of local and global flows. In the examples of Silver End and Temple Farm, we can explore how the production of things becomes synonymous with place-making through which processes of communal identification occur without a territorialising of identity.

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Production and the Utopian Method

Within the utopian experiments of Essex, the ‘thing’ becomes reframed as both the vehicle of place and an instrument of communication a utopian ideal as part of a more radical project of transformation. This is notable through the general emphasis on the production ‘things’, as the social and economic basis for a utopian settlement; such as shoes in the Bata company town at East Tilbury, vegetables through new agricultural methods at Maylandsea, printed translations of Tolstoy at the Purleigh anarchist commune and printed religious leaflets in the forthcoming Jehovah Witness Bethel at Temple Farm. The production of ‘things’ within these experiments becomes a driving focus of co-operative modes of living through the integration of polity within a shared process of manufacture or improvement.

This integration rejected the idea of the suburb as periphery residential area of consumption in favor of a more total environment in which a microcosm of social relations are enacted.

In the example of Silver End, the production of the steel-framed Crittall window becomes the basis of the town and the connective element of identification. The town was built in 1926 by the Crittall Manufacturing company as a total environment in which to house the company’s production facilities, decent homes for all its workers, public amenities, recreation grounds, transport links to surrounding towns and self-sufficient energy and food production. For Francis Crittall (the founder), Silver End was based on a paternal capitalism which believed that the improvement of quality of life for his workers would lead to increased productivity (King:1996). Silver End was also a practical response to the wider social problems of its time; the quality of workers housing, industrial unrest and the plight of disabled veterans following the war and as such embodied a utopian proposition. Design became a method through which these problems were addressed through innovations in housing design, urban layout, building component and manufacturing processes. However, the newness of the settlement, the size of the community and the vision of Crittall inevitably led to a series of tensions common to more general utopian plans which Dolores Hayden has noted; between authoritative and participatory design processes, private and communal space and the need for unique but replicable plans (p.5 Hayden:1976).

As a productive and utopian industrial town, Silver End approached issues of construction, management and hierarchy through the same mechanisms of business management. The layout is governed by the a prescriptive master plan directed by the architect Thomas Tait, structured around a series of significant public buildings connected by streets of housing which enclose a series of large communal open spaces. The housing itself embodied a corporate hierarchy, with the Crittall family home of ‘Manors’ prominently opposite the village hall, and the homes of managers in noticeable avant-garde examples of Modernist architecture. The workers housing appealed to many of the ideals of the ‘indigenous dream’ with low densities and large private gardens, however, the use of a number of architects ensured a variety of street identities to ensure a nuance within the overall master plan.

Figure 25 & 26

Figure 27-30

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Village Hall

Factory

Figure 25 (top): Aerial view of Silver End during construction, showing the Crittall Family home, ‘Manors’, and village centre in the left foreground.

Figure 26 (bottom): Initial Masterplan for Silver End

by Thomas Tait. The crescent on the left was only ever half completed.

Inset Drawing 4: Silver End Existing Plan

Key

S I LV ER ST REET

Conservation Area

Village Ha

‘Manor

FR

N

1:5000

AN

S CI

Y WA

School Factory Site (inactive) Formerly Dept. Store

all

LE VA

rs’

Formerly Hotel

NT

I

NE

Y WA

1. ‘Manors’, Crittall Family Home

52 - 53 4. Silver Street

2. Valentine Way

3. Francis Way

Figure 27-30 (clockwise from top left): Variety of housing types and styles in Silver End, all sharing the Crittall window as common building component.

As a ‘thing’, the Crittall window became a more general signifier of place through its incorporation into every building, regardless of stylistic difference. Its production and propagation at Silver End gave continuing concrete expression to the notion of belonging as all individuals could be located within a particular industrial process. However, the window also had a life as a ideal object through its association with the Modern movement in architecture and its application in many seminal buildings. Its design innovations of thin frames and capacity to glaze large areas transformed the Crittall window as an important tool in the search for more open and light-filled internal spaces and was used in some of the most iconic buildings of the movement. The complexity of the Crittall Window transcends this tension between the generic and the particular as an ‘thing’ with agency in a globalised system of production in which creates identity as well as carries it. With the death of its original visionaries and subsequent global economic instability of the 1930s, this vision of Silver End deteriorate. The ownership of the village began to disintegrate through the selling off of company-owned public amenities, land and building and separation of private homeownership from those that worked for the company due to the a more volatile period of employment featuring redundancies and scaling down. While the classic Crittall window is still produced and disseminated globally, its production has succumb to the global flows of capital which prize efficiency, economies of scale and profit-maximisation in which both social objectives and an emphasis on locality is no longer considered. Silver End’s failure was not so much an inability to stand up to the status-quo, but a standardisation of its economic logic towards a more dominant characterised as placeless in which economic production follows sites of profit maximisation.

The utopian Essex colony was not an outright rejection of this logic however, but a repositioning of itself in the context of the city region in which the benefits of the metropolitan were still utilised. For example, the anarchist commune at Wickford became known as the ‘colony for city men’ since its easy rail-access to the city of London allowed its members to maintain well-paid jobs which then funded their agricultural, self-sufficient and vegan community (p.165 Hardy:1979). Hayden refers to this phenomena as ‘edge city’ (p.324 Hayden:1976) in which utopian visions locate themselves conceptually between the city and wilderness, close enough to recruit followers, gather materials and use vital services, but far enough conceptually to situate themselves as an imaginary reconstitution of society. Essex as a periphery of London adopts this quality as the fertile ground of the tentative, alternative and utopian reconstitution due to its location conceptually within the urban hegemony of the city on the one hand, and a frontier wilderness on the other. Peter Kropotkin’s influential anarchist treatise Fields, Factories and Workshops argued for such networks of small-scale industrial villages which combine agricultural self-sufficiency with industrial manufacturer, promoting the integration of labour into varying tasks which combine ‘manual work and brain work’ (p.151 Kropotkin & Ward: 1985). As a vision of self-sufficient settlements, it ensures a level of resilience while engaging with the reality of contemporary globalisation in which the placed-based objectives of locality succumb to the fleeting mobility of contemporary capital.

Figure 31

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Figure 31: Advertising for Crittall windows frequently related the building component to Modernist visions of architecture and the image of a sun-drenched utopia.

This opportunity of decentralisation is explored fully in the movement of the Jehovah Witness Bethel from Mill Hill London to a new site at Temple Farm currently under construction. The structure will contain an international printing facility for religious leaflets and publications, as well as audio-visual studios, administrative offices and residential spaces for its voluntary community. Temple Farm is a utopian project since it seeks to provide a total environment for its staff based on a particular vision of society based on religious belief and the giving of voluntary time for the purposes on bringing about a wider transformation of society. Yet this relocation is a functional response to the logistical needs of the community, which takes advantage of the cheap local shipping rates and proximity to major ports as a repositioning of an alternative vision of society within the flows of globalisation, opportunistically using the economic logic of the global city to disseminate the word of Jehovah as a national export of Essex.

Figure 32 & 33

Figure 34-37

The condition of decentralisation has increasingly become the dominant theme of the contemporary city as it fragments into more ephemeral networks of communication and flows in which physically located distinctions of centre and periphery become less and less relevant. In the case of Essex, the utopian objective is minor to the utopian method, in which the opportunistic manipulation of these wider flows are use to enable fragmentary explorations of alternative ways of living based in the here and now. In Thomas Sieverts study of the contemporary city as a regional network form (he terms zwischenstadt), he notes a tension between the idea of “system” and “agora”, that is, the difficultly of nesting everyday life and lived experience within the wider infrastructural understanding of the landscape which serve the flows of communication, capital and people through the network (p.69 Sieverts:2003). As emblematic of this condition, Essex shows how the indeterminacy of its position within a wider global territory allows the expression of the individual vision, however fleetingly, in the face of dominant economic hegemony of globalisation.

In this sense, the perceived failure of utopian experiments becomes necessary as an expression of their flexibility and tentativeness. As Worpole notes, an appeal to long-term objectives in utopian communities reflects a tyranny which prevents a direct and immediate reaction against the here and now. As such the architecture and structure of a utopian community should be based on the re-articulation of everyday human relations and impulses based on elective affinities and not authoritative master plans (p.52 Worpole:2015). Utopia is a site of process which by its nature is conceptually difficult to link to ‘place’ since they resist stability in favor of a constant questioning of the form and structure of a good society. Utopia is, in this sense, functionally opposite to ideology which seeks to preserve the status quo (p.

289 Levitas:2007). Through their tentative manifestation in architecture, utopia attempt to prefigure social forms as expressions of a desire for a better way of being based on alternative models of morality and processes of improvement which reconfigure the role of the individual in polity through complex regimes of obligation and rights.

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Figure 32 (top): Proposed printing facilities and colony at Temple Farm, south of Chelmsford for the Jehovah Witnesses Figure 33 (bottom): Current state of construction at Temple Farm. All work is undertaken by volunteers who live on site.

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Figure 34-37 (clockwise from top left): Images of production at the current Jehovah Witness Bethel at Mill Hill London. State-of-the-art facilities and shrewd utilisation of cheap shipping routes ensure that the most efficient global coverage is co-ordinated between a network of international printing Bethels.

SUBURBIA AS PROCESS

Through structures of morality, the Essex suburb explores a relationship between the individual and the English landscape as a place of polity. In the previous models, this is a relationship mediated by appeal to the mythic qualities of the English landscape embedded within the ‘indigenous dream’ and visions of alternative imaginary reconstitutions of society.

These are essentially authoritative projects in which hierarchy locates the individual as consumer, but not producer, of the environment. The final model of the ‘plotlands’ presents a more conjoined possibility in which the inhabitant is also an author of their own environment.

Historically, these were large areas of self-made housing, created prior to the introduction of comprehensive planning policy through the division of redundant farm-land following an agricultural depression at the end of the nineteenth century. The ‘plotlands’ were created through incremental processes of improvement in conditions of economic scarcity, which rejected the veiled image of the ‘indigenous dream’ in favor of association of land-ownership, no matter how marginal, with freedom. Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward’s authoritative study Arcadia for All (1984) describes the Essex ‘plotlands’ with the changing fortunes of a relatively deprived East London demographic through which the processes of land-ownership and gradual improvement of the plot becomes synonymous with wider social phenomena of aspiration and upward social mobility.

The expression of aspiration within a traditional ‘morality of improvement’ have been associated with self-reliance and individual competitiveness. Through a study of the stereotype of the ‘Essex Man’, this interpretation will be called into question in which a common aspiration of home-ownership can result in qualities of co-operation through which individual desire can align with collective notions, through custom as the formative processes of identification. Using the example of the plot ‘Perseverance’ in the settlement of North Benfleet, these social processes will be explored through their physically manifestation in the definition of property as a performative action upon the landscape, in which the property edge becomes a site of negotiation between the plot and the suburb. Through a more considered discussion of the ‘make-shift’ aesthetics of the ‘plotlands’, the qualities of aspiration through co-operation and custom will be interpreted through the strategy of bricolage and its potential consequences for the larger regional processes of city-making in the periphery through an analogy of ‘gardening’.

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Map 3: Location of main ‘plotland’ developments within the county.

The ‘Essex Man’ and the ‘Morality of Improvement

The ‘Essex Man’, and associated ‘Essex Girl’ stereotypes, reflect more general classbased criticism of social mobility enabled through policies of decentralisation and the later neo-liberal policies of Thatcher, in which a traditional understanding of the English classed society underwent a significant fragmentation. While the ‘Essex Girl’ is a culturally more visible archetype it reflects a complex dynamic regarding gender-relations, the ‘Essex Man’ on the other hand has become a more generic concept regarding the visible manifestation of social mobility thats remains insightful in the case of a general cultural understanding of homeownership. Originally coined by Simon Heffer in 1990, ‘Essex Man’ is portrayed as ‘young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren’ and ‘breathtakingly right wing’ (p.23 Heffer:1990). These were qualities highlighted by Matless as synonymous with a ‘preservationist’ portrait of the English anti-citizen (p.47 Matless:1998). Heffer was referring specifically to an emerging meritocracy within the City of London following the de-regulation of financial markets. Traditional career paths into the financial professions based on the cultural and social capital of education, prestige and family connections were revalued through a concern for more practical knowledge associated with trading. As class no longer became an obstacle to procurement of immense wealth within the new freedom of global transactions, a series of potent yet visible characters of socially mobile and competitive individuals emerged from working-class backgrounds.

The ‘Essex Man’ more precisely spoke of this physical trajectory of social mobility between the historically poor neighborhoods of the East End, projects of decentralisation towards the East and their adjacent rural areas as general sites of the ‘indigenous dream’, all connected by the railway lines from Fenchurch and Liverpool Street, the heart of the financial centre of London. Biressi & Nunn’s portray the ‘Essex Man’ as a more contested identity through its territorialisation of the neo-liberal ideal of the self-made subject and its cultural hybridity between received notions of English class which combined created a visible symbol of aggressive individualism:

Figure 38

‘There is a brutish, bold ‘get out of my way because I’m worth it’ bravado attached to these figures which appears to disconnect them from their classed, collective moorings in the service of individual success.’ (p.43 Biressi & Nunn:2013) The ‘Essex Man’ stereotype epitomised the emergence of a new and assertive consumerism in which visible expression of wealth through home-ownership becomes the materiality of aspiration. The ambivalent reception of the ‘Essex Man’ within popular culture at the time sought to naturalise an idea of aspiration based on competition rather than co-operation with significant urban effects in the articulation of ‘home’ as a symbol of attainment.

The association of social mobility with home-ownership traces a particular English

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Figure 38: The illustration of the stereotypical ‘Essex Man’, with the car and satellite-dish on his newly brought council-house as visible symbols of aspiration through notions of ownership. From Simon Heffer’s orginal article in which he introduces the archetype.

concern which connotes property and liberty, notable in the English philosophers of Locke, Hume and Mill. The ‘indigenous dream’ places an implicit value on a notion of liberty as remoteness, in which a desire for the larger detached house supersedes more denser and communal visions of home and hence generates a trajectory in which upward social movement, embodied in the archetype of the ‘Essex Man’, becomes associated with a more general desire for a movement towards the suburban ideal. The shifting political fortunes of Basildon is a prime example of this materiality of aspiration, notable in its visible shift from the welfare state ideology of the Labour Party to become the vanguard of Thatcherite policies aimed at expanding home-ownership through policies of Right-to-Buy. However, as recent sociological studies on the town by Hayes and Hudson (2001) show, the ‘Essex Man’ phenomena is not strictly tied to 1980s reform, but to a more general assertion of the values of independence, self-sufficiency and a desire to make one’s own way in the world. In this respect it follows a more historic trajectory of the ‘plotlands’, large areas of which were cleared away to enabled Basildon as the manifestation of the welfare state, in which private sovereignty of ownership is replaced with rental from the state (Beaven:2001). This return to private property as an aspiration ideal in Basildon has resulted in a more problematic phenomena of political disenfranchisement. This features a profound detachment from all forms of collective political process, from participation in explicit political processes to a more general lack of subscription to social clubs and public forums (p.11 Hayes & Hudson:2001).

Instead, the family and the domestic space have replaced the civic and political institutions which primarily give cohesion and identity to the people of Basildon. While the aims and aspirations of the family, as a more complex assemblage of interests, persons and territories, continue to drive the individual projects of social mobility in through concrete expressions of ownership, the inability to link the smaller domestic sphere to wider social fortunes has created a city in which traditional civic and political institutions are rejected with nothing adequate to replace them.

The ‘Essex Man’ combines aspiration and a preference for private property with the personal project of self-improvement, in which physical transformations of the English landscape through the house are enacted. Raymond Williams refers to this as a ‘morality of improvement’ in which the historical reconsideration of the ‘estate’ as a source of economic exploitation tied to the economic and social fortunes of the individual is reframed as a moral imperative (p.60 Williams:1973). As in the Picturesque, this appeal to the individual notion of self-improvement enacts a veiling of the landscape when it manifests in the creation of home as private territory and an associated dispossession of the practices of commons. A reversal of this requires a reconsideration of the ‘morality of improvement’ in the context of co-operation in which projects of transformation serve collective ends rather than private exploitation. In a sense this mirrors earlier forms of the estate not as bounded private property but as a complex arrangement of belonging in which ownership is exerted through practice and not through scenic space. Improvement through co-operation does not only relate to the management of an estate as a contained unit of social and physical space, but how these ‘estate’

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interact with other forms of polity. Whereas the ‘estate’ as a community entails a process of seeking out people similar, co-operation deals with how one approaches those which one has no immediate connection with. Whereas the ‘Essex Man’ views the persona project of selfimprovement to a point of stability embodied in the vision of the ‘indigenous dream’, Richard Sennett notes co-operation to be in itself a craft requiring constant training and practice (Sennett: 2013). The articulation of improvement in which individual desires can be located within collective projects requires, like the utopian method, a non-representational emphasis on performative practice, which in architecture must link the processes of urbanisation and building, and not to an image as imagined goal.

The ‘Essex Man’ embodied an archetype of aspiration in which shifting valuations of social, economic and intellectual capital took place within the context of a movement between a city and its periphery. Whereas socially the ‘Essex Man’ was a visible aberration of the class-based understanding of English society, his economic achievements through upward social mobility create a contested identity whose celebration of the rise of consumer culture was received ambivalently. Intellectually, the ‘Essex Man’ embodied success through more practical forms of knowledge (or metis) which emphasises sociality, deal-making and the ability to think on ones feet as opposed to a more academic valorisation. It is this practical know-how embodied within the notion of aspiration that allows it to function as the basis for processes of co=operation. When applied to the physical environment in the example of the ‘plotlands’, this produces an urbanism of process which discredit the desire for suburbia to emerge into the world fully formed, based on clear and authoritative visions.

Inset Drawing 5: Exploration of the personal trajectory of the ‘Essex Man’, from the city to the periphery through a mapping of my own father’s movement over 30 years.

‘Perseverance’ and the Emergence of Property

Aspiration as a continuous process of co-operation manifests in a production of space through social processes of negotiation and mutual-aid. As emblematic of this, the ‘plotlands’ explores the emergence of individual property as part of a nuanced incremental process of edge-making through which the ‘indigenous dream’ is never fulfilled but always aspired to. Through a continuing process of improvement, property becomes a “palimpsest” of varying actions upon the land both physical, performative and commemorative through which complex arrangements of belonging are instilled. This was prefigured through the cadastral form of the ‘plotlands’, in the very laying out as strips of small ownership sold through auction but not physically enclosed. As such, the emergence of both house and infrastructure went hand-in-hand through the agency of individuals through co-operation.

As a suburb of process, the ‘plotlands’ require a continuous durational practice of improvement which allows redundant farm-lands to transform into meaningful settlements.

In areas in which they remain, the restrictions of contemporary planning practice effectively curtail this natural metabolism to continue. This is particularly true around Basildon, in which thirteen ‘plotland’ settlements exist within its Green Belt. Today, these host around 5,000 people in an urbanism characterised physically as having ‘a semi-rural character that is still typified privately maintained roads, varying dwelling plot sizes, natural property boundaries and vacant plots.’ (BBC:2014). In the case of North Benfleet, a ‘plotland’ settlement to the East of Basildon, the flexibility of this urbanism has created a range of housing, from large detached family homes with swimming pools, to abandoned plots, mobile homes and industrial yards. However, the restrictions on their natural processes of improvement through the Green Belt and subsequent effects on permitted development ensure that North Benfleet has remained relatively stagnant since 1945 and characterised by a chronic underinvestment in their roads and infrastructure and a significant lack of public amenity. The current Basildon Local Plan enables a ‘Plotland Infill Policy’, through which designated vacant plots could be built on to fund infrastructure improvements, but removes all future permitted development rights. This effectively transforms the ‘plotland’ into a site of value-maximisation for existing land-owners rather than a continuation of the more social processes of mobility which the initial phenomena served. Through the demise of the durational process of improvement, the ‘plotland’ of North Benfleet has transformed from a suburb of process to one of enclosure in which the natural property boundaries, planted during a tentative sketching out of a possible and flexible layout, have solidified into defensible boundaries of exclusion.

Within the ‘plotlands’ the hedgerow as property edge emerged from the complex negotiations between individual and the wider polity of the ‘plotland’ in which its treatment, rather than its physicality, changes it agency within the expression of territory. Richard Sennett makes a distinction between such edges as a boundary or a border, which in the former embodies a dead space which seeks to separate difference while the later becomes a live

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Cadastral Parcels Vacant Parcels Unregistered Land 2015 HELAA, Assessed Land 2015 Plotlands Review, Proposed Infill 2015 Plotlands Review, Boundary

Map 4: Cadastral analysis of North Benfleet, showing the level of inhabation and complexity which emerges from an intial division of land. Data from the UK Land Registry and Basildon Local Plan

site at which difference meets (Sennett:2016). In this respect the hedgerow is an ambiguous thing, initially employed in the English landscape as a violent assertion of property through exclusion and the shifting nature of relations from customary law to codified statute, yet also a site of social protest and contestation since they are productive edges in which the ownership of the hedge itself, the space it represents and the fruit of its growth create a patchwork of rights, customs and obligations upon different segments of polity.

Through an exploration of the individual history of the plot named ‘Perseverance’ we can unpick how the physical manifestation of property emerges as a fluid and performative action upon the land. Situated at the South-West corner of North Benfleet, ‘Perseverance’ is defined through a series of natural vegetative edges and inhabited by a house, some external buildings and a swimming pool. Some edges have only been made relatively recently while others were defined during the conversion of the agricultural field to plotlands or even more historically through the delineation of ancient parishes and field structures. However, this physical reality is disjunctive to the legal standards through which property is recorded and made measurable through cadastral mapping. As Scott notes, the comprehensive cadastral map enacts a simplification of the complex nature of land tenure, favoring a single allocation of fixed dimension to known individuals as a way of making land fiscally transparent (p.36 Scott:1998). The abstractions of the cadastral map is embodied in the standards of the UK land registry, which records through plan and title deed all transactions in land through a reduction to a red-line (demise) on an Ordnance Survey plan and a written text detailing conveyances. Even within the single plot of ‘Perseverance’ the inadequacy of this cadastral standard is exposed, since two registration are officially logged for the total plot, failing to account for their current amalgamation. The cadastral form of ‘Perseverance’, even at its most current official delineation fails to acknowledge the way even simple relationship of private property play out through incremental processes of making the territory of home.

Figure 39

A more performative understanding of property fundamentally alters how we approach landscape, not as a representation of aspirational ideal, but embodied in process and the memory of these processes which in themselves generate differentiations of place which are neither inherent or stable. The title deeds of ‘Perseverance’ reveal a more historical process of amalgamation, in which the original plot to the East expanded over time through merging with the four adjacent plots of similar size. The original plots were brought from three different vendors by three purchasers between 1898, 1900 and 1926 most probably through auctions by land-agents who were responsible for disposing of defaulted agricultural land following the depression of the 1870s. This transformation of agricultural field, to divide plot, to territory of home through an aspiration to the ‘indigenous dream’ is captured

by Colin Ward, who records the story of ‘Perseverance’ and its emergence under its initial proprietorship: 70 - 71

Figure 39: ‘Perseverance’ as encountered by Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy in the 1980s..

‘Mr Fred Nichols of Bowers Gifford is in his seventies. He had a poverty-stricken childhood in East London, and a hard and uncertain life as a casual dock worker.

His piece of land cost him £10 in 1934. It is 40 feet wide by 100 feet deep. First he put up a tent which his family used as weekend, and he gradually accumulated tools, timber and glass which he brought to the site strapped to his back as he cycle down from London. For water he sank a well in his garden. His house is called ‘Perseverance’. In the course of time it was connected for mains, water, gas and electricity, though the road is still unmade and unsewered.’ (p.200-201 Hardy & Ward: 2004) Several features in this account point to a more embodied and performative understanding of the plot within the Essex landscape. Firstly, the plot has a distinct relationship to the city as a retreat from London as a site of endurance, uncertain work and deprivation. Secondly, there is link to a movement of aspiration, both physically from the city and through the processes of incremental improvement in which the initial starting point (a dimension and a price) manifests in the transformation of shelter from an original tent, to the self-build house. Thirdly, there is a process of self-sufficiency with the sinking of the well and a reliance on a bricolage of found materials and self-made solutions to problems of water access, with full service hook-up not occurring until much later. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the process of naming through which the plot as ‘Perseverance’ is both a place but also the memory of an act, in which Mr. Nichols inscribes his personal trajectory upon the Essex landscape.

The plotlands require an understanding of the temporality of landscape as well as its spatiality since they are defined by process rather than an appeal to a coherent image of the English landscape. Tim Ingold (1993) refers to this temporality of the landscape through a notion of ‘taskscape’, as an array of related activities performed and remembered upon the landscape which must be considered as in a perpetual state of transience and process.

This is in reaction to a static representational ideal of landscape in which ideas of place are based not within a relational context of people’s engagement with it, but through the attachment of meaning in which places are characterised as centres with no boundaries (p.155 Ingold:1993). Within a temporal understanding of landscape, the edge as either boundary or border becomes the site of activity through which we participate rather than spectate in landscape. ‘Taskscape’ is anathema to the abstract cadastral map, which seeks to freeze an idea of property, yet whatever physical demarcations are employed in the service of property definition only behave as such in the day-to-day recognition or experience of these landscape features as boundaries or borders. Temporality and historicity are not opposed however but coincident. The experience of prior landscape activities are remembered through custom and physical traces, carrying forward the process of social life which ‘in the resonance of movement and feeling stemming from people’s mutually attentive engagement, in shared contexts of practical activity, lies the very foundation of sociality.’ (p.160 Ingold:1993).

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The comparison between the idea of property through the abstract cadastral compared to the durational ‘taskscape’ is one between a codified understanding of space and customary one. Within the English landscape, this has historically been the tension between legal systems in which customary law, evolving through established usage linked to everyday practices or activities regularly performed, provides a basis for management of complex ideas of tenure. Olwig notes customary law to be vital to the notion of landscape as polity, since the designation of territory requires a socially cohesive administration based on shared practices and customs (p.57 Olwig:2002). Bob Bushaway, in his study of English rural customs, notes their importance in being able to enact indeterminate forms of property in the landscape (p.12 Bushaway:1982). Custom and its link to notions of the legal, provided the basis for both social cohesive polities, but also provided a vehicle for social protest in which the needs of local units of administration could resist pressure from dominant landowners or the central state. Customs such as beating-the-bounds through walking the parish border during ‘Rogationtide’ were acts of identification through which the social structures of the community were propagated and enforced. Custom provided a nuances way for management of the particularities of locality, which through repeated action became legible through use to the community. For Raymond Williams, the ability to communicate social relationship is a legible way allows one to speak of a ‘knowable community’, however this is not the same criticism as Scott who sees a quest for legibility on the side of the state as the cause of unwieldy processes of administration. Instead the ‘knowable community’ posits an ambivalent relationship between the individual and wider society and the myriad ways in which both belonging and not belonging is enacted ultimately in the formation of ones own moral history (p.174 Williams: 1973).

For ‘Perseverance’, the tracing of social relations occurs through a myriad of activities which leave their marks on the land, both physically through borders and socially through address. While the official cadastral description of the site reduced this to an abstract idea of area and ownership, it ignores the extent to which the plot formed through complex processes of custom, repeated performance and improvement based on collective processes of negotiation. Scott asks whether the cadastral map should in fact be used to complicate rather than simplify the understanding of land ownership as way to map the more complex relations of rights, responsibilities and obligations which determine an individual territory within more collective notions of polity (p.27 Scott:1998). Fundamental to this vision is the temporal quality of landscape and the inhabitation within it. Whereas the EDG suburb and examples of the utopian settlement attempt to create places fully-formed in the world the plotlands lacked an overarching vision but instead were based on an aspirational process in which individuals worked together to achieve personal desire through collective means of accumulative bricolage.

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This is a copy of the title plan on 12 MAR 2016 at 23:45:09. This copy does not take account of any application made after that time even if still pending in the Land Registry when this copy was issued.

Map 5:in a court UKto the Land Registry for This copy is not an 'Official Copy' of the title plan. An official copy of the title plan is admissible in evidence same extent as the Title original. Plan A person is entitled to be indemnified by the registrar if he or she suffers loss by reason of a mistake in an official copy. If you wantato obtain an official copy, the Land Registry ‘Perseverance’, reduction of the trajectory of selfweb site explains how to do this. improvement to a single red-line and association

with the identity the current owners.

The Land Registry endeavours to maintain high quality and scale accuracy of title plan images.The quality and accuracy of any print willof depend on your printer, your computer and its print settings.This title plan shows the general position, not the exact line, of the boundaries. It may be subject to distortions in scale.

Measurements scaled from this plan may not match measurements between the same points on the ground.

This title is dealt with by Land Registry, Peterborough Office.

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The emergence of ‘Perseverance’, from left to right, top to bottom: 1860s, 1890s, 1920s, 1930s, 1950s and in its contemporary ordnance.

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(1) Charles Walter Cumberbatch (Vendor) and (2) Joseph Pearse (Purchaser)

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‘For water he sank a well in his garden.’

Mr Fred Nichols, purchased in 1934 for £10... [1926 conveyance]

‘First he put up a tent whcih his family used as a weekend retreat...’

P ERSERVERANCE

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Attempted cadastral mapping of ‘Perseverance’, acknowledging the emergence of property through ‘taskscape’

(1) Charles Walter Cumberbatch (Vendor) and (2) Samuel Weaver (Purchaser)

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1. No caravan house on wheels or other moveable dwelling booth show roundabout or swing shall be allowed to stand or remain on any part of the land"

SUSAN C O T TA G E

Beating the bounds Annually at Rogationtide 5th Sunday after Easter

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A Conveyance of the land in this title dated 24 August 1926 made between (1) Archibald James Thomas Clark (Vendor) and (2) Frederick George Nicholls (Purchaser) contains the following covenants:-

Bricolage, ‘Make-shift’ and ‘Gardening’

The aesthetics of the plotlands are one of temporal process rather than defined vision of space, in which the durational nature of improvement leaves the environment in a constant and tentative state of change. This is fundamentally different to the Essex statusquo which seeks to create suburbs as fully-formed entities based on a particular design image.

While all three models of suburbia aspire to elements of an ‘indigenous dream’, the plotlands confront the economic reality of its potential achievement through conditions of scarcity.

The aesthetics of the plotlands are one of the ‘make-shift’ in which conditions of marginality, both in site, access to skilled labour and materials, create an architecture of the assembled, the fragmentary and the unfinished (p.2. Hardy & Ward: 1988). Physically, this is an architecture which is dominated by pre-fabricated homes, standard and cheap materials, and a haphazard method of assembly complicated by the difficultly of marginal sites. The building type of the ‘Picturesque Cottage’ is replaced by the ‘Bungalow’ which accomplished the ideals of detachment and simplicity but through new methods of production and standardisation rather than an implicit historicisation of the built environment (p.160 King: 1984). As a basic form which could be brought whole or through plans, and could be easily adapted or extended as means allows, the ‘bungalow’ became a functional approach to home-ownership and a fertile vessel through which symbolic readings of the ‘indigenous dream’ could be applied through ornamentation and bricolage.

Figure 40

This quality of bricolage spoke of a more direct relationship between the inhabitant as participant and author of their environment, in which the distinction between conception, construction and living is blurred. The bricoleur, as proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, generates from the reassembly of existing and available materials (in the broadest sense) without recourse to philosophy or application of a consistent vision, in opposition to the engineer who subordinates materials to an ideal plan. Through processes of improvisation and interrogation of their inventory, the bricoleur pursues projects in which the result is always a compromise between original intention, and physical reality. Scalbert traces the role of the bricoleur within architecture as a riposte to Modernist concerns of rationality: ‘Bricolage cannot have a form because, to the bricoleur, it is a life process. Nor can bricolage have a philosophy, insofar as it does not lend itself to concepts and theories. Instead, bricolage values flair, wisdom and forethought, resourcefulness, deception and vigilance, opportunism, skills, and experience. Bricolage is a form of cunning’ (p.77 Scalbert:2011) This concern for practical knowledge (or metis) embodies the qualities of the ‘Essex Man’ as a self-reliant version of the English citizen. In the context of the plotlands, the ‘Essex Man’ as bricoleur pursues the ‘indigenous dream’ in the loosest possible terms through a reassembly or material, processes and logistics which are available to him. However, implicit within the

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Figure 40: Photographic survey of ‘make-shift’ housing within Dunton plotlands, prior to demolition to make way for Basildon New Town.

‘make-shift’ as a process of bricolage is a social base, since it opportunistically confronts the wider social and physical assemblages available to it as the basis for compromised transformations in which individual desire meets collective aspiration.

This process of transformation positions the ‘make-shift’ as a socially driven manifestation of relational networks. In David Crouch and Colin Ward’s studies of the allotment landscape, the ‘make-shift’ reverses a veiling of the landscape in which social and economic relations explicitly manifest the visual realm (p.205 Crouch & Ward:1988).

However, this signification is not immediately legible to those looking in from the outside in as aesthetic notions of landscape beauty are replaced by customs of use through reciprocal exchanges, and an sense of enjoyment experienced through the process of bricolage.

Recycling, seasonal change and gift relationships create ‘make-shift’ landscapes a more contemporary vision of the commons in which a diversity of practices ensure the sustainable allocation of resource, as one person waste becomes another’s beginnings. Within these opportunistic transformations of landscape, the role of design is fundamentally shifted away from the description of intended outcomes. Following from the analogy of the allotment, Scalbert pursues the notion of gardening as an alternative design practice which utilises the possibility of bricolage in more substantial urban and regional transformations. Fundamental to this is a refusal of the abstract and all-encompassing vision, in favor of a myopia in which work is characterised by a lack of distance and known plans, since the point of gardening is not so much the final vision but the act itself (p.57 Scalbert:2009). As a form of citymaking gardening remains grounded in the minutiae of everyday life, in which processes of improvement celebrate the small adjustment over the big intention, in which the figure of the gardener collapse previously held divisions between inhabitation and creation while acknowledging the cyclical cycles of creation and obsolescence as a basic feature of the metabolism of the urban form. In his studies of the notion of gardening in the early Garden Cities, Graham Livesey locates gardening as part of a productive assemblage in which urban phenomena such as labour, country, town, pleasure, moral and civil education are joined together within the individual figure of the gardener as responsible urban citizen, whose constant acts of maintenance produce the wider notion of polity while retaining a particular appeal to Englishness (p.275 Livesey: 2011).

In the context of Essex, gardening as a form of regional transformation would be functionally opposite to the current reliance on restrictive planning and the mediation of competing interests through the ideal vision of the EDG as a status-quo. As a shared process of improvement, the notion of gardening provides a coherent base from which difference can emerge as tailored approached to unique issues of suburban form. Through its situation in the habitual rather than the ideal, gardening as a form of bricolage allows a deeper questioning of the way the city periphery (as Essex) is valued since it approaches the here and now, and the things present in the landscape through their potential for use rather than exchange.

Just as the enclosure of one set of practices may enable the protection of the commons of

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another, the whole-scale restriction of alternative within the current status-quo does not in fact prevent the dangers of monotonous development through architectures of enclosure but simply mediates it through popular notions of Englishness in which vision gains precedence over use. To reframe the London’s eastern periphery as the Garden of Essex entails more fundamental and radical transformations to the nature of planning, land ownership and the role of the architect in favor of the commons as a diverse and difficult to map set of practices rooted in bricolage and custom within a nesting of polity through which the individual associates with locality through process and elective affinities rather than grand vision.

CONCLUSION

This exploration of three models of suburbia within Essex have attempted to trace the way Englishness is manifested through the experience of property. Specifically, this has sought to trace how ideas of the English landscape inform the articulation of hierarchy and the role of the individual within wider notions of collective polity.

The initial investigation of the Essex Design Guide as the status-quo in current suburban production in the country has revealed how an architecture of enclosure promotes a singular view of property. The sovereignty of the individual and a notion of the home as private is used to crowd out the multifarious ways through which belonging and identification is enacted in the English landscape. Through an appeal to an ‘indigenous dream’, the EDG suburb veils the privatisation of settlements and a depoliticised vision of property in which a relationship between owners and things owned supersede a more vital relationship between owner and non-owners. The use of hedgerow as vegetative property boundary naturalises these relations while creating urban forms as fully-formed through which identity is territorialised and thus the basis for exclusion.

In attempting to prefigure an alternative method for an inclusive methods of identification, the utopian sentiment in Essex was explored as a second model of suburbia which viewed the city’s periphery as a fertile test-bed for alternative visions of living. The Modernist New Towns sought a landscape aesthetic of openness in order to transcend notions of private property by appeal to coherent base of the English landscape as national identity. However, in becoming the status quo, this vision quickly became the source of a counter-utopia, or ‘subtopia’, that failed to articulate a collective vision due to the its generic qualities in which the status of ‘things’ are centres of place are diminished. The model utopias of Silver End and Temple Farm demonstrate how the production of ‘things’ rather than their territorialisation can become both a signifier of polity and instrument of the utopian method in which alternative visions of society can be enacted without regard to an overall goal in the here and now. However, the basis of the utopian method relies on an articulation of the everyday relations of the here and now which creates a tension between the basis of polity in an authoritative but inflexible master plan or the coming together under a notion of elective affinities in which the individual is reframed not as a subject of control but a responsible author of the utopian method.

The final model of the ‘plotlands’ explores this reframing of the individual through a reconsideration of aspiration as stereotypically defined within the ‘Essex Man’. Through an emphasis on co-operation as opposed to competition, the application of a utopian method in pursuit of a notion of the ‘indigenous dream’ aligns individual desire with collective projects of improvement. In the context of the ‘plotlands’, the emergence of property occurs through repeated acts of customs and activity whose multifariousness cannot be captured in legible

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abstract terms. As a performative action which reassembles the land for the purposes of individual desire, the plotlands adopt an aesthetic of bricolage through which identifications of user, inhabitant and author are blurred. Through the analogy of gardening, this process confronts the individual within wider assemblages of social relations and physical things to become the basis for a temporal understanding of landscape. Within this, notions of Englishness can be identified without recourse to an ideal environment to be created fully formed, whilst allowing the articulation of difference within the periphery conditions of the city.

The hybrid nature of Essex as a periphery region necessitates its continuous contestation in which models of alternative living become visible critiques of the more national consciousness in which Englishness is constructed. While this occurs in the opportunities of built experiment within the county, it has also emerged through an inability to link the physical and estuarine landscape of the Essex coast to more traditional and pastoral reading of the English landscape (p.87 Howkins:1986). Despite this, the topography of Essex and its region has a strong cultural history and link to the national imaginary, explored in Ken Worpole’s extensive exploration of the coastal landscape in The New English Landscape in which he asks: ‘If landscape and national identity are uneasy familiars or surrogates of each other, it is worth asking what is Englishness today if its favored topography is based on the low horizons and cold seas of its eastern approaches? Why does the zeitgeist now favor a lonelier, bleaker, more rebarbative sense of place?’ (p.13 Worpole & Orton:2013) Through the photography of Jason Orton, the contestation of Essex as site of difference has a physical manifestation in the indeterminacy of the landscape in which the fragment and the trace merge the qualities of the unimproved, the obsolete and detritus as the fundamental texture of the periphery. For Antoine Picon, such landscape naturally promote anxiety due to their affront to the more basic assumption Modernity has placed upon our understanding of the landscape while simultaneously exposing the inability for our societies to predict or correctly control their effect on such places (p.79 Picon:2000). For Robert Macfarlane, the eeriness of the English landscape and its representation through the post-pastoral is less a mythologising of alternative readings of the land but instead an expression of absence and loss (Macfarlane:2015). Whereas the Picturesque enacted a veiling of the unpleasant social transformations implicit in property, the places where this veil is lifted become the sites of contemporary anxieties about the landscape as the national realm.

An appeal to the eeriness of Essex is a reaction against a contemporary invocation of the pastoral as a point of stability during great political and social change. For Joe Kennedy, a rediscovery of pastoral has become a corner stone of austerity of politics which seeks to naturalise

Figure 41 & 42

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Figure 41 (left) & 42 (right): Jason Orton’s photographs of the Essex foreshore, as an indeterminate zone in constant transition.

continuing economic forces of landed exploitation such as the emergence of ‘fracking’, and the continuing privatisation of national resources (Kennedy:2013). Concurrently, the fiscal retreat of the state frames austerity through a more nostalgic notion of ‘thrift’ embodied in popular culture such as the Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On motif and the Great British BakeOff (2010-). The appeal to bricolage through a particular image of ‘make do’ unknowingly dismantles its ability as form of continuous questioning and aspiration of the status quo.

Kennedy notes particularly how Folk music, as a traditional form of asserting local rights and custom in the face of exploitation and domination, has instead become a marketable commodity in such bands as Mumford and Sons (Kennedy: 2013). However, trends in music towards the post-pastoral as a resistance to the idealised image of the English landscape has congregated on Essex as a site of departure, in which new aural aesthetics of ambiance provide a useful starting point for relating the built process of bricolage and the utopian method into a durational understanding. The music of These New Puritans, and in particular their album Field of Reeds which adopts a series of techniques to represent the indeterminate and the fragmentary as the characteristics of the Thames Estuary (Burrows:2013). Through the use of hybrid classical instruments with electronic manipulations, an emphasis on resonance of tones, an expanded use of voice between legible lyric and undulating utterance, and a quality of ‘half-remembrance’ in which traces are repeated and transformed but their provenance unknown, a series of songs trace duration through a cycle of creation and destruction. Like the garden, the planning of the periphery must adopt this concern for obsolescence and creation in which aesthetics of duration acknowledges both the failure of utopia but more importantly the value of its continual pursuit through the methods of bricolage in the face of social, political and environmental uncertainty. Like the tidal action of the Thames, each new flood provides the basis for more fertile beginnings.

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Inset Drawing 8: LAN DSC APE

The Garden of Essex: A Bricolage Master Plan

Saffron Walden

Key London Overspill

Fitchingfield

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Plotlands

Great Barfield Clavering

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Travellers Sites

Hawkspur Experiment

Model Industrial Towns 0:40

Alternative Communes

LONDON STANSTED AIRPORT Felsted Travellers Site

Bishop’s Stortford to Braintree Line, now a walking route

Essex Design Guide

Hatfield Forest

Rural Villages

Gilston Park

London Green Infrastructure

Great No

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Harlow

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Metropolitan Greenbelt

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Landscape Character Assessment Areas

Chelmsford

Dial House

Epping

Greensted

Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

Relocation o London Bet Temple Far UK HQ of th accomodati printing and

LEY

Ingatestone

0:28

Epping Forest

Loughton

Stapleford Abbots

VAL

Characteristic Essex Landscapes

Island Conditions

0:22

Brentwood

Havering Park

Shenfield

0:30

Billericay

Noak Hill Dale Farm

LEA

Time from London Railways

Pre-1967 GLA Boundary

Thames Chase Community Forest Basildon

West Horndon

0:37

19) ning 20

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Proposed Crossrail

Crossra

STRATFORD

Laindon Farm Colony

0:07

Fobbing

Movements of Waste

KING’S CROSS

Moore Place

0:00

Movement of Communities

South Ockenden

Longley

0:50 Grays

Beeching Cuts

CITY OF LONDON

Chafford Hundred

LONDON CITY AIRPORT

Major Motorways

Stanford-le-Hope

Bata-ville

0:35

CANARY WHARF

Shoe making utopia, more European than Silver End in its modernist forms and communal ideas

Fr

GREATER LONDON N

1:350000

GLA Boundary

PORT OF TILBURY

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Ridgewell

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‘Constable Country’ AONB

Yeldham

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1:27

Grayson Perry’s House for Essex

Boxted

New Adelphi Apricot Centre

Extensive but failed spa resort with public buildings half built by Robert Adam (the older one)

HARWICH INTERNATIONAL PORT

Hamford Water SSSI

1:00

Colchester

0:58

Braintree

Coggleshall

Sandiacres

otley

Frinton-on-Sea

Silver End The utopian village of Francis Crittall, hosting his Crittall window Cressing manufacturing plant Temples and workers houses

Black Notley

Mersea Island

Frating Fall Farm

0:44 Maypole Forest Garden

Blackwater SSSI Hatfield Peverel

North Heybridge Garden Suburb

Maldon

Mayland Colony

Purleigh Colony

Othona Community

Dengie Flats SSSI

Althorne

Movement of Crossrail spoil to transform Wallasea Island into a ‘naturalistic’ RSPB reserve

DENGIE PENINSULA Maylandsea

South Woodham Ferrers

New town built in the 1980s, a testbed for the original Essex Design Guide

Hullbridge

Burnham-on-Crouch

Ashingdon Hockley

Wallasea Island

Ashingdon Colony

Wickford Rayleigh

0:43 0:54

Hovefields

Foulness Island

Rochford

North Benfleet

LONDON SOUTHEND AIRPORT

South Benfleet

Benfleet Hadleigh Farm Colony

1:08 Southend-on-Sea

Canvey Island

LONDON GATEWAY

rom Zlin, Czech Republic

A

R ESTUA TE RY

South Maldon Garden Suburb

East Maldon Line, dismantled in the 1960s and sold off.

0:38

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St. Lawrence

Charrington’s Hotel

Danbury Hills

of the Jehovah Witness’s thel in Mill Hill, London to rm, Essex. The Bethel is the he organisation, providing ion for 1,500 and extensive d publication facilities.

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Osea Island

Northey Island

EcoDIY Clacton-on-Sea

Jaywick Sands

Brickhouse Road

Wood Corner

Point Clear

The inspiration for ‘The Tempest’?

Witham

THA

ME

S E ST UA RY

Maplin Sands SSSI

1:54 FELIXSTOWE PORT

Mistley

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IMAGE CREDITS All photos and drawings the author’s own unless otherwise stated.

Figure 1: BARR, S. (2008) RSPB Purfleet Classroom. [Online] Available from: http:// www.peterbeardlandroom.co.uk/rspb_class_6.html. [Accessed 24th May 2016] Figure 2: STATHAKI, E. (2015) FAT and Grayson Perry’s Gingerbread House open for Booking. In: Wallpaper. [Online] Available at: http://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/ fat-and-grayson-perrys-gingerbread-house-opens-for-bookings. [Accessed on 24th May 2016].

Figure 3,5,8,9 & 10: ESSEX COUNTY COUNCIL (1973) Design Guide for Residential Areas. Tiptree: The Anchor Press Ltd. Figure 4, 6 & 7: ESSEX COUNTY COUNCIL (1997) The Essex Design Guide for Residential and Mixed use Areas. [online] Availabe at: http://www.placeservices.co.uk/ media/56453/essex-design-guide_all.pdf [Accessed on 21st May 2016] Figure 11: DEAN, S. (2015) South Woodham Ferrers Town Centre. [Online] Available at: http://www.southwoodhamferrerstc.gov.uk/aerial-photograph. [Accessed 24th May 2016] Figure 12-19: ESSEX EDUCATIONAL VIDEO UNIT (1981) A Riverside Country Town. [Online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzkbZCOXUoQ. [Accessed 02/05/2015] Figure 20: OSBORN, F. & WHITTICK, A. (1963) The New Towns: the answer to megalopolis. London: Leonard Hill Figure 21: TUNNARD, C. (1948) Gardens in the modern landscape. 2nd Ed. The Architectural Press: London Figure 22: REPTON, H. (1816) Fragments on the theory and practice of landscape gardening: including some remarks on Grecian and Gothic Architecture. London: T. Bensley and Son. Figure 23: NAIRN, I. (1955) Outrage in The Architectural Review vol.117, no.702 June 1955.

Figure 24: NAIRN, I. (ed.) (1956) Counter-Attack. In: The Architectural Review. Vol. 120, No. 719, December. pp. 353-436 Figure 25: ESSEX RECORD OFFICE. Silver End Aerial [Online] Available at: http:// www.essexrecordofficeblog.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/I-Mp-290-1-11.jpg.

[Accessed on 24th May 2016].

Figure 26: Silver End Masterplan [Online] Available at: http://www.silverend.org/history/ PLANNED.gif [Accessed 24th May 2016].

Figure 31: Crittall Windows Advertisment. [Online] Available at: https://c1.staticflickr.

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com/5/4012/4372820447_c484d4e8fd_b.jpg [Accessed: 24th May 2016].

Figure 32: IBSA (2014) Temple Farm Proposal. [Online] Available at: http://www. templefarmdevelopment.co.uk/images/placeholders/slider_main.png. [Accessed 24th May 2016].

Figure 33: IBSA (2016) Current Progress at Temple Farm Site. [Online] Available from: http://jw-branchoffices.blogspot.co.uk/p/branch-expansion-britain.html. [Accessed 24th May 2016].

Figure 38: BIRESSI, A. & NUNN, H. (2013) ‘Essex: Class, Aspiration and Social Mobility’. In: Class and Contemporary British Culture. Palgrave Macmillan: Hampshire. pp. 23-43 Figure 39: HARDY, D. & WARD, C. (2004) Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications Figure 40: HAYES, P. (1984) A Plotland Album: The Story of the Dunton Hills Community. London: Basildon Development Corporation.

Figure 41-42: WORPOLE, K. & ORTON, J. (2013) The New English Landscape.

London: Field Station