Essex Honey
St.Peter-on-the-wWall, 7th century chapel at Bradwell, Essex
Radical Essex was an ambitious programme of events arranged by Southend’s Focal Point Gallery a few years ago, its intention being to examine the county in relation to radical thought, lifestyle, politics, and architecture, thereby countering the many unflattering myths and clichés that are often associated with the place. The basic premise was the interesting fact that a wide variety of Utopian and idealistic social experiments could be found in Essex from the late 19th century until the end of World War II, led by Quakers, anarchists, horticulturalists, Christians, naturists, the temperance movement and the Salvation Army. Many are the subjects of Ken Worpole’s recent Brightening from the East, a series of essays on landscape and memory (one of them having been first published in the Radical Essex book), and he writes about them with warmth and sympathy, suggesting that although they didn’t engender mass movements or fundamental change, their radicalism helped to lead the way towards many of the benign changes in society that we enjoy today.
In his earlier No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: Back to the Land in Wartime Britain, Worpole focussed on the group of pacifists who took over a vacant farm in Frating, a hamlet near Tendring, in the final years of World War II. There they established a working community, partly inspired by The Adelphi, a journal in which writers such as D.H.Lawrence, Vera Brittain, Iris Murdoch, and George Orwell, as well as Nikolai Berdyaev and Simone Weil, developed progressive ideas about the future. Frating Hall Farm provided homes and livelihoods for like-minded individuals and families, and temporary sanctuary for refugees and prisoners-of-war, gradually developing into a successful agricultural enterprise and a centre for the arts, earning the tolerance and respect of their neighbours. The story draws on the recollections of people who grew up on the farm, as well as on photographs, letters and records, and it doesn’t evade the struggles and difficulties in the community, which are presented with understanding and compassion. In Ken Worpole’s view, people are more important than ideology; as he writes in his influential essay ‘The New English Landscape’, ‘human life and the natural world are part of the same order of things, mutually shaping and changing each other through space and time.’
Essex has been central to Worpole’s own life. Born into a family of London East Enders whose occupations included those of a carpenter, pub pianist, part-time bookie, scrap metal worker, brewers’ clerk, and palm reader, he remarks that they were suspicious of authority and ‘anybody who might wish them harm, or, even worse, want to improve them’. The war years were spent with his mother at ‘The Bungalow’, her parents’ home in Chelmsford, which was ‘fronted by a wide verandah, surrounded by a vast orchard of apple and plum trees’. Another family lived in the front of the house; a railway line and the River Chelmer ran close by. Worpole has written about his happy childhood there, describing the area as ‘a magical place, as if from an Edwardian children’s book: steam trains, orchards, candlelit bedrooms, chamber pots, no parental supervision, and new children to play with’.
The musician Devonté Hynes also grew up in London and Essex, but he felt like an outsider. The youngest of three, born to a Guyanese mother and Sierra Leonean father, Dev played football, and also the cello; he liked hip-hop as well as Bach. He didn't fit in and was frequently bullied. Hynes’ musical career started in London, in bars and pubs in Shoreditch and Dalston, where he played with a rowdy, short-lived dance-punk band, but he soon became disillusioned and moved to New York, performing late-night sets as ‘Blood Orange’ in half-empty clubs around the city. In time, success came his way, and he recorded four albums, as well as working with well-known friends and peers. He has just released a new album, Essex Honey, a quiet and ruminative collection of songs in which he explores memories of growing up in England and sadness at the death of his mother.
Inspired, or at least galvanized, by unexpectedly hearing Fourth of July, a song on Sufjan Stevens’ sorrowful Carrie and Lowell, nothing on the album is forceful or demanding of attention; its gentle irresolution questions, deconstructs, and subverts certainty. It also acknowledges much of the music that he has loved in the past; there are references to indie-pop, street soul, hip hop, and to the cello and eclecticism of Arthur Russell, the American musician who died young and who was once described as ‘the lost hero of dance and minimalism’. The album is enigmatic, vulnerable, self-aware. Its main mood is one of late summer melancholia; infused with reflective thoughts and feelings, the record’s atmosphere lingers like smoke from an early bonfire on a windless day. Hynes’ thoughts about his identity and the complexities of being a Black man from an Essex suburb are fugitive but memorable, not unlike the marginal ‘plotland’ homes, constructed in the early part of the 20th century, that provided East Enders with ‘places in the sun’, off-centre refuges from the intensity of city life.
For further exploration:
Ken Worpole’s website: https://thenewenglishlandscape.wordpress.com/
Jonathan Meades’ ‘The Joy of Essex’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wujXeI6rj6U
A review of Essex Honey: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/aug/28/blood-orange-essex-honey-review
Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Fourth of July”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTeKpWp8Psw
Blood Orange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_0DYKvcjCE
About the ‘plotlands’ and other forms of vernacular housing: https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-hidden-history-of-housing/
Image on index page: ‘The Haven’, ‘plotlands’ museum in Dunton, Essex
Image on the cover of Essex Honey