The Essay - Brightening from the East
Download Brightening from the East
In the next in a series celebrating the joys of Essex, surely the most maligned of counties, writer and social historian Ken Worpole explores Essex as a place of retreat and refuge.
Known recently for the pneumonic blondes and diamond geezers of television's The Only Way Is Essex, as well as the peroxided 'Essex Girls' of the 80s, Essex seems to have an image problem. John Betjeman called it 'a stronger contrast of beauty and ugliness than any other southern English county'. This series explores the contrasts of this boundary county, this interzone, which has become a parody of itself.
Reader and writer: Ken Worpole is an acclaimed writer with books on architecture, landscape, planning, design, and social history. He was a founder-member of openDemocracy, and is a senior professor at The Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University.
Producer: Justine Willett
Published on Thursday, 28th January 2021.
Available Podcasts from The Essay
We are not the BBC, we only list available podcasts. To find out more about the programme including episodes available on BBC iPlayer, go to the The Essay webpage.