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And on your left…

June 3rd, 2008 · Posted by Skuds in Life · 2 Comments · Life

…is a pile of vomit from last night’s clubbers.  Well I double-checked and triple-checked but today was June 2nd andnot April 1st, so I guess this story from today’s paper must be true, and Basildon really does have a pot of lottery money to set up a heritage trail.   On the face of it the idea is quite amusing,  but for real belly laughs you have to read  a bit further.

I have to admit that I actually did laugh out loud when I reached the third paragraph.  The Guardian scoured the venerable new town to find locals who would speak up for the place, and the best they could find was a bloke called Terry, who said:

The nicest thing I can say about it is, its shit

The Basildon tourist board are considering adopting that as a slogan. Perhaps more depressing is the quote from the person behind the scheme, Vin Harrop, who is planning the details of the heritage trail, and whose attempt to make the town sound attractive to visitors rather errs on the side of damning with faint praise:

If you stand with your back to Toys’R’Us and look back along that straight line of shops towards the Town Square and Brooke House, that to me is the classic view of Basildon. I think it’s a magnificent sight. That’s Basildon, that’s ’60s architecture.

The thing is that he is not totally wrong.  Brooke House is quite impressive and a good example of its type of building.  I can remember Basildon town centre from the 60s and when it was all new it did work.  The problem with 60s architecture is that it really doesn’t blend well with anything more recent.  It may not be pretty by traditional standards, but when it was built it did have a kind of integrity and unity of design even down to the little details like the wooden slatted bench that ran around the foot of the stairs outside the Post Office.

Once the large Marks and Spencer was built at the end, forming a barrier between the main square and the church that unity was lost and, and then all the other changes like the escalators leading up to the multi-storey finished the job so that it ended up just like Terry describes it.  Once you you have introduced that sort of thing, the 60s stuff just looks wrong and it might be better to just replace it all or hide it under new facades.

I wasn’t around in Crawley when its town centre was first built but I imagine it was similar and that those 60s touches that now look so naff made a lot more sense in context.

Having slagged Basildon off a bit, I should mention that there is, of course, more to the place than the town centre.  Although successive developments have removed just about everything I remember as a child – the dairy and the old cinema on Laindon High Road for starters – there are some pretty nice spots in the wider new town.

I had to have a wry mile about the comments regarding Gloucester Park though.  Yes it is a nice bit of green and I remember it being well landscaped and it may well be that it is only there, as the paper says, because the land was too soggy to be built on, but there is more to it than that.   What some of the newer residents of Basildon might not be aware of is that the hills of Gloucester Park are the result of an ingenious solution to the problem of what to do with all the waste involved in building the new town…  I can remember when the hills were still being built and there were great big lumps of reinforced concrete sticking out of mud.  We used to have little camps made in hollows dug out from under sheets of concrete.  Its a wonder we survived to adulthood and did not all get buried alive.

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • Gert

    I attended a Weekend School of the Essex Labour History Society where someone was talking about the bequest they had received of archive papers from someone’s attic. These included the minutes of Billericay Town Council where hey voted to invite the government to build one of those New Towns in their area so they could pay for sewers for Billericay.

  • Skuds

    Interesting. Billericay, of course, became part of Basildon and has never seemed happy about it.

    This is the place that at different times has resisted letting MacDonalds and Woolworths operate in the High Street because they would lower the tone 🙂