The story of Essex

through new eyes.

How well do you know your own home?

I don’t mean the walls of your house, the whitewashed fence, the nettles growing between the paving stones you keep meaning to pick and the third floorboard on the landing you instinctively know to sidestep in the middle of the night to prevent the creak from waking up the guests in the spare room.

I don’t mean the teacher at the primary school who plays in a jazz band on Saturday evenings, or the postman who has walked a little slower and smiles a little less since his wife of 23 years passed away.

I don’t mean the blackbird who visits your doorstep each morning hoping for crumbs of stale toast, or the sounds of the terrier barking at the paper boy three doors down at 6am.

You already know these things. Instinctively, if not consciously, you know them. And this is as much your home as anything else.

But what I mean is the land itself. Its ecology, its geology, its sociology. Its paths, its ways, its songs. Its stories, its traditions, the culture that seeps deep into the soil and has shaped it for generations even before you thought about living there. If you listen closely, your home will speak, and it will speak without judgement of the countless lives that have come before it, that have moulded it over time.

I grew up in Essex, on the east coast of England. Flat, dry, and bordered by marshes overlooking the North Sea on one side and a patchwork of agrarian greens and browns on the other, it is a land of myth and history and hard but loving people.

It was tainted, in the UK’s eyes, by The Only Way Is Essex, a reality TV show that painted the people of Essex with the brush of orange tans, fluorescent teeth, a coarse accent and people with nothing more interesting to talk about than themselves. Since the show first aired 15 years ago to huge success, it has defined the conversation with everyone I’ve met when I tell them I’m from Essex - even international travellers.

The reality is, of course, wildly different. The show centres on just one small town on the fringe of London, and doesn’t touch on the complexities of the other hundreds of miles of coastline, marsh, villages, towns and cities and the two million people who live there.

I’ve lived in both north and south Essex, both very different experiences, but after being in London for the last seven years I have begun to wonder if I truly understand my home county. There are parts of it I’ve never visited, landscapes I’ve never seen, folk stories and tales from history I’ve never heard before.

So when my friend James kicked off a project to travel 450km around Essex, starting in Epping and following the Essex Way to the north of the country before turning and heading south down the coastline to finish in Tilbury, my interest was piqued. When he asked me to come with him to document the journey in a short film, I jumped at the opportunity.

James runs a blog called Man About Country and offers guided nature walks and storytelling sessions around the country. He shares his adventures on social media and I chatted to him about it last year. He lives in the southwest of the country now, but like me grew up in Essex and has a particular fondness for its fields, its beaches, and the eccentricities of its people.

He’s walking for 21 days in total, past ancient trees and Saxon wooden churches and historical landscapes that speak of robbery and war and love over the years. Sadly I can’t join him for all of it, but so far I’ve walked with him on and off for several days with my camera in tow.

His fascination with the world around him is endless and infectious, and it’s given me a renewed appreciation for Essex - not just its landscapes and history but the openness of its people. James has been updating his audience on social media with progress of his journey and more than one person has greeted him with enthusiasm and an offer to introduce him to a place or a story they love, recognising him from his videos.

He has met people from all walks of life, people who have opened their homes and their hearts to him as he journeys on foot through our home county. The walk is building a picture of a county that has been shaped and defined over generations by the people who have lived and worked there, and continues to change at a rapid pace today.

Many of its green fields are being bulldozed to make room for massive urban sprawls that will change the cultural identity of the place forever. The coastline shrinks and creeps inland beneath the seemingly inexorable bootprint of climate change. But there are people working hard to revitalise its natural spaces, to keep the developers from concreting every available inch of land, to bring the wild back into what was once a wild place.

All of it, for good or for ill, is part of the story of Essex, a story that will continue for centuries more, with the echoes of humanity imprinted into the landscape long after the Earth has shaken us off entirely.

It’s a story I am privileged to be a part of, and privileged to help tell even just a fraction of.

Production of the film is ongoing, but I’ll keep you updated with how it’s shaping up, and you can keep track of James’s journey on Instagram and TikTok. And if you’re in or close to Essex and see him passing, give him a wave and tell him your story.