Dear people of Suffolk

I rode the train north out of Chelmsford for the first time in 10 years at the weekend, and feel I must apologise for the mess of my county strewn along that line.

Entirely biassed, I know, but I’ve always considered Essex to be a beautiful county - in parts. Those northern fringes that run along your border are among the most picturesque in the whole of East Anglia, and the coast that runs down from Walton and on through Frinton is a mini paradise on any summer’s day.

So imagine my surprise and mild shame to see speeding past me (yes - speeding; hard to believe, I know) factories, scarred pits, rubbish dumps, run-down housing estates and industrial parks, the whole way from the county town in which I live, to the border with your own green and hilly domain.

Perhaps we Essexers are more closely related than we’d like to admit to the Romford, Ilford and Barking lot we wisely jettisoned through some simple remapping in the sixties. Maybe I shouldn’t be so vociferous in my barracking of the BBC and Sky when their news sites make silly mistakes like proclaiming that Essex is the luckiest country in which to play the lottery, as evidenced by the number of winners hailing from Ilford and Romford, which sit happily in the London Boroughs of Redbridge and Havering. And both Redbridge and Havering are welcome to keep them.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if things hadn’t changed quite so dramatically or so suddenly as we crossed the county line, and shook off the factories in favour of fields, the pits in favour of ponies and the dumps in favour of small Anglian dales.

All I can ask is that as you next speed through our county on your way out of London you remember that beyond that burnt out wreck of a car, that malt processing factory and that sink estate there is a land of green trees, small undulations that in our pancake-flat land count for hills, and slowly eroding coastline largely free from mucky brown flotsam. Remember that it is somewhere we love, and that the grim vista you see through the train windows is not representative of the rest of the region we choose to call home.

Or, at the very least, bury your head in a copy of London Lite and try not to look through the glass.

Lots of love
Nik
x

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