Veneers

My project is on my home county of Essex and how throughout history it has been a driving force of the UK in industry, landscape, utopian and radical ideals. Yet alongside its complex and vast past has followed a dark shadow cast by outsiders and us.

Essex man was coined by Simon Heffer as, “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”

The magazine, Harters and Queen, said ‘Essex man’ embodied a vulgar capitalism that had eaten into the confidence of the old ruling class and invaded its most sacred enclaves’.

Essex girl was coined as a social commentary, being defined in the Oxford dictionary as a type of ‘young woman who is not intelligent, dresses badly, talks in a loud and ugly way and is very willing to have sex.’

If Essex man is a monstrous figure of entrepreneurial money making and boom economics, Essex girl is a monstrous figure of consumption.