Though not as new as the archetypal New City, Milton Keynes, Basildon was also created to cope with the capital's overspill. In recent times the Essex town has become something of a lightning rod for the UK's political leanings. The "Basildon man" – a tabloid creation from the Thatcher era – is a supposed embodiment of the average Brit, the opinions they hold and the way they feel about culture, politics and identity.
Annons
Photojournalist CJ Clarke's new book Magic Party Place is a decade-long exploration of Basildon, his hometown. I sat down with him to discuss insularity, British – or, rather, English – identity, and the gulf between the reality and fiction of a romanticised past.VICE: So why Basildon, of all places?
CJ Clarke: Basildon is where I grew up, so it was obviously something that I knew very well. I was kind of aware of the media stereotype about the "Basildon man", as a kind of middle ground, middle Englander, and to win the heart and mind of the Basildon man is to win the elections. There was an awareness of this averageness and how Basildon was a symbol of averageness, or the average English mentality. When I was 22 and I was studying photography and I needed to find a story, I was thinking about doing a story in the Middle East, and like many people I was [interested] by the war in Iraq and things like that.You become a photojournalist and try to find out about that region and Britain's role in that region. Then I had a chance meeting with a great photojournalist who'd done a lot of work in that region – a guy called Judah Passow. We were just generally chatting and I raised Basildon, and he said it was a great story. That gave me the impetus to do it. The point was to try and provide a document of contemporary England through intimately documenting one place, which happened to be one of the most average in the country.
CJ Clarke: Basildon is where I grew up, so it was obviously something that I knew very well. I was kind of aware of the media stereotype about the "Basildon man", as a kind of middle ground, middle Englander, and to win the heart and mind of the Basildon man is to win the elections. There was an awareness of this averageness and how Basildon was a symbol of averageness, or the average English mentality. When I was 22 and I was studying photography and I needed to find a story, I was thinking about doing a story in the Middle East, and like many people I was [interested] by the war in Iraq and things like that.You become a photojournalist and try to find out about that region and Britain's role in that region. Then I had a chance meeting with a great photojournalist who'd done a lot of work in that region – a guy called Judah Passow. We were just generally chatting and I raised Basildon, and he said it was a great story. That gave me the impetus to do it. The point was to try and provide a document of contemporary England through intimately documenting one place, which happened to be one of the most average in the country.
Annons
Throughout the book there are news story headlines from quite violent crimes next to the photographs. What are the significance of these?
All of the headlines are about Basildon. All but one of them is taken from the Daily Mail, and the other comes from the local newspaper. There's a few different ideas that interplay, but the idea was that Basildon was supposed to be this district that tells us what England is like, which presupposes there's this idea of normality – and, you know, what is normality? Which feeds into the fact itself that Basildon is a new town, a manufactured community. The question of what is normal and what is harmonious kept coming up. And the lurid, slightly bizarre headlines maybe serve as, on one level, a questioning of this normality. What happens in supposedly average places? Plus, they come from a tabloid newspaper, and the whole idea of the Basildon man is a tabloid construct, so it's trying to play with a few different things really.Some of the quotes from residents dotted around the book nod to a sense of community that is perhaps now being lost, as it is in many places in the UK. Is that something you've noticed in Basildon over the years?
Basildon means different things to different generations. To those pioneer generations who moved there from the East End, from Dagenham, to come to Basildon – they have essentially come to achieve something under their own steam. They were the ones who upped sticks to improve their quality of life, almost exclusively through their own efforts. They have an attachment to an idea and the ideal of what a new town was. For younger generations, I think the attachment is less, and the sense of community is less. Basildon, like many other places, has been going through a "regeneration" – whatever that means – which hasn't done anything to foster a sense of being, a sense of place; all it's done is build more houses. Houses are needed, but to create a real sense of the place you have to do much more, and that "much more" has really been lacking from the councillors, the politicians, and it's part of this disconnect between the elite – the political class – and the people, in many ways, which Brexit is an expression of.
All of the headlines are about Basildon. All but one of them is taken from the Daily Mail, and the other comes from the local newspaper. There's a few different ideas that interplay, but the idea was that Basildon was supposed to be this district that tells us what England is like, which presupposes there's this idea of normality – and, you know, what is normality? Which feeds into the fact itself that Basildon is a new town, a manufactured community. The question of what is normal and what is harmonious kept coming up. And the lurid, slightly bizarre headlines maybe serve as, on one level, a questioning of this normality. What happens in supposedly average places? Plus, they come from a tabloid newspaper, and the whole idea of the Basildon man is a tabloid construct, so it's trying to play with a few different things really.Some of the quotes from residents dotted around the book nod to a sense of community that is perhaps now being lost, as it is in many places in the UK. Is that something you've noticed in Basildon over the years?
Basildon means different things to different generations. To those pioneer generations who moved there from the East End, from Dagenham, to come to Basildon – they have essentially come to achieve something under their own steam. They were the ones who upped sticks to improve their quality of life, almost exclusively through their own efforts. They have an attachment to an idea and the ideal of what a new town was. For younger generations, I think the attachment is less, and the sense of community is less. Basildon, like many other places, has been going through a "regeneration" – whatever that means – which hasn't done anything to foster a sense of being, a sense of place; all it's done is build more houses. Houses are needed, but to create a real sense of the place you have to do much more, and that "much more" has really been lacking from the councillors, the politicians, and it's part of this disconnect between the elite – the political class – and the people, in many ways, which Brexit is an expression of.
Annons
One thing missing from the photos is diversity. Is Basildon as mono-ethnic as it appears?
Basildon is remarkably white given how close it is to London. When you live in London, or a metropolitan city, or a diverse community, you forget that this is the reality for a lot of places. Some of the places around England that voted highest for Brexit are some of the least diverse places in the country. There's a weird relationship between the fear of something and the actual experience of something. Basildon is a white, working class town, and the statistics – which I've included in the book – reinforce just how much. The UK has an eight percent Muslim population total, whereas in Basildon it's only 0.9 percent. It just goes to show how white the town is. That's not to say it's a town of racists or anything like that – far from it – but there's a correlation between the Brexit vote and the lacking of a sense of identity, and it was on its way to reassert a sense of English identity and Englishness, and has kind of manifested itself in an extremism of supposed Englishness.What do you think the significance of the English flag is to the people of Basildon? I find it a little obtuse to just denounce it as a racist emblem, which it's quite popular to do now.
I remember we had a neighbour who lived down the road from us, and one day he erected a giant flagpole and flew the George flag in his back garden. I think it invokes this conflated bag of oddities that we call Englishness – you know, the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, always losing on penalties at football, stiff upper lip… all of these things that get invoked every time we play Germany, or during the Falklands War, that are the edited versions of our own history and our own identity. It's all to do with harking back to try and find a sense of who you are, and people take comfort in the past. The past as filtered through the present kind of loses its complications. The Blitz loses its complexity when you view it through time and various films or constant documentaries, or whatever. It's a searching or a yearning for something that never really existed in the first place.
Basildon is remarkably white given how close it is to London. When you live in London, or a metropolitan city, or a diverse community, you forget that this is the reality for a lot of places. Some of the places around England that voted highest for Brexit are some of the least diverse places in the country. There's a weird relationship between the fear of something and the actual experience of something. Basildon is a white, working class town, and the statistics – which I've included in the book – reinforce just how much. The UK has an eight percent Muslim population total, whereas in Basildon it's only 0.9 percent. It just goes to show how white the town is. That's not to say it's a town of racists or anything like that – far from it – but there's a correlation between the Brexit vote and the lacking of a sense of identity, and it was on its way to reassert a sense of English identity and Englishness, and has kind of manifested itself in an extremism of supposed Englishness.What do you think the significance of the English flag is to the people of Basildon? I find it a little obtuse to just denounce it as a racist emblem, which it's quite popular to do now.
I remember we had a neighbour who lived down the road from us, and one day he erected a giant flagpole and flew the George flag in his back garden. I think it invokes this conflated bag of oddities that we call Englishness – you know, the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, always losing on penalties at football, stiff upper lip… all of these things that get invoked every time we play Germany, or during the Falklands War, that are the edited versions of our own history and our own identity. It's all to do with harking back to try and find a sense of who you are, and people take comfort in the past. The past as filtered through the present kind of loses its complications. The Blitz loses its complexity when you view it through time and various films or constant documentaries, or whatever. It's a searching or a yearning for something that never really existed in the first place.
Annons
A lot of the quotes conjure up images of the elderly. Is that intentional?
Yes, indeed, they come from older people – two people who arrived in Basildon as the town was being built. That was deliberate, to kind of create layers of narrative, to have this voice that was kind of talking about the idea of the community and how that's not reflected in the present. Sense of place is always dependent on the person themselves and what their connection to that location is, how they invoke the place and what emotion that is tied up with. But certainly that was deliberate to try and get across the point that the new town and what it was meant to be – and what it has the potential to be – does not necessarily match with reality viewed or understood by some of the younger people in the pictures.What do you think drives the Englishman?
Good question… I'm not sure I have a pithy answer to that. What does anyone want? They just want to work hard, to be well paid for their efforts in work that's meaningful.What is the Magic Party Place?
Specifically or metaphorically?A bit of both.
Specifically it was a neon sign that was shining in the town centre one evening, but I suppose, metaphorically, it's about how as a society a new town is able to facilitate the breakdown in society that Thatcher wanted. "You have to think for yourself first" is what she said in that interview in '87, and it certainly counts without a history or sense of identity or bedrock that went on for hundreds of years. It's there to facilitate things like the buy your own house scheme – the kind of individualism that that creates, where you're consumers first and citizens second. All of these things manifest themselves quite plainly and quite starkly in new towns, I think. It takes a generation for the seismic shifts in society to really come to roost. What we're living in now is very much Thatcher's Britain, I think, so you have this world where we have retreated inwards. There's no attempts to foster a sense of community in Basildon, so we've retreated inwards into our houses, into our family life, and almost nothing more. In a way it's this strange magic party of house parties or family engagements, of this kind of insularity where you're just going house to house or different social functions, and that represents your world, your small selection of people that you meet in all of these different places – but they're enclosed spaces or private spaces.
Yes, indeed, they come from older people – two people who arrived in Basildon as the town was being built. That was deliberate, to kind of create layers of narrative, to have this voice that was kind of talking about the idea of the community and how that's not reflected in the present. Sense of place is always dependent on the person themselves and what their connection to that location is, how they invoke the place and what emotion that is tied up with. But certainly that was deliberate to try and get across the point that the new town and what it was meant to be – and what it has the potential to be – does not necessarily match with reality viewed or understood by some of the younger people in the pictures.What do you think drives the Englishman?
Good question… I'm not sure I have a pithy answer to that. What does anyone want? They just want to work hard, to be well paid for their efforts in work that's meaningful.What is the Magic Party Place?
Specifically or metaphorically?A bit of both.
Specifically it was a neon sign that was shining in the town centre one evening, but I suppose, metaphorically, it's about how as a society a new town is able to facilitate the breakdown in society that Thatcher wanted. "You have to think for yourself first" is what she said in that interview in '87, and it certainly counts without a history or sense of identity or bedrock that went on for hundreds of years. It's there to facilitate things like the buy your own house scheme – the kind of individualism that that creates, where you're consumers first and citizens second. All of these things manifest themselves quite plainly and quite starkly in new towns, I think. It takes a generation for the seismic shifts in society to really come to roost. What we're living in now is very much Thatcher's Britain, I think, so you have this world where we have retreated inwards. There's no attempts to foster a sense of community in Basildon, so we've retreated inwards into our houses, into our family life, and almost nothing more. In a way it's this strange magic party of house parties or family engagements, of this kind of insularity where you're just going house to house or different social functions, and that represents your world, your small selection of people that you meet in all of these different places – but they're enclosed spaces or private spaces.
Annons
Thanks CJ.@joe_bish
