Why everywhere should be more like Essex

Apart from the Wye Valley, where I grew up, there are only two places in Britain I’d consider living: Kent and Essex. Since Kent grabbed the ‘Garden of England’ moniker, it’s generally considered the posher of the two, but in reality the two counties are mirror images of each other: in the words of one travel writer, the Medway towns are ‘where you take your northern friends when they claim that southerners are soft’. In both places it is possible to drive through an idyllic medieval village and two miles later find yourself at a KFC drive-thru which is open until two in the morning (I like both).

I now live near Sevenoaks — a town so rich that you reach it by exiting the M25 from the fast lane — but in time I’d like to move east. This is partly because east Kent has some of the only sanely priced housing within reach of London, but also because of the huge gains you enjoy from having a large and massively able population of enterprising geezers, white van men and ‘blue-collar aristocrats’ around you. If you have a window that needs repairing or want a reconditioned fuel-pump for a 1988 Ford Mustang, you’ll find there are 20,000 people called Dave within a ten-mile radius who can sort you out at 8 a.m. tomorrow. Everybody is busy doing things.

The entrepreneurialism you find in Kent and Essex are widely derided, but they make the place an extraordinarily easy and agreeable place to live. Deal, which recently and deservedly won the Daily Telegraph’s ‘High Street of the Year’ award, has a business culture more like Brooklyn than Britain: there is a micropub (a Kent invention), a furniture shop which also serves tea, and a restaurant which charges £5 a year membership and which opens for only a few days a week — when it is usually packed.