Essex both famous and notorious, the stuff of tabloid headlines and reality television, consume culture and right-wing politicians, England’s dark id.

Essex is also the secret place with a rich history of smugglers and private islands, aritists and radicals, myths and legends. Essex is where the Peasants Revolt began and the Empire Windrush docked and political movements like Brexit to cultural events like TOWIE where Essex leads, the rest of us often follow.

The Invention of Essex shows that there is more to this fabled English country than meets the eye. Tim Burrows explains “It’s the New Jersey of England 0 and byword for vulgarity and rebellion. Viewed as the nation’s id”.

Burrows grew up in Southend the destination of all Cockneys on a Bank Holiday Monday where crazed youth  raced their souped up Ford Fiestas along the seafront. On the eastern outskirts of London, Essex is developed but not famed “out there”.

The better off South-East of England clutched its pearls at the exploits of vajazzed, perma-tanned cast of “ Towie” the realty series, the Only Way is Essex was set in Brentwood which can claim the peasants revolt of the 14^th century.

As the East-End’s poor trickled towards the estuary becoming a flood during the Victorian era and after when a plot of fresh air  tempted them to  the “porous fringes” of the islands and inlets at the mouth of river Thames.  The extreme Methodist sect the peculiar people is cited alongside utopians and eccentrics who set up communities in hidden corners, Burrows visits a church with satanic claw marks  on a door where a priest practiced the dark aerts, and a burbling spring that inspired a pre-Christian cult.

Essex is a county

The Invention of Essex: The Making of an English County by Tim Burrows, Profile £16.99, 336 pages.