SOUTHEND ON MUD OR SEA?
My young family and I moved from East London to Southend nearly four years ago for a variety of reasons: the commutable distance back to the city, the value for money in the housing market, the fact that it was a reasonably busy place to live with a choice of good schools. In fact it was, if you closed your eyes a little and squinted, a bit like still being in London.
The beach was not really a factor, much less the estuary beyond. For a start, it’s not a real seaside is it? You can see the Kent side with all the heavy industry and half the time there’s only the mud to be getting on with.
When visitors first came to see us after the move here a trip to the front was obligatory. Oh, how my heart sank if the tide was out and all that greeted them was a disappointment of mud. Look, here was I trying to do good promotional work to new visitors of Southend and there was the River Thames conspiring against me. I made a note to buy a tide table and refuse people the pleasure of a Rossi ice-cream unless the tide was high.
Of course, I never bought the tide time table (which is not always entirely accurate anyway as the recent Little Haven mud runners can attest!). Instead I began to change my mind about the estuary and the mud. For example, when we made the decision to move to the town we stood down at Westcliff on the beach opposite the arches after a hot drink. It was cold, March probably. I looked at the kids poking about with frozen fingers in the stones. I could see the chimneys opposite on the Isle of Grain. I said something like, “it would be nice if it weren’t for those spoiling the view…”
The handful of years here have mellowed me. I am the first to appreciate the occasional calm like a mill pond on a full estuary, but equally I can find something to admire when the tide is going, going, gone. The way the boats slowly start to tilt from their upright positions as the watery cloth is slowly pulled from under their bows, until they finally come to rest on the mud bed. Mud that never looks the same way twice, once you get to know it. The rivulets and channels that leave their impressions, the light that can transform it from brown and green velvet to a silvery glistening sheet. It makes me want to be able to paint it.
As for the chimeys that I first considered an eyesore, they are a point of interest. Some days it is as if they have mysteriously disappeared, shrouded in mist or cloud. Other days you can make them out, but not clearly. When they are in full crisp view as they were that first spring day I feel glad to see them. They have become my friends. I appreciate their contrast to the water, the industrial counterpoint making both the water and land more interesting.
There are still some things to wonder about: the triangular-roofed house boat that is moored a way out off Chalkwell Beach and the Crowstone: the stone obelisk on the foreshore that marks the start, or end, of the Port of London’s authority depending on your point of view. I can’t enlighten you about the houseboat (perhaps you can me), but the motto on the Crowstone “Floreat Imperii Portus” means Let the Imperial Port Flourish. Having left London behind, I am now rather glad the Crowstone provides a visible reminder of the limits of the City’s reach.
