Me and James have moved into our own wee flat! It’s teeny and up a huge hill, it’s a gorgeous wee place though and I’m totally in love with it. It’s in Grays, which is to say, not the most charming of Essex towns. The people here are rude, they are loud and they shout at each other in the street. I would say, on average, I serve 5 people a day at work who come in stinking of the most rancid smelling weed I have ever known. The foreign population is growing by the day. It’s a town on the downward. But I like to think Grays is just misunderstood.
Grays has some beautiful buildings. If you walk down the High Street and look up, ignoring all the pawn and pound shops that have sprung up and look to the sky, you see the most wonderful looking old buildings. I was walking past Grays Sports Bar the other day and I just happened to look up and see above it, a gorgeous building with the word ‘Burtons’ engraved on it and ‘mens fine tailoring’ underneath. I couldn’t believe something like that was so well preserved. I suddenly felt like it was fifty years before and the High Street was a splash of shops all carefully managed and looked after by woman with set hair and men in impeccable crisp suits. Its the same when you walk up Orsett Road to where my flat is. Ignoring the dozens of nail bars, salons and afro-caribbean grocery shops, you can see a world behind them. A world of fifty+ years ago when Grays was a proud town, proud to be standing on the Thames and proud of its placing in Britain. Grays has some gorgeous townhouses which I would kill to own one day. I said to a friend the other day, if I won the lottery, I would buy one of them. I live in one now, but I only rent the flat, and its been converted to a block. The old style, the ones which have remained as townhouses are beautiful examples of what British architecture used to be about.
Walking down Highview Avenue, some of the houses look like they are occupied by witches. Very old and very unkempt with yellowing net curtains on the single glazed windows and peeling paint. These houses look like they might have cellars. What do we call them in Britain? Cellars or basements? I myself, being of Scottish descent feel the need to use the word bunker, a word that has such a wide ranging definition in Scotland, it needs its own blog post. You never get houses with bunkers these days, its a shame, I would love one.
On my road to work, I walk past this place.
It’s called the State Cinema and it used to be just that. I’m told that parts of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? were filmed here. To see it for yourself is something else. It doesn’t look like much now as its been shut down for years and I arrived in Essex when it was already in severe decay. But if you look up to the tower, the tower with the word ‘STATE’ proudly displayed on the side and the beautiful brickwork which surrounds it, my imagination disappears into a world of the 1940s when people would flock here to learn the latest of Hitlers brutal assault on Europe or watch in wonder as David Niven fought for the right to live for love. One of my dreams since moving here is to open it again, make it amazing. A tribute to film and to Britain. It will never happen of course, Grays has no need for a cinema, theres a Vue at Lakeside…
It looks like this now
Run down and forgotten about. It makes me sad. On the walls of the canteen at work (which is right next door to the State) we have old movie posters from inside. Films that starred Gloria Swanson, Spencer Tracey, Lionel Barrymore and Michael Powell. The Golden Age. On a Friday, the cinema gets buried behind a wall of stalls and a huge meat auction van for the Friday market. A market which Grays could be rid of this week and I would wave it off with a smile on my face. That market is everything that went wrong with this town. Cheap and ugly.
I talk as if I know this town inside out. I don’t. I only moved to Essex 10 months ago. But I hear so many bad things said about Grays from people, including myself, that I thought Grays needed a little bit of defending. People need to start being proud of their towns again, proud of what they used to be and proud enough to stand up for it and say ‘Yes, I come from here’. Industrial towns have died. But their shells remain and we should preserve them the best we can. I’m thinking about the little industrial town I grew up near. Bathgate. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Grays. A once bustling town which has had the soul sucked out of it by a huge shopping centre and people who stopped caring. It’s sad that we have to lose these magical towns like this, and it’s sad that we never actually realise until its too late and we can’t save them.
Sew It Begins 