Loose Footings - Dunton Plotlands, Basildon

    At the Dunton Plotlands museum Norman, an elderly volunteer is busy with a hand full of visitors, they arrive later than expected since only smouldering ashes provide a subsidiary heat. But eager to entertain, he winds up the record player with gusto. The tone is sweet and clear, the song, ‘Its a long way to Tipperary’. But the air is pungent and desperate for this old shack barely hangs to together. Haven cottage was an exemplar of the dream, and sits within a three plot site with an outside toilet, Anderson shelter, vegetable patch and workshops. A wooded picket fence and sunburst gates furnish the ‘Haven’.

    Walking around the plotlands site, much of the remains of previous sheds and cottages are now disguised with overgrowth and hedges. Was it true that the now 184 demolished houses, built to varying levels of sophistication could have imposed some kind of threat to the development of the new town, seen as a controversial model for unsubsidised living, by being outside from Basildon Development Corporation's administrative control ?

 

    The individualised variety of the Plotland homes, the handcrafted look fits well with the preference for house names over numbers The last remaining Haven cottage is bright from the exterior, albeit the foundations are sinking into the ground, with internal floors, ceilings and walls all giving away its structurally decrepit form. Inside the 1940’s war period has been re translated for Plotland living, an impression of ‘how it was then’ - although it may well never have been. It’s a great place; you can rummage around in the undergrowth and find saucepans, toilets seats and ceramics, total immersion.
           

    The impetus for the Dunton Plotlands is similar to Jaywick Sands. At the still remaining self built settlement at Jaywick residents have long running problems with the local council who refuse to maintain the roads and services to the estates, but aside from the political, this can also present a conflict in differing approaches to modernity. The Plotlands in Dunton are difficult to attend without dwelling on the nostalgic and the missing parts of the town. Representing a deviation from the assent of administrative and machined modernity, an idealised longing for the good life and self sufficiency, away from the slums of the East End. Soon what was initially a weekender village became full time residences when the Second World War broke out. The Plotlands did not have proper roads built, and the brick tracks often became impassable in the winter months. They had neither gas or electric but in this the Plotlanders also became untouchable, they imposed there own siege in a denial of state dependence. Described by the local authorities as ‘rural – slums’, but to its builders a pastoral idyll. The return to pastoral living, as prophesied by Ebenezer Howard in 1902 when he spoke of ‘… the return to the countryside’   albeit not expected in such a makeshift settlement.

  The history of the Dunton Plotlands, and other plotlands found along the Fenchurch, Laindon, Southend railway began with the enticement of potential buyers from the East End with free fares out to the countryside from as early as 1881, with punters being brought to ‘champagne auctions’ on site. Families from Stepney, Poplar, Bromley by Bow, East Ham and West Ham and Barking, bought up the cheap plots and returned to the city as landowners. This was followed with stories of carpenters, opportune on London banks refurbishing there panelled interiors, harvesting the discarded shop fittings for customisation of their self built homes. The self-built settlements constructed in the first four decades of the century culminated in an unregulated ‘land grab’ by London families during the interwar years. Now demolished, the landscape manicured back into a nature reserve. As part of the folklore, even today the Basildon Development Corporation still receive enquiries over the inheritance of plots that now lay in the middle of roads or supermarket carparks.

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