The Essay: Odes to Essex

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The Essay: Odes to Essex: The Refusal of Place

The Refusal of Place

Odes to Essex

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Odes to Essex, The Refusal of Place

Writer Lavinia Greenlaw takes us back to the formative landscape of her childhood.

Celebrating the joys of Essex, surely the most misunderstood of counties, writer Lavinia Greenlaw takes us back to the formative landscape of her childhood.

In the next in a series exploring the joys of Essex, surely the most maligned and misunderstood of counties, writer and poet Lavinia Greenlaw takes us back to the formative landscape of her childhood - a place that she rejected for so long...

Known recently for the pneumonic blondes and diamond geezers of television's The Only Way Is Essex, as well as the peroxided 'Essex Girls' of the 80s, Essex seems to have an image problem. John Betjeman called it 'a stronger contrast of beauty and ugliness than any other southern English county'. This series explores the contrasts of this boundary county, this interzone, which has become a parody of itself.

Reader and writer: Lavinia Greenlaw is an acclaimed poet and novelist.
Producer: Justine Willett

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Five Essex-lovers reclaim the county that they grew up in or now call home.

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