The New Jerusalem
This photograph is like the 1980s captured in one shot, full of so many signifiers of the era it could be a tableaux staged by some conceptual artist as a commentary on the decade of greed and flash.
I don’t know where the picture was taken but it looks like the typical suburban home of the newly-property-owning, Thatcher-voting class known as Essex Man. The building work is a sign of the re-make/re-model boom years and the sports car (red, probably) an obvious symbol of gaudy, flaunting-it, Loadsamoney success and excess — a major upgrade from the owner’s previous XR3i and paid for with the profit from selling British Gas shares.
Sitting on the bonnet is the dream girlfriend (after Samantha Fox anyway), Page 3 stunna Linda Lusardi looking like the archetypal Essex Girl with her frizzy perm, short skirt, tan legs and white high heels, all dressed up for a night out at Stringfellow’s.
This is the new England that Maggie created where the past has been dumped in a skip and future is brand-new, turbo-charged, is having an extension built, and has big tits.
Download: Goodbye 70s – Yazoo (mp3)
The re-generation lies cheek-by-jowl with the de-generation. The ‘exclusive waterside penthouse apartments’ are largely vacant as the fattened rats feast within the slums of tomorrow.
The tattoo on the country’s arse – once a majestic dolphin symbolising a leaping rise from the depths, now lies beached – jaded and faded – unable to breathe.
The car was scrapped – the injection blocked and the gasket blew. The house was re-possessed. (There never was any planning permission for the extension). The block-paving is overgrown by moss and weeds. The syringes point north while the tits sag south. The white shoes lay scuffed and peeling. The Red Lion closed down. The high street bank branched out – to India. The boom town is a bust town. The hopes and dreams were carted off in the skip (possibly for re-cycling).
It’s an end to boom and, er, bust.
I did write an ending about the current bust but thought I was overloading the metaphors a bit much already.
this town …. is nothing but a ghosttown!
Literally, the most depressing photo ever (except for the front cover of Half Man Half Biscuit’s ‘This Leaden Pall’ album cover)
“This is the new England that Maggie created where the past has been dumped in a skip and future is brand-new, turbo-charged, is having an extension built, and has big tits.”
Unedifying as that may all seem, it’s still identifiably English and spiritually libertarian – and preferable to the England that the treacherous Left dumped, in favour of pandering to Islamic extremism, fragmented ethnically-Balkanised communities, mass-immigration, rootlessness, welfare dependency and Stalinist like Statism.
I live in a majority Muslim area, and have to endure spitting and hissing sounds from the local men, and i’m practically a prisoner in my own flat every Friday afternoon after prayers. My generation don’t have the luxury of wallowing in nerdy English nostalgia, thanks to people like you. Thanks for that btw. No seriously, thanks!
Notwithstanding Lee’s song choice, all I hear when I see that photo is ‘Essex Dogs’ by Blur.
Would