In the late 1920s and early 1930s, two sleepy corners of Essex woke up to the modern world. Czech footwear giant Tomáš Baťa’s model town rose from nothing in the East Tilbury marshes: a workers’ community with everything a short walk from the front doors of its flat-roofed houses, from the shoe factory to the football pitch, the ballroom to the cinema. Window manufacturer Francis Crittall, meanwhile, had just turned “a cluster of rural cottages” into Silver End, a similar model village outside Braintree. Today, with the fashion industry’s production now centred in east Asia, the tattered Bata shoe factory is listed, though its communal buildings are defunct. Silver End’s art deco villas have fared better, as restoration-worthy trophy properties.
Wanting an alternative take on Essex’s modernism, in 2019 Southend’s Focal Point Gallery invited the Chinese artist Cui Jie to visit these sites. Cui has made a name for herself as a chronicler of modern Chinese experience, exploring the swiftly shifting urban landscape in Beijing, Hong Kong and her home city, Shanghai, in layered, impressionistic paintings. Prevented from returning to the UK when the pandemic hit, she found, in Shanghai, an unexpected point of comparison: the Caoyang New Village of 1951. Although conceived as part of Mao’s very different communist economic vision, like the Essex developments this artisan textile workers’ housing project was all-inclusive, with a cinema, mall, hospital, school and plenty of green space. And as with Essex, its vision of communal life collapsed as industrial conditions changed.
