A family walk on Margate’s seafront

Identifying the territory of southeast England—minus London—is simple; articulating its identity is harder. Officially it includes Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Sussex, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, the Isle of Wight, Surrey and Kent. But like most regions of the country, its characteristics become fuzzier the closer you look. The southeast counties incorporate many Englands: the Surrey of the professional, commuting class; the Kent of London’s working-class diaspora; the postwar new towns; the southeast coast; Oxford’s dreaming spires and so on. The region lives in the shadow of the capital and many of its inhabitants are ex-residents—but it is almost defiantly not London. At the end of last year I travelled to Surrey, Kent and Sussex and observed the aspirant working-class people who moved there from inner London. It was a timely expedition with a general election looming and renewed concern about the white working class.

In English Journey (1934) JB Priestley discovered rural, urban, industrial England, as well as a newborn nation partly conceived in America: an England of light industries sprouting on arterial roads to the Midlands. An England “of filling stations and factories… giant cinemas and dance-halls…bungalows with tiny garages… Woolworth’s… wireless… factory girls looking like actresses.” An England that expanded, evolved and is now left deflated as the first decade of the 21st century closes, covered in a veil of economic uncertainty.

The old Woolies stores await new life on the high streets of Bexleyheath and neighbouring Erith and Welling—the erstwhile satellite suburbs of Kent and greater London that fall within the borough of Bexley. I know these territories well. This is where members of my family bought houses over the past 30 years, after leaving inner London. I have relatives working in local schools, councils and shops—Boots, M&S, Starbucks—alongside students from Zimbabwe and Nigeria. The latter descend on the local library to study for accountancy courses before leaving for more central London homes.

In this part of greater London/Kent, on the Isle of Sheppey and the Medway Towns, relatively few school leavers move into higher education. Their parents and grandparents often made the voyage from the inner city to bungalowed roads in which residents are like expats harbouring memories of the mother country. Many of their parents voted Tory in 1979. Some returned to Labour in 1997 and there are quite a few Labour-held marginals here. Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, recently argued that “ordinary” people, such as those southeasterners who still think of themselves as working class, are the real “middle Britain.” And Britain’s median income still hovers around the £20,000 mark. “They are without university degrees,” Barber wrote. “And they are doing jobs that have less value than their fathers’ jobs.”

But if these truly are the people of England who have not spoken yet, few speak in the same tongue as the TUC. The southern working class has long since ceased to fit the stereotype that, even in the 1980s, still had resonance in the north. They are no longer the tower-block dwellers that maintained Labour’s vote in London; but equally they failed to become the graduates Labour hoped to educate into the middle class.

Southern working-class identity was always less based on industry than in the north. Even before the closure of the docks, southern collectivism was grounded as much in locality, history and kinship ties as in work. Those who migrated to the capital’s outer southern suburbs all told me that their communities were dismantled by mass immigration and new housing developments. These white Londoners—the subject of The Likes of Us, my book on the white working class—have often been seen by liberals as a blot on the landscape of multicultural London. And when their presence in the city could no longer be blamed for the failings of multiculturalism, their absence was. Lack of integration was due to “white flight.”

They fled to Kent, Sussex, Surrey and, of course, Essex. Oddly, the latter, which to many people epitomises the southeast, is too far east to fall into the official boundaries (as is Hertfordshire). But there is no distinction between the members of the working class that moved to Kent and those that went to Essex. The “Essex man” once thought to be the epitome of Thatcher’s Britain is the same species as the “Bluewater man” of Kent, who has emerged in the last decade.

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