The Rough Guide to Canvey Island

Greetings from the heart of the Essex Riviera.

Since I’m temporarily stuck on Canvey Island, I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell you more about the island, and enlighten you about the place known to everyone as ‘The Jewel of the Thames’. Well maybe not everyone, but a lot of people. OK then, just me.

The question I always get asked is ‘Is Canvey Island really an island?’ The answer, of course, is yes. Otherwise it would be a spectacularly silly name. It is in fact situated just off the coast of Southend-on-Sea in the Thames Estuary. If it was a bit further south it would be off the Kent coast and I would be a Kentish Cowboy. *Shudder* Despite being an island though, it’s so close to the mainland that only a creek separates the island from the mainland, which looks like a lot like a small river. But because the Thames Estuary is tidal it sometimes looks like a big fat river when the tide is in, and sometimes looks like a small trickle that you could jump across when the tide is out. Which brings me to my second most frequently asked question! ‘Do you have to get a ferry?’ No! If you did, it would be a very short journey. In fact you could probably drive on one end of the ferry and drive straight off the other end. Which is why we have a bridge. In fact we’re so posh that we have two bridges. Unfortunately we’re not posh enough to have them on different sides of the island, and they both come off the same roundabout causing gridlock and general traffic chaos twice a day, every day. There are currently about 37 thousand people on Canvey (37,001 including me), and a lot of them commute off the island to London everyday. It only takes about 40 minutes by train into the city, but the nearest station is just the other side of one of the bridges, so there’s no way of avoiding the traffic. Of course they could build another bridge but it would have to connect to something, and who wants thousands of islanders driving past their front door? Answers on a postcard.

So once you make it onto the island, what’s there? Well it used to be a buzzing little seaside town back in the 60’s and 70’s. There’s a beach (not Malibu but better than nothing), some amusement arcades (complete with 80’s retro video games), and some seasidey stuff like a doughnut and candy floss stall and a crazy golf course. Canvey beach is actually the nearest beach to London and used to attract enough people here that it had two big holiday caravan parks. Of course, most of this has closed down since I was a kid and there’s now a nice big hole in the seafront where the ancient funfair used to be. For some reason people no longer want to spend two weeks holiday on Canvey. But come to Canvey seafront on a warm summer Sunday and the place will be packed like it’s 1974 all over again. You can see bits of Canvey seafront in its 70's heyday in this music video:

Away from the seafront, the rest of Canvey looks much like any other Essex town. Lots of family houses, a lot of small bungalows and a closed-down Woolworths in the town centre. In fact quite a lot of closed-down shops these days, and a lot of those that remain are pound shops or charity shops. It’s never exactly been 5^th Avenue or Rodeo Drive, but like a lot of small towns the life is slowly being squeezed out of the town centre. We have a ‘lake’, which is another creek that’s been cut off and is a little clue to the history of the place. It was in fact a bunch of mudflats before some Dutch bloke called Cornelius Vermuyden came over to England and decided to drain the place in the 1620’s. He built a load of drainage dykes, and ta-da! Canvey Island was born. The geography is still flatter than Kate Moss's chest though, so there's a massive sea wall around the island that makes it look a bit like West Berlin, to stop us all being washed into the North Sea. It spent most of its life as a small sheep farming area until the 60’s and 70’s when hordes of rough Cockneys started moving out of the East End of London and into Essex. My mum and dad were among them. A generation on, it’s the slightly watered-down version of the cockney accent that dominates this part of the country that has become infamous as ‘Estuary English’.

If you’re not one of the many people that have an aunt or a nan here, you’re unlikely to stop by on a passing visit. One of the unfortunate things about being an island is that you only come here if you’re heading here (or if you take the wrong turn-off from the A13). Aside from the seafront, the biggest draw here is probably the football team who were doing really well and were on Match of the Day during an FA Cup run until the manager resigned and the entire first team left the club!

So there you have it. In times of recession forget about Barbados, Phuket and the Maldives. Come to England's favourite island (after those imposters on the Isle of Wight). Only a short drive from the M25, or you can just swim down the Thames. Just make sure you don't swallow the water.

I’ll leave you with some exciting links:

Canvey Island on Wikipedia - It's Wikipedia, therefore FACT

ChavTowns - An alternative look at island culture

Canvey Island FC - The Mighty Gulls

The Concrete Barge - Hilarious memorial to Canvey's premier concrete attraction