'The Raac crisis is what happens when a society forgets how to look after the things that it has built, because it has politically disowned them.' Some concrete opinions from me in the Guardian
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Tim Burrows
@timburrows
Journalist/author. The Invention of Essex is published by Profile Books. BUY IT: bit.ly/3Bj9lLi
Agent: ZRoss@unitedagents.co.uk
Tim Burrows’s posts
Been contacted by a man who found my wallet at Reading 2003, took £10 out to buy cider and held an annual drinking competition in my honour
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UPDATE: The rules of the 'Timothy Burrows challenge'
This has been in the works for a while: The invention of Essex, for
How to Articulate a Point Effectively in Under One Minute
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Replying to @JessicaLBarnard and @RMTunion
Everyone rightfully talking about his Kay Burley interview, but they way he doesn't even miss a beat in his response here. What. A. Man.
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Alan Moore to vote for first time, for Labour: 'The wretched world we’re living in at present was not an unlucky turn of fate; it was an economic and political decision, made without consulting the enormous human population that it would most drastically affect.'
STOP THE COUNT
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Westminster voting intention:
LAB: 40% (+2)
CON: 35% (-3)
LDEM: 7% (+1)
via @YouGov
Now is the time
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British sausage makers face EU freeze after Brexit on.ft.com/3m9kXHs
Hancock's home looks like it was designed during an experiment that asked an 11-year-old to imagine what a grown-up's house might look like
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Is this Matt Hancock’s real house? Jesus. Is it just me thinking that Carpe Diem in the background is perhaps not the best for present times (if any!)? And don’t even start me on the decor! 
Andrew Neil should do this but an absolutely massive one made of rotating doner meat. The audience is made up of feral dogs and Neil stands behind protective glass, screaming accusations
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Boris Johnson to be replaced with melting ice sculpture after dodging climate change TV debate independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi
I knew the BBC World Service would call one day. I just didn't think it would be about losing a wallet pissed out of my mind 14 years ago
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UPDATE: Last night I met the Timothy Burrows Challenge crew and got my money back. And a few pints of cider.
My favourite bookshop in Southend is for sale (with bonus 3 bed flat), please someone into books buy it so it doesn't turn into an estate agent pretty please rightmove.co.uk/properties/108
Today I won the Guardian's best headline of the year prize in my last week as a Guardian headline writer. Touched!
Meanwhile, Basildon's finest Essexploitation synth act is third in the iTunes chart with this
Solidarity with the striking nurses (taken by my wife, Hayley, a radiographer at St Thomas' Hospital)
It would require “a level of literacy that the great British public doesn’t necessarily have”.
The Johnsons are a classist endeavour.
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‘They couldn’t spell Pinocchio if they tried’
@StanleyPJohnson replying to a viewer’s comment that called his son Pinocchio.
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It's alive! (Thanks Alex!)
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I'm excited to share this edited extract from my forthcoming book, The Invention of Essex
Ten years ago today I walked from West Ham to Tilbury with my mate Adam, via Rainham marshes, Barking Riverside (unbuilt), Dagenham, Purfleet, the monster QE2 bridge, Grays for pie and mash... I was limping when I arrived at Tilbury and a nun crossed the road to ask if I was OK
7am at the rave, the lights up and bouncers circling, but there's no way you're going home. No way. twitter.com/UKRaveComments
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A reminder of the case for war:
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Cameron: Sadly it's inevitable they'll attack us if we bomb them. But if they're going to attack us, we need to stop them. By bombing them.
UK cultural inertia in a sentence>
'Brilleaux’s ashes were scattered on an small island between Canvey and the mainland using a map he had made as a kid that was marked with an X.' My appraisal of Lee Brilleaux who died 25 years ago today, which I wrote a while back
It's quite a thing to have a mate who works in house clearance in Thurrock while I write a book on Essex. Every few weeks he drops off more source material he has saved from the dump for me 🙏. Latest haul:
Feels fitting to say, at sunset on Winter solstice, today is my last day at the Guardian, the place I have worked for the past six or so years. I am leaving to concentrate on writing, but I do so with such a deep affection and admiration for my colleagues. That's the tweet.
One of my great, naive wishes is that politicians talking as directly and as morally as this is no longer mocked or snidily discounted
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“Housing, and the basic needs of society, should never have been left to the marketplace.”
@PresidentIRL is one of the only public figures anywhere in the West prepared to speak this obvious truth.
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A masked smile on the train to Basildon this morning after learning I'd been awarded one of @socofauthors' #SoAGrants to help me finish writing The Invention of Essex, out 2022 via . Really grateful for the support as I enter the final sprint!
The former site of Paul Oakenfold's Home superclub is now the world's biggest Greggs.
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From this new advert for Basildon, I get the sense Essex County Council aren't all that keen on postwar architecture
Oiii oiiiii! Here's everything you wanted to know about The Invention of Essex in one handy link
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Calling all #Essex lovers!
Whether you live there, you've been there, or you've watched it on TV, Essex has a place in all our hearts.
Dig deeper in @timburrows' #TheInventionofEssex - coming this June: bit.ly/TheInventionof
The only way this is a surprise is if you assume Kafka was dour. He was funny the whole time! Gregor Samsa woke up as a giant insect, FFS! It's incredible how long the misreading has continued
The BBC once asked John Berger to make Ways of Seeing, an imaginitive & brave cultural critique of grotesque capitalist impulses. Now it buries its most cherished broadcaster for describing what he is seeing in front of him as it is so fearfully beholden to those same impulses
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BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over fear of rightwing backlash theguardian.com/media/2023/mar
I sent off the first draft of my book yesterday! Had five minutes of euphoria, then was plagued by all the bits I missed getting in due to time and space. Now I have woken up to face all the things I have been putting off due to needing to finish the book.
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Sufficient data worldwide now exists to conclude that, to date, the UK has the highest rate of excess deaths in the Coronavirus pandemic in the world
Free to read article with @jburnmurdoch
1/
ft.com/content/6b4c78
I was part of the fuel queuing in south Essex over the weekend (aka part of the problem but petrol light was on!!!!). Observation: People were LOVING it. Lots of smiles, comments like 'Crazy isn't it!' and swapping highly detailed stories of why they needed the fuel *now*
Johnson's chaotic book pile contains Serotonin by Houellebecq, 'Modern Diplomacy' (a book for students to learn what statesmen are supposed to do), a book about nice walks on the coast, and two copies of Lord Ashcroft's book about lions
'It's like a fucking warzone': a fireman's view in the aftermath of a heatwave fire in Dagenham
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To cheer everyone up*, I've written a reflective piece on Essex roots, London fatigue and Brexit somesuchstories.co/story/never-le
*lol
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Toilet book idea: sacred sites despoiled by logistics. This is St Laurence's in Eastwood, Essex, where Samuel Purchas - whose writing directly (almost plagiaristically) inspired Coleridge's Kubla Khan - was vicar. Now tucked up against a new runway at Southend airport
RIP Wilko Johnson. More electrical charge than human. He, with out hyperbole, changed the currents of UK music. Just look at him here.
Re mortgage payments, Radio 4 correspondent says some people might want to dip into savings while others could borrow from a family member, so that's cool
I finished up amendments to The Invention Of Essex, which I have been writing since 2020 today - but at the exact same time I did so my wife bought and successfully plumbed in a new toilet herself after never having done so before. So she wins! #humbled
Football pundit Chris Sutton had a better grasp of the meaning of Black Lives Matter on Radio 5 last week than the Labour leader seems to have here
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Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer tells #BBCBreakfast it’s "a shame" the sentiment behind the Black Lives Matter movement is getting “tangled up with these organisational issues" and it’s "nonsense" to call to ‘Defund the Police’.
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'I think that people are the greatest fun.' It must have been eight years since I last listened to this all the way through. Feel like it's mending me somehow.
My first piece in ages is this appraisal of Essex's rudest synth act for . It's quite sweary
Oi oooiiiiii (I think I first had the idea of a book on Essex a decade ago come to think of it )
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I’ve been waiting for this book for about a decade and can’t wait to get stuck in - The Invention of Essex by @timburrows. 
Congrats m8! )Nice to see the mighty Hammers on the cover 
IRONS )
Congrats m8! )Nice to see the mighty Hammers on the cover IRONS )
Well, it is certainly a nice (& mildy anxiety inducing) surprise to see The Invention Of Essex recommended as a book to read in 2023 by the (!)
ft.com/content/e0931f
Depeche Mode are trending so here is my account of a pilgrimage to Basildon I went on with their European fans some years back. That's Vince Clarke's garage in the picture, and a neighbour who had never heard of the Mode - to the fans' disbelief thequietus.com/articles/10184
The old Essex accent before it became post-Cockney is documented on this wonderful 2009 video of Foulness island, the time-warp south Essex island 50 miles (and also several centuries) away from London
Drove to King's Cross and back to Southend yesterday to empty my Guardian locker. First time in London since March. Was a beautiful crisp day as Essex fields morphed into more dense housing and towers. Here I am saying goodbye to the Guardian building
If Essex man's heart is in Basildon or Billericay, his soul could be said to be in Southend. Me on the unbearable lightness of the seaside settlement's newfound city status for (£)
I wrote about how Johnson's big city status gesture in Southend exposed the paucity of 'levelling up'
Will never forget seeing Mr Big Boiler himself *chain* his sports car to a stanchion outside the local corner shop opposite my house in Hackney, as he was scared of getting it nicked. Upon returning he forgot it was attached, and took the shop's porch with him when reversing
My new long read on how Essex is a bellwether for England's perfect storm of housing crises, the culmination of my writing residency. Thanks to , , >>>
This is Essex: the A127 flanked by the green belt. For my writing residency for + , I'm looking at how the green belt influences tensions around housing in Essex, from local XR members fighting to save it, to its pernicious effect on house prices
The absolute pits. Empty, smirking, the worst of us
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Delighted that the government will work alongside our campaign to end the tragedy of rough sleeping. Today’s @EveningStandard
Have moved into an old house and have inherited a pianola (automatic playing piano/knees-up machine). Anyone know how to get these things going?
Starting the year trying to write down my thoughts about Basildon's finest chart-bothering act , and it's as if he is making up the news himself
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Haha, I do! Might try and revive the 'Tim Burrows challenge'
RIP Barbara Windsor, daughter of a Shoreditch costermonger. I feel like her decision to nick the Queen's name worked, as she did end up a kind of monarch of the popular working class imagination. If Babs didn't exist, they would need to invent her
Lad on tour! Join me in one of these venues to mark the launch of The Invention of Essex, my new book for . (Apart from Wanstead, where it's one-in-one-out I'm afraid, mate.) For tickets follow this link: linktr.ee/timburrows
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Note to the 'reviewer': I'd rather be "weedy, needy and seedy" than "greedy and siding with the paedies"
Congratulations Eddie Howe. Here's what your bosses got up to on your special day.
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It just gets better and better... 
Eddie Howe has been named the Premier League Manager of the Month for February!
Congratulations to the gaffer and all of our backroom staff! 
Eddie Howe has been named the Premier League Manager of the Month for February!
Congratulations to the gaffer and all of our backroom staff! Reality now entering 'third series of twin peaks' levels of logic.
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Can I just point out that Theresa May is wearing a bracelet of Frida Kahlo, a member of the Communist party who LITERALLY DATED TROTSKY
we are stuck in some kind of percentage glitch hell
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On who performed best in the #BBCDebate:
Boris Johnson: 52%
Jeremy Corbyn: 48%
via @YouGov
Representative survey of viewers
Southenders! Southend is now a city. What does it mean to you? Will it change anything? I'm asking for an article I'm writing - so if any residents or business owners etc want to tell me, give me a shout! (Picture taken in Leigh-on-Sea in autumn 2021)
How not to write about place (and, therefore, class) in 2023, by the wife of a Conservative Lord
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“Apparently, Colchester town centre is the most dangerous place to live in Essex: 406 offences a year for every 1,000 residents. It’s Friday night on the high street and it’s kicking off.”
@SashaSwire in this week’s diary. newstatesman.com/diary/2023/07/
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Thrilled to welcome Jason Cowley, the brilliant editor of the New Statesman, to the Sunday Times books section. As an Essex boy, he was the perfect person to review Tim Burrows’s new book about England’s (most?) misunderstood and maligned county.
thetimes.co.uk/article/the-in
You've probably been writing a book on Essex too long when you glance at this image on the timeline and immediately think 'Hadleigh Castle'
I'm in the Observer today with a bit about how Essex county council’s drive to combat the Essex stereotype is almost as old as the stereotype itself. Digital version here: theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/j
Isn't it her own cabinet who are organising the pile-on?
The problem with Twitter is you toy with deactivating your account and then you see Zac Efron's been helping relieve Rainham marshes of plastic waste and you think ah sod it, I might give it another week
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Have you seen @ZacEfron joining in with @Thames21’s plastic clean-up in the London episode of his new @NetflixUK documentary: #DowntoEarth?!
Read more: thames21.org.uk/2020/07/hollyw and watch on Netflix now!
This book by Basildon's first council leader is just such a revealing portrait of the early days of the new town - page after page of tales of alienated cockneys and an endemically corrupt development company, a portrait of the limits of utopia & the importance of struggle
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Thanks to everyone who turned up to The Invention of Essex event tonight, but most of all @timburrows for a very entertaining and interesting talk. Signed stock now available. #essex #books #BookTwitter #booktwt
