Opinion: the radical buildings in the English county of Essex suggest that avant-garde architecture is better found in the suburbs than the cities, says Owen Hatherley.

"The only way is Radical Essex" is one of the better slogans to have been printed on an architecture-related tote bag in recent years. It comes in a variety of bright pinks, blues and greens, and I picked it up at a weekend-long event at various locations in the southeast England county in September.
Aside from the quality of the merch, there was something quite unexpected in the two-day Radical Essex architecture festival.
Essex has for some years been considered the classic area of working-class-made-good conservatism, a classic electoral bellwether, suburban, a tad bigoted and flat (there's no helping the geography). The Brexit vote in Essex was uniformly enormous. But the new towns, company towns and architect-designed villas ? to which tours were organised as part of the Radical Essex programme ? are, they argue, examples of how the area was actually "the modernist county", at the forefront of all the 20th century's architectural and social advances. More so, it would seem, than London itself.
Essex has for some years been considered the classic area of working-class-made-good conservatism
If Essex was once radical after all, maybe the usual dichotomy between cosmopolitan, design-conscious cities and their conservative periphery is actually inaccurate. Maybe the avant-garde i...