Lisa Horner Writer & Artist

In 1989 the dramatic history of 'New Town' Basildon was portrayed in Arnold Wesker's play 'Beorhtel's Hill' at the Towngate Theatre to celebrate it's 40th anniversary. He went beyond this actually and the pioneering plotlanders were portrayed by a group of very effective amateur actors.  The community play incorporated locals who had acted before or wanted to try their hand at it and the Thalian Theatre Group.  Somebody who was very involved in the music scene of the 1980's was Rob Marlow and he did a great job of portraying the narrator of the play.  I have a close at hand experience of this as I was in the play, I played several small parts and was in the chorus.  This occupies a few pages of this book but it is so much more than that. I was fortunate enough to meet Tim Williams who was the first photographer of Depeche Mode.   I learnt a great deal doing this book such as the fact that Joan Sims was born at Laindon Station and that...

Did you know that there was a W. H. Smith at Langdon Hills in the 1920's?  Well it's not what you think, there was a William Hutton Smith who had a small shop on the High Road and it was unrelated to the high street retail giant.  There was even a dolls hospital in the same area around the same time. Find out a bit more about the family who ran a historic public house in Vange for seventy years and what happened to several other public houses.  Follow the dairy business that got passed down three generations. Basildon had a large impact on the music business in the eighties but in the swinging sixties things were really lively.  Mecca Dancing entertained the young of the era and bands would do the Mecca circuit travelling all over as Mecca Leisure Group ran numerous nightclubs in major towns and cities throughout the UK.  The bands would sometimes become a resident band at one of the Mecca venues, one band was Sadie's Expression and another w...