Black Girl Essex

What does it mean to be black in Essex? Southend-based British African-Caribbean artist, producer and activist Elsa James is exploring this experience in our misunderstood and homogeneously white county that she calls home

- Nicky Adams

Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, ‘This is what an Essex girl looks like’ while wandering around the Women of the World Festival (WOW) at London’s Southbank Centre two years ago prompted Elsa James to have some interesting conversations with passers-by.

‘Here I was, a black woman, walking around London announcing to all “I am an Essex girl” and yet, I was embarrassed,’ explains Elsa, who moved to Thurrock from west London in 1999 and then settled with her family in Southend in 2009. ‘I was ashamed to tell people I lived in Essex, especially black folks in London, who would look at me as if something might be seriously wrong with my decision to live here.’

Just a few months before, Elsa had embarked on her first solo project since leaving Chelsea College of Arts, a work responding to stories of black presence in Britain prior to the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. Alongside a historian specialising in black British history, she created two short films about two black women who spent time in Essex – one in Harlow during the 1700s and the other in Southend in 1908.

‘Their stories profoundly resonated with me,’ she says, but what astonished Elsa most was that records of these stories sat gathering dust in our national archives. ‘They seemed to me to be overlooked or simply not recognised as significant.’

Elsa’s films, titled Forgotten Black Essex, made their debut at Southend’s Chalkwell Hall in February 2018.