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Brentwood Gazette columnist Josie Stephenson lets off steam and backs the Essex girl tradition…

When I ask Australian friends and relatives how they picture England and Englishmen, they instantly say that the country languishes under constant rain and is almost completely covered with concrete.

They view a large percentage of Englishmen as gay and are convinced that we seldom take a shower and still wear bowler hats.

English friends, on the other hand, picture Australia as offering little more than baking deserts and mountains of tinnies, and view Australians as drunken wife-bashers with BO.

Burying absurd stereotypes is long overdue, especially when it comes to that tired old string-vested, tattooed Essex Man image and his bottle-blonde bimbo in white stilettos.

The myth that Essex is populated by hoardes of nose-studded morons screeching around an ugly flat wasteland in Ford Capris has been fuelled by crass ignorance and blatant snobbery. It's an image now so deep-rooted, that it's in danger of scaring off potential new business and affecting the county's economy.

The truth is that thousands of East Londoners filtered out into Essex after the last war in search of a cleaner and better life. They are fine people. They are proud, independent, with a sense of community rooted in the spirit which brought them through five years of bombing.

Go into any community centre along the Thames corridor, as I frequently do, and you'll see the truth of that.

Away from its industrial heartland, Essex hamlets and country towns, with burnished gold thatch and ancient pargeting nestling into folds of gentle rolling pastures and broad horizon farms, are quintessentially rural England.

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