Essex
51.7500°N 0.5833°E · Q23240
2 English words in this atlas trace back to Essex. It sits in United Kingdom.
Essex campaigners asked the Oxford English Dictionary to delete this phrase, and were refused.
The stereotype spread through joke books and tabloid columns in the early 1990s, alongside the Essex man coined in 1990. In 2016 a petition from Essex women asked the Oxford English Dictionary to remove the entry; the OED declined, on the grounds that dictionaries record usage rather than approve of it. It belongs to a long English habit of naming stock characters after places, beside Covent Garden nun and Sloane Ranger.
A newspaper column invented an entire social class in a single article.
Simon Heffer coined the phrase in the Sunday Telegraph in October 1990 to name the skilled manual workers of the Essex commuter belt who had left Labour to vote for Margaret Thatcher. The county was chosen because London's East End had emptied into its new towns after the war. Essex girl followed as the female counterpart, and Mondeo Man later did the same job for the Blair years.