Inside Grayson Perry's house

Walking along the Essex Way with the high-pitch shrills of the peewits for company as they skip across the mud flats of the Stour Estuary and then all of a sudden.

In the distance, a gingerbread style house you might half expect Hansel and Gretel to step out of, but this is a chapel, a shrine to an everyday Essex woman called Julie Cope built by her imaginary husband as a kind of Essex Taj Mahal.

The Grayson Perry House. Picture Jack Hobhouse

Situated just outside Wrabness, it was actually conceived by the county's most famous living artist, Grayson Perry, along with architect, Charles Holland, as part of a project for Living Architecture, which was set up to change public perceptions of modern architecture.

Now a special exhibition is taking place at the Firstsite art gallery in Colchester made-up of some of the art works inside the House for Essex as well as models, plans and even a 3000 word ballad, written by Grayson, which puts the building of the house into an artistic context.

A House for Essex. Picture Jack Hobhouse

Grayson says: "It’s a shrine and a holiday cottage – an art work you can stay in.

"I think some people have been frustrated that they cannot go in. A lot of people just see the outside and would love to go in and have a glimpse so this an opportunity for them to see the art works inside.

"Many years ago Alain de Botton, who is the creative director of Living Architecture, and I met at some party and we talked about whether I would like to design a church and I said I would quite like to do that.

I suppose that’s where it all started and then the idea of me doing it just rumbled on as the years went by until one day, out of the blue, he asked whether the church idea could be completed as one of their houses. In the Firstsite show there is a model that I built of my design of a church which echoes the house."

In Its Familiarity Golden 2015 © Grayson Perry, Paragon Contemporary Editions Ltd and Victoria Miro

Also included are The Essex House Tapestries: The Life of Julie Cope on loan from the Crafts Council Collection.

The two major tapestries illustrate the key events in Julie's journey, from her birth on Canvey Island during the great flood of 1953 to her untimely death in a tragic accident on Colchester High Street.

Overflowing with cultural and architectural detail, the tapestries contain a social history of Essex and modern Britain that reflects Firstsite’s year-long focus on contemporary identity.

The first, A Perfect Match is centered upon Julie’s conventional early life and ultimately doomed relationship with her first husband Dave.

The second, In Its Familiarity, Golden depicts Julie’s ‘second act’, in which she takes control of her life and widens her horizons as she relocates to Maldon with her children and attends university in Colchester, where she meets her second husband Rob.

A Perfect March 2015 © Grayson Perry, Paragon Contemporary Editions Ltd and Victoria Miro

The tapestries and woodcuts are displayed alongside an audio recording of The Ballad of Julie Cope, a 3000-word narrative written and read by Grayson that builds upon his own childhood in Essex to illuminate Julie’s hopes and fears as she journeys through life.

"When we started working on it," Grayson adds, "Charles and I tossed a lot of ideas about and came up with this idea of a chapel or a shrine and then we thought we have to have a story. Every religion has one and I thought it should be about an everyday Essex woman.

"The ballad was a way of working out Julie’s biography from her working class home in Canvey.

"That was the narrative in my imagination. The house became almost an Essex Taj Mahal built by Julie’s imaginary husband after she died.

"I have got absolutely no pretence over my abilities as a poet, I just liked the idea of that form to detail her life.

"I had a rough idea of her life, this was just a way of fleshing it out in detail. One of the women we took on the Essex Julie pilgrimage who was particularly sharp asked whether it was my mother and I thought ‘here we go’ but perhaps in some way this is an idolisation of my mother and a re-write of her life."

As Grayson is quick to point out it's also a lot to do with the county he was born and brought up in.

"In the beginning of my career in the early Eighties Essex didn’t seem to have a strong identity," he continues.

"Coming from Essex just meant coming from one of the home counties, 30 miles up the road from London. There was no Essex man or girls and then Towie came along and we somehow got tainted with that."

So why choose Wrabness for his homage to the county?

"We were just looking for a plot that already had existing planning permission which had a nice aspect," he explains.

"Somewhere if a person was going to build a chapel, they might build it there.

"As soon as we saw it, the place was a no brainer for us. It was close to a railway line and I liked the idea people could reach it by foot, road and rail.

"I also wanted it to be at the end of a line of pilgrimage so that people could follow the line of Julie’s life.

"I even worked out a not too arduous 30 mile cycle route which took in Basildon, Maldon, Colchester, and then up here to Wrabness.

"Charles and I did a lot of research and at the beginning we both paid a visit to St Peter’s at Bradwell, which became a huge inspiration for us with the project."

As one might expect the house has attracted a lot of attention since it was completed in 2015, but for the artist himself it was a proper labour of love.

“I really had no idea how much work it would entail," Grayson tells me, "and we didn’t get to do a lot of the ideas we had for it. For example designing a whole range of crockery to go in the house.

"I was quite overwhelmed when we had finally completely it. I remember after the last remaining art work was installed just standing in the main space and getting quite overcome with emotion."

Grayson Perry: The Life of Julie Cope runs at the Firstsite art gallery from November 18 to February 18. Tomorrow night, November 17, there is a special public opening celebration from 6pm to 9pm.

For more information on the exhibition go to www.firstsite.uk