Basildon: Just the job to be a party girl

Basildon has come a long way since the bulldozers moved in on scrubland and rural slum to provide mass-market housing for more than 100,000 people 50 years ago.

Amanda Lewsey, a child of the new town, has travelled a similar distance -- from teenage mum to the woman in charge of making sure the town's 50th anniversary and millennium celebrations pass off successfully this year.

There is no doubting 43-year-old Amanda's affection and pride in the town which was good to her parents -- both early settlers here -- and which in turn has looked after her.

Her remit as Basildon Council's 50th anniversary and millennium co-ordinator is huge. She is responsible for overseeing the anniversary theme for around 40 events between now and October, many of them specifically being held in celebration of the new town's half-century.

Not only must she help organise them, liaise with business for sponsorship and report back to the council, but she will also get to as many of the events themselves as possible.

It's a daunting task --but one that this former community liaison officer relishes. "I know I sound a bit gushy, but I am thoroughly enjoying it," she says, almost apologetically.

Amanda has little time for Basildon's critics, who say the early aspirations of the green Utopia just haven't been fulfilled.

"I love living in Basildon," she declares. "I'm not one of these people who look back and think: 'Oh, it was really good in the old days,' because I think we tend to look back with rose-coloured spectacles.

"When people moved here in the 1950s there weren't TVs and pubs weren't built, so people had to work together to make a community. In the '60s all this changed and people didn't have to bother so much.

"It's not so much that the people changed, it's that their way of life did. I don't think you can regret that. You have to move with the times and work with them."

In these days of housing shortages and job insecurity, it seems incredible to believe that prospective workers were wooed into the new town with prospects of a new house for rent and a steady job with a major employer such as what was then the Ford Radiator Plant or Carreras.

The so-called pioneers arrived between 1951 and 1953. These were the builders, usually from East and West Ham, and the first employees for the major firms.

In those days there were no made-up roads and the few children there were had to walk miles to Vange primary school or to one even further at Nevendon, near Wickford. Nevertheless, 1,000 new homes were built in just the first two years.

Amanda is currently trying to track these early settlers (most of whom are in their 70s), and has a list of around 100 so far who will be honoured later this year in an awards ceremony.

She says her own parents are mightily peeved that, moving two months later in 1954, they missed the cut-off point by two months.

Amanda herself always had the best Basildon had to offer. Her parents (dad was a chemical engineer, mum a housewife) moved from their respective rented accommodation in Corringham to set up home at Bardfield, Vange, where they still live today.

They were awarded a three-bedroomed semi, a generous allocation to a young married couple without children.

There was also, of course, the instant guarantee and reassurance from the Basildon Development Corporation (a quango established by the Government to oversee the management of new towns), that the second-generationers would automatically get a property when they moved out.

Amanda went to Swanmead School and then to Bardfield, a spanking new primary so new that, when it opened, in Amanda's year there were just ten children aged ten!

From there Amanda went to Chalvedon, which itself had only been open for two years. Youngsters were taught in mobile classrooms while the school's two end blocks were completed.

She left school at 15 and did office and factory work before getting married at the young age of 17 to Gerry, now an LTS training officer.

Twenty-six years later they are still together, and Amanda looks surprised that it should be any other way.

They went on to have two sons, Kai, 25, and Ryan, 22, and Amanda is now proud grandmother to Ryan's daughter, Coral, who is five.

"It's all just worked out that way," she smiles. "But it means that I can enjoy looking after Coral without feeling exhausted!"

When her first child started school, Amanda did a nursery nursing course at Basildon College and worked with young children, before deciding that the world of tots wasn't really for her.

She worked as a librarian at Pitsea Library before joining Basildon Council as an assistant community officer 10 years ago.

She was made redundant in the dark days of Basildon Council cuts in 1992, but after a three-year stint working in the library at Basildon College -- "library work wasn't for me; I like working with people," she says diplomatically -- she came back to the Basildon Council fold as an estates officer, working with council tenants.

It wasn't always an easy job. "You had to monitor rent accounts and advise people on repayment schemes, but often they'd ignore you and it would go to court," she says candidly.

She successfully applied for her present job last June, and it's easy to see why, given her pedigree and enthusiasm, she got the post.

Although Amanda is honest enough to admit that living in Basildon isn't always a bed of roses -- "there is a lot of apathy out there, but there's a lot of places than Basildon which are worse to live in" -- the town is now on the up and there's no doubting that it doesn't need that amount of talking up.

The population exceeded the official estimates of 130,000, and now stands at around 170,000.

The Festival Leisure Park at Pipps Hill, the multi-million-pound Fodderwick development in the town centre and the environmentally-friendly Barclays Life Assurance building taking shape in Laindon are all indicative of a rising confidence.

And of Amanda. "I just never thought when I was at school that I would be doing this job and meeting the Queen," she says, smiling. "But here I am!"

l If you were one of Basildon's pioneers who moved there between 1951 and 1953, please contact Amanda on 01268 294442.

In charge -- new towner Amanda Lewsey has the task of running both Basildon's major celebrations

Picture: MAXINE CLARKE

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.