To the southern Essex suburbs, South Benfleet, Hadleigh and Leigh-on-Sea. After being roundly castigated in a letter from a reader last week for being ‘grumpy’ about the Greens, I decided that what I needed was a nice long spin in a Ford Focus.

Even though I don’t own a car, as an evil eco heretic, I still like to do my bit towards speeding the planet’s demise. The above story is only partly true. It was a family visit. I’m nervous in cars and only got into this one on the understanding that the driver wouldn’t go too fast.

As a passenger, to most drivers, I must seem like one of those highly-strung dogs – which always needs the car window open, so that it can throw its head back and loll its tongue out.

Within five minutes I’d asked if the heater could be turned off, because it made me feel muzzy-headed. Shortly after that, I asked if the radio could be turned on so that I could listen to Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the 60s – the finest show on British radio.

There was a pause. “What’s Sounds of the 60s ?” asked our young driver. As if on cue, a song called Rain and Tears came on. “Wow!” I said. “This is Aphrodite’s Child, a Greek prog-rock band. It was the only British hit they ever had. The bassist was Demis Roussos and the keyboard player was Vangelis Papathanassiou! Isn’t that incredible?”

“When was this a hit?” asked the puzzled driver. “I dunno – 68 or ‘69, I think.” came my tragic reply.

Essex, I am able to confirm, remains the Court of King Car. Where better to pay unholy sockage to him, therefore, than on the busy A13 from Benfleet to Leigh?

To the average metropolitan snob, these suburbs are despised badlands, the places where, in 1983, working-class voters shooed Mrs Thatcher back into Downing Street for a second term of office.

The consequent rout of Labour gave rise to a new and much- derided stereotype, Essex Man.

The legend that Essex Man cared greatly for his motors, his moolah and little else was soon set in stone. The legend that his consort, Essex Girl, was blonde, vulgar, bejewelled and big-mouthed soon followed. Ever since then, our county, especially this part of it, has been looked down upon by the sophisticates of London’s media elite as its scruffy unloved back yard – a Sparta to their Athens. I’ve even heard of London-Suffolk weekenders who will drive from the capital up through Herts and Cambs rather than surf the razorback A12 through Essex.

The long-established conurbation which runs between Basildon and Shoeburyness has its own unassailable suburban beauty. Southend, Benfleet, Hadleigh and Leigh became “built-up” years ago. The Victorians, the Edwardians and the New Georgians all staked their respective claims upon the south Essex landscape. All of them, however, as densely packed as their terraces were, were creative to the point of baroque with their designs.

Many of the houses are pretty ersatz-Tudor creations, with large rooms and generous gardens. The New Elizabethans then came along in the 1960s and ‘70s, shoe-horning their boxy precincts and car salesrooms into the high streets.

Look again, though. Despite these additions, Hadleigh and Benfleet look lived-in and kindly-disposed neighbourhoods. “I think I could probably live here.” I remark to my fellow passengers.

Southend, remember, was fairly-recently billed as the best place in the UK for our senior citizens to live. It feels safe. I’ve always thought of sunny Southend itself as a sort of cosier English Monte Carlo.

On the A13, somewhere near Hadleigh, the view across the Thames estuary on this silvery March morning is breath-taking. “Over there,” says our guide, “...is the end of Canvey Island. Just in front of that is Two Tree Island. Beyond that, you can see Kent.” I regard the hazy-looking land in the distance where Kent and Essex sit like twin bouncers on the doorway into London.

As we double back to Benfleet from Leigh, we pass a strip known locally as Millionaire’s Row and I catch a glimpse of a huge house, so over-the-top that it’s beautiful. White with many colonades, it resembles a colonial plantation owner’s palace from pre-Civil War America – as if it had been designed by Liberace. Who would live in a house like this? Even Loyd Grossman might be taxed for an answer here.

By contrast, I learn that Colchester is soon to have anther 1,600 homes bolted onto its northern flank. This, it is whispered may be the first tranche of many other such developments. No-one appears to be able to prevent this state of affairs: neither the council nor, even, our doughty and despairing MP, Sir Bob Russell.

In the Southend conurbation, such a thing simply couldn’t happen. The chief reason for this is that the builders of earlier decades got in first and there simply isn’t the room.

In the southern suburbs however, there are proper shopping streets and nearly all the houses have gardens. A subsequent visit to a newish housing development on the former Woods site near Colchester North Station, reveals acres of new houses with either postage-stamp gardens or none whatsoever.

“You’d think they’d have put a corner shop in,” I say to our young driver, who lives here. “They did,” he tells me bluntly. “Nobody used it. They all went to Asda.”