“I’m bursting with pride,” says Sharon Wuyts, 45, on the day her home town, Southend-on-Sea, was granted city status.
The carer “snuck out of work” to attend celebrations with her colleague Debra Goaté on the seafront. The pair ended up staying more than four hours in drizzle to wait for Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, to mark the occasion by greeting the crowd.
“We wanted to show our support in the blistering cold,” says Wuyts.
She explains why: “The first things I associate with Southend are: the pier, doughnuts and entertainment. I used to visit here as a child, my mum took me on the train from Chelmsford. It’s part of my childhood. Now I will be able to tell my grandchildren, when they arrive, that I was here when Southend got its city status.”
Goaté says: “Lots of places have become cities, so why not Southend?”
And she reckons it was worth waiting for the royals in the cold. “Camilla was so nice. She said: ‘Sorry we couldn’t bring nice weather with us.’ She shook my hand – I could chop it off and auction it for charity.”
Southend was given city status after the murder of its MP, David Amess, last October. It was an issue he had campaigned on for years – he ended what turned out to be his last speech in the Commons with the words: “And of course, we must make Southend a city.”
On Tuesday, Amess posthumously became the first freeman of the city of Southend at a ceremony in the civic centre attended by his widow and children and the royal couple.
And Southend now has new roads signs which read: “Welcome to the City of Southend-on-Sea, home of the world’s longest pleasure pier. Twinned with Sopot, Poland.”
Sadly, no one from the Polish resort city on the Baltic Sea was invited to the party. But when the royal couple turned up at Southend’s famously long pier, they were entertained with a rendition of the The Lion Sleeps Tonight, played by a steel band from the South Essex African Caribbean Association.
One of its trustees, Shauna Creary, 63, describes Southend’s new status as “brilliant and much needed”.
She hopes it will help to highlight Southend’s diversity. “When you hear about seaside towns, there’s a kind of label to it,” she says. “It’s not that interesting or it’s just candy floss and amusements. It ignores the people that live in the area that make the place – the community itself. I hope being a city changes how people think about Southend.”
Creary describes city status as Amess’s legacy but she wonders if it would ever have happened if he had not been killed in such brutal circumstances.
Sheila Wright, 60, was waiting to get her council tenancy arrangements changed at the civic centre as the city ceremony got under way. She says Southend was destined to become to a city “eventually, not this quickly”.
She adds: “I think it’s a wonderful thing, especially for David Amess and his family. Our high street is so empty, hopefully it will bring new businesses to the town.”
Taylor Randall, 20, who works in a cafe on the seafront, is not so sure. “I don’t understand what difference it makes,” he says. “It’s just a title. We need more than a title to bring pride back.”
The new city has some of the most deprived areas in Essex with 40% of its neighbourhoods falling in the bottom third of the deprivation index. And some have sneered at granting the title of city to a struggling place at the end of what commuters dub the “misery line”.
But Sheila Smerdon, 59, who was out walking her bulldog Nellie on the seafront, reckons Southend deserves a better reputation. Smerdon, who has lived in Southend all her life, says: “It’s got good parts and bad parts, like most towns, or cities I should now say. And this should bring a bit of energy.”
Charmaine Bailey, 49, who runs a neighbouring ice-cream parlour with her husband, Jason, agrees. She says: “It’s a lovely place, it just needs something put back in the centre – that’s a little bit doom and gloom. But it definitely deserves to be a city.”
Jimmy Constantinou, 77, who runs a neighbouring cafe, will not have a word said against Southend. “The people here are very excited and very grateful. I absolutely love Southend,” he says.
A former headteacher, James Lupton, 43, dressed up as a soldier on a horse to celebrate. “I’m born-and-bred Southend. Anything that raises the profile of our town, now city, is excellent. I just wish it had happened without the sad circumstances around it.”
