Is it a flyover, a place, or a village? (From Echo)

Is it a flyover, a place, or a village?

11:00pm Thursday 2nd December 2010 in Memories By Tom King

TO most people the name Nevendon means, if it means anything at all, a flyover on the A127. Nevendon, though, is a place.

Not a lot of people know that, including some who live just a few hundred yards away.

They have an excuse. Nevendon is a lost village in the sense most people have forgotten it is there. Yet, it has its own church, resident population and community life.

Nevendon straddles the old road from Wickford to Pitsea and Canvey. In the Fifties, this route was bypassed by the construction of East Mayne.

Church Lane used to hum with through traffic. Now it is a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac. During the same period, Nevendon was absorbed into Basildon New Town, and lost its separate identity.

However, while the new-town builders bulldozed a lot of ancient history, they left Nevendon intact.

It is easy to reach. Just turn south off the approach road to Basildon Sainsbury’s, and into Church Lane. Finding it is no problem. It’s just that very few people do so. All this will change if Christopher Harrold and John Simpson have their way. The pair, members of the congregation at St Peter’s, the parish church, have set out to make everyone more Nevendon-conscious.

They know what they are up against. John tells how he asked a group of schoolchildren to look across from Church Lane towards Sainsbury’s.

“Try to imagine that view 100 years ago,” he told them. “What do you imagine was there?”

John vividly recalls the answer: “Please, sir, Sainsbury’s was.”

Christopher and John knew better than that, but even they realised there were big gaps in their knowledge of their home hamlet. Neither had been born or bred in Nevendon.

“We both came here because of our wives,” says John. “We like it, but we knew we had a lot to learn.”

The book they have put together jointly, the Story of Nevendon, fills the gap.

“We had some information on paper, but we had no idea where some of the places mentioned on the map could be found,” says Christopher. Indeed, they didn’t even know if some of the old farmhouses and other old sites still existed.

Gradually, though, Nevendon began to give up its secrets. Christopher and John found an old booklet, published in 1925 by a man who knew Nevendon backwards, the Rev Alfred Watson.

They interviewed local residents, including Arthur Hawkins, churchwarden at St Peter’s for 30 years. They dug into the files of the Essex Record Office.

“Nevendon really does have a rich history,” says John.

The official aim of the book was to raise money for parish church funds. There may be another, underlying motive, however. Could the residents of Nevendon be feeling a bit lonely? As the authors relate: “Even the emergency services have had difficulty in finding the place.” Says Christopher: “If we can raise our profile perhaps a few more people will come to Nevendon.”

Christopher Harrold and John Simpson will sign copies of the Story of Nevendon to coincide with St Peter’s Church Christmas bazaar, Church Lane, off Cricketers Way, Basildon, on Saturday, from 2pm to 4pm. £5 per copy.