This weekend, on the advice of ChatGPT, I visited Constable country. That is Essex, the villages of Dedham and East Bergholt, by the River Stour, which John Constable so famously painted.
Having just spent a fortnight in Namibia, I’ve become attuned to stunning landscapes. Even so, I was blown away by the beauty of the place.
Here are some snaps to get you in the zone.
I went with a French friend who wanted to see the “real England”, but not too far from Stansted Airport.
As we drove into East Bergholt, I began, as I always do as soon as I see them, to despair at the ugliness of modern buildings. No wonder we have so many NIMBYs, when what gets built around beautiful villages is so bland and ugly. Objection is both rational and natural.
But then we turned a corner and everything was suddenly stunning.
It’s not a part of the world I knew. I had lazily assumed all of Essex looked like Basildon. It doesn’t. It was glorious. You could really see the Dutch and Flemish influence in the architecture and the colours they were painted - so different to the equally beautiful Cotswolds, where I was last weekend doing gigs.
We were only sixty miles from London, but it still felt like an England of old, unblighted.
My French companion could not understand what I had been moaning about when I complain about decline. This was the England she knew growing up, and she got excited by everything. Scones. Tea. Churches. Beautiful landscapes. Polite conversation. Phone boxes. Properly kept gardens. Even the beer. “It’s not cold,” she said, before promptly downing it.
My oft-cited complaint that the England she knew is disappearing seemed nonsense. There was no evidence of it here.
As we walked into Manningtree, the buildings got ugly again. Warehouses and industrial buildings, in particular. Nineteenth century warehouses were often things of beauty. Why can 21st century warehouses not be? (The answer lies in our system of measurement, but that’s for another day).
Then we learnt about Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, who operated here, exploiting the social upheaval of the English Civil War to have hundreds of women executed as witches. Among his methods of getting to the “truth” he used sleep deprivation to extract confessions; he tied victims to chairs and dropped them into the estuary. If they floated, they were witches. If they sank, they weren’t. I guess the victims lost either way. He strip-searched women looking for signs of the mark of the devil. If he couldn’t find any he pricked them with knives until he found the signs he was looking for. Just horrible. Maybe the English past isn’t quite so idyllic after all.
Today, if we are heading into the civil war many think we are, who knows what kind of witch hunts we are going to see in the name of some nuts ideology?
We caught a train from Mistley back to Manningtree. More grim modern housing. Lots of it too.
More walking then a short river boat tour. We mentioned we were staying at a village up the road, East Bergholt, and one of the locals declared this was the last chance to enjoy it before more new-build goes up. “We need 1.5 million homes,” he said. “The question is, do we have 1.5 million people who are going to buy them?”
Articulated right there is the property crisis coming to a town near you.
I have long argued that beautiful property will keep its value. Ugly new build won’t. Beautiful is pretty much synonymous with period. It was built using traditional measures, where proportion is intrinsic. No such proportion is inherent to metric.
We are already seeing the unravelling of the new-build market in London. That unravelling is coming to everywhere there is ugly new build, whether blocks of flats or houses.
We did find one modern close in East Bergholt that was actually beautiful by the way. So it’s possible. But it’s the exception, not the rule.
This is one of the reasons I invest so much of my capital outside the UK. I don’t like sterling, so I hold gold and bitcoin, and I don’t like gilts. A weakening property market, which is happening right on cue, will create problems for both.
If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.
Idyllic corners of England do still exist. Many of them. UK shares already offer value. There is a lot to like in the UK, as my French companion kept pointing out. But there are also big problems ahead, with a leadership class that, shall we say, falls short.
Opportunities abroad, however
I sit regularly on a roundtable with Doug Casey and a number of other mining newsletter writers. A company presents. The experts grill them. The company logs off, and then we discuss it.
I liked this week’s so much I bought shares while the presentation was still happening.
The company is …
