TRADITIONAL Cockney speakers have been exiled to parts of south Essex – including Brentwood – with people in the east end of London speaking a whole new dialect, according to a study.
Essex the new Cockney heartland after immigration, study saysThe phenomenon detailed in the research from a London university certainly rings true for Grace Hayden who, for the past 30 years, has lived on Brentwood's East Ham estate, the development built by Newham Council to house people from east London after the Second World War.
Work on the estate started in about 1950, and she subsequently moved there from Canning Town 33 years ago.
Now 91, Mrs Hayden said she decided to move after traffic noise in the capital started to cause health problems for her late husband.
She is just one of the departed whose emigration from the Cockney heartland is leading to permanent changes to the traditional dialect which had its origins in the east end.
She said: "Many people started leaving initially because they were living in prefabs and they wanted somewhere better to live, but before that there were those who started losing their accents after they had been evacuated while they were living away in the country."
She added: "I think a lot of people started moving out when we got quite a few people coming in from other countries."
Pauline Attridge, 58, who lived in Forest Gate, Upton Park, Manor Park and Stratford before moving to Brentwood, said: "We had a real sense of community. All the neighbours know each other, but then everything started to fragment."
The study, compiled by experts at Queen Mary University, claims that the Cockney drift can be summed up by listening to the cast of The Only Way Is Essex (Towie).
The more traditional-sounding Cockney speakers have migrated to Essex, including X Factor finalist Stacey Solomon and those in Towie, according to the report's author Dr Sue Fox.
"In the last five decades Cockney has probably undergone more rapid change than at any time in its long history," she said.
She also put it down to the number of white working class families who moved into Essex from the 1950s onwards.
Dr Fox added: "It is probably more accurate to say that Cockney has now become more synonymous with white working class speakers from a much larger geographical region of south-east England and is not generally a term applied to speakers of minority ethnic backgrounds even if they have been born within the traditional Cockney area.
"The Bangladeshi community now makes up over a third of the population the borough of Tower Hamlets in the east end, and the vast majority of people in this area now speak what we have labelled as multicultural London English.
"They don't identify with being Cockney, and this new term is more reflective of the current population."
Dr Fox was speaking on the history of the language as part of the Cockney Heritage Festival last week.
What do you think? Is Brentwood the new home of the traditional Cockney? Write to us at the address on page two, e-mail editorial@gazettenews.co.uk or visit www.brentwood gazette.co.uk
