How do our early experiences of place influence the direction of our lives?

What does it mean to grow up in a town that is always ‘performing’?

20th Century Essex Boy is a new project by Small Acts that focuses the lens closer to home. Simon’s hometown to be precise. Sunny Southend-on-sea.

As the eldest son of seven children born to an Irish-Italian, working class family in Essex, Simon Persighetti was destined either for the priesthood or Neeta’s tubular furniture factory.

Instead, growing up in Southend in the second half of the 20th Century afforded this ordinary boy access to extraordinary experiences from an early age.

Greeting music hall star Arthur Askey on your morning paper round, feeding neighbour Roy Bates’ cat ‘Fruitcake’ while the family are out defending Sealand, burning your dad’s census form in the middle of Southend High Street, watching a young Bowie perform at Eastwood free festival, meeting London hippies at the Golden Egg cafe, freaking out to Funkadelic at the Kursaal.

Fast forward 50 years, the Kursaal fairground is now a housing estate and Simon is an artist. How on earth did this happen?

Join Small Acts at the seaside and hold tight for a rollercoaster ride through the 20th Century’s most significant cultural and political movements from hippy counterculture to feminism, punk to the miners strike, avant-garde theatre to anti-apartheid.