Southchurch Access

Essex House was another office servicing Access within Southend - constituting Lloyds Bank's Access facilities. The building was originally constructed around 1978, and had a smoked glass effect exterior. Some time later it was re-clad with white metal panels.

From discussions on the Ros Southend Past in Photos Facebook group, it seems that during strong gales, entire panes of glass used to fall out of the building - this may have had some influence over the re-cladding.

From the time of it's build, until around the mid-1980s, Essex House was the site of the Disaster Recovery (backup) computer suite for the Access mainframe platform - the production/main suite being in Priory Crescent. When JCCC moved into the Basildon premises in the mid 1980s, the Disaster Recovery machine was moved to Basildon, with production remaining in Southend until the early 2000s.

Lloyds finally moved out in 2013, initially to offices in Chelmsford before consolidating all of their credit card operations in London.

We Made It! Essex House Refurbishment Commemorative Brochure

Since asking questions on Ros' Southend Facebook Page, about when Essex House was re-clad, Stew Mills has donated a huge amount of Access documentation to this archive. One such item is the brochure below, not only giving exact dates for refurbishment, but also detailing the different phases, as well as many of the problems they faced during the process.