Jaywick Sands Happy Club
WIP - 2025
An ongoing project celebrating community resilience and representation in the Essex village of Jaywick, whilst exploring the issues and links between climate change and Reform UK.
Jaywick Sands Happy Club
“I hate the word deprived…” Volunteer at Jaywick Sands Revival Foodbank.
Frequently reported as ‘Britain’s most deprived village’, Jaywick has an infamous reputation for poverty and social issues, which is regularly highlighted through documentaries and YouTube videos ‘exploring’ the village.
I never planned to create a project about Jaywick and first visited the area after walking from Clacton whilst investigating the constituencies voting for the Reform UK party.
As I nervously wandered along the beach towards the village, the negative representation of Jaywick I had seen online chimed in my head. I took bleak photos of fly-tipped furniture, whilst a local kindly informed me that cameras were not welcome on many of Jaywick’s streets. Another girl zooming past on a scooter was less polite about it.
On this first trip, I met Robbo, who asked if I was from the press. I explained confusedly, ‘kind of… sometimes’, and that I was here visiting the areas that voted for Reform to try to understand why. Robbo explained that despite what I may have read about Jaywick, his experience of the village was not what was generally represented and that it has a thriving community that he felt was reminiscent of London 30 years ago. He said that there was a culture of care within the community, but also a sense of humour and a spirit of fun, which could be best observed at one of Jaywick’s many karaoke nights. He invited me to see for myself at a karaoke party he was hosting.
A few days later, I took a deep breath and walked into the Broadway Club. Robbo announced my arrival over the speakers whilst giving me a wink: “you’ve just seen Dave walk in. He is a journalist, he is a Charlton fan, but don’t beat him up.”
Jaywick sits on the Essex coastline of England, facing out to the North Sea on the UK’s eastern frontier. Two miles west of Clacton, the town was built in the 1930s as a holiday destination for predominantly East End Londoners. Today, many of the Jaywickians I have met moved to the village from London after spending their holidays there as youths. After the Second World War, the holiday homes became permanent residences despite not being built for this purpose. In 1983, Clacton Butlins was closed, removing most of the jobs that the local population relied on.
Today, Jaywick has a population of approximately 5,000, of which 97% are ethnically white and 38% are in the 65+ age group (over double the national average) in the 2021 census. The village regularly tops the ‘most deprived area’ list in the UK, with around 62% of the population living on some form of benefits.
In 2018, Nick Stella, a Republican politician campaigning for Trump, used an image of a Jaywick street with the words: “Only you can stop this from becoming a reality. Help President Trump keep America on track and thriving.”
In the 2024 election, Nigel Farage became MP on his eighth election attempt for the Clacton-on- Sea constituency, of which Jaywick sits within. A last-minute entry to the election race, Farage, as leader and then owner of the Reform UK party, ousted local Jaywickian Tony Mack, who had been successfully campaigning for Reform for months.