Jaywick Sands Happy Club

WIP - 2025

An on-going project celebrating community resilience and representation in the Essex village of Jaywick, whilst exploring the issues and links between climate change and Reform UK.
For more information, a PDF portfolio or for any other questions about this project please contact me on davidjshawphoto@gmail.com.

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.

Sitting in the Broadway Club on Jaywick’s main street listening to locals sing cockney classics like ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, David Proust, who works as chief frier in a local chippy, tells me how proud he is to be from Jaywick. Others, such as JB, I realised are not from the town but visit regularly for a night of karaoke.

As the night progressed and the singing became more slurred, I felt relaxed photographing and chatting in the non-judgmental atmosphere. Towards the end of the night, Robbo calls for me over the speakers after Amanda had slipped him a song request with my name on it. It was my turn to sing, and my out-of-tune rendition of Madness - ‘Night Boat to Cairo’, went down well.

That week, I bought a converted van to live in and have dedicated as much time as possible to photographing Jaywick and its community. My policy has been to say yes to everything people invite me to photograph. This has led me to experiences such as visiting the caravans in St Osyth, the Miss Jaywick competition, country dancing, a local fashion show, the famous Danny Slogett’s 50th birthday party, attending the Jaywick Sands Happy Club and of course, lots of karaoke.

There is an intense media interest in Jaywick.

Googling the name of the town presents a long list of YouTube films supposedly exploring ‘Britain’s most deprived area’. These YouTubers make brief visits that often continue the narrative of Jaywick being a broken place. Many feature images of boarded-up houses, cracked roads and fly-tipped furniture.

“We’ve all been caught out by it at least once”, says Davina, the landlady of Jaywick’s Never Say Die pub, in reference to feeling tricked into recording interviews for films that then show the town negatively.

It made me think of that original trip to Jaywick, with my camera hidden under my arm. Perhaps I was caught out by ‘it’ as well. As I met and got to know the community, I learned how well-versed in media representation issues many Jaywickians are. Many would enquire about my angle, asking me not to ‘bash’ the town whilst criticising the negativity they see in the many YouTube videos.

Josie explained to me that GB News did a piece about the food bank where she was volunteering. In her interview, she gave praise to Jaywick and how far it has come, this was subsequently cut from the film. According to Josie, the report focused on a mother at the food bank, introducing her as a ‘single mother’ to then speak about her poverty.

“Why couldn’t she just be called Jane?” asks Josie.

In response to this issue of how Jaywickians feel represented, I put on an interim exhibition of the project. This was done in the Broadway Club, where many of the photos had been taken. There were feedback forms, both physical and anonymous online, and I was there for the full three days available for a chat. In the spirit of openness and trust - the idea of this was so that the townspeople represented by me in these images could let me know what they felt about it, at a point where I was still making the project.

To see more of the exhibition please go to my instagram here.

‘Jaywick Sands Happy Club’ is the name of the club run by the unofficial spokesperson of the village - Danny Sloggett. Danny is the port of call for most media persons working in Jaywick, and he and his neighbours have appeared in many films and documentaries over the years. Danny is a community activist and attempts to utilise the media interest to shine a positive light on Jaywick.

He also set up the Happy Club, a monthly meeting for anyone to be social and speak about and respond to many of Jaywick’s issues. For myself, Jaywick Sands Happy Club refers to more than just Danny’s club. Most of my experiences in Jaywick that I have been photographing have included some form of social help or community support. Obvious examples of this include the various food banks and free meals run by predominantly women volunteers and charity fundraisers like the Miss Jaywick Competition. However, less obvious examples include venues such as the Never Say Die Pub and Golf Green Hall, which both put on events that allow many Jaywickians to be with their community and offer an active social calendar, and the karaoke events, which give a fun and safe place for some of Jaywick’s vulnerable to come and listen to, and maybe sing, songs from their youth.

Two Martello towers sit on either side of Jaywick. Built in the 18th century to protect England from the French, they now sit behind large seawalls, protecting them from the rising ocean. Jaywick suffered enormously during the 1953 North Sea Flood, with 35 people losing their lives. Climate change-related sea level rise is predicted to negatively affect Jaywick, and a new £12 million seawall was finished in 2024 to help provide flood protection.

Jaywick has long felt like a frontier, and the support of the modern concept of fortress Britain is demonstrated by the election of MP Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party. Whilst shifting the blame to immigration for the problems faced by many in the UK, Reform also wants to get rid of net-zero climate change goals, pledging to allow further drilling for North Sea gas and oil. A move that would speed up the effects of climate change, although supposedly, as argued by Reform, would decrease fuel and energy bills across the UK.

If you are reading this far down the page - Thank You!!
‘Jaywick Sands Happy Club’ - book coming soon.

David J Shaw