David J Shaw Finds Community, Not Misery, in Jaywick

David J Shaw's ongoing series Jaywick Sands Happy Club began with one photograph of fly-tipped furniture that its author now calls "problematic" — and ends, so far, with a book contract at Dewi Lewis Publishing and a Kickstarter campaign to bring it to print. In between lies a year spent sleeping in a converted van, three to five nights a week, in the Essex village designated England's "most deprived neighbourhood" for the fourth consecutive year.

Shaw arrived in Jaywick in January 2025, anxious. The village sits in Clacton, the constituency of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and its grim headlines had drawn journalists hunting for misery and YouTubers hunting for cheap clips. "I wasn't comfortable," he remembers. "At that point I didn't really want to work there, because I didn't want to make a project about deprivation."

How did a karaoke party change the story?

Enter Robbo. A retired youth worker of around 60, he struck up a conversation off the back of Shaw's Charlton Athletic FC shirt, one photograph into the visit. "He said to me, 'Don't worry about what you read about Jaywick. I run a karaoke party, why don't you come and have a look?'" A few weeks later, at the Broadway Club, Robbo announced the newcomer over the speakers with a wink: "That's Dave, he's a journalist, he's a Charlton fan, don't beat him up."

By the end of the night Shaw had a long list of markets, youth clubs and birthday parties to photograph. "Everyone was proud of Jaywick, and proud of being from there," he says. "Quite quickly my idea of the place completely changed."

Shaw lives roughly two hours away, so he bought the van and commuted weekly. The resulting work is warm and specific rather than statistical. He photographed young women dancing at a winter dance hosted by Sonny's Army, a charity supporting families of children with long-term illness, and made portraits of local figures including community activist Danny Sloggett and Linda McGarry, once a regular on the TV show Gogglebox. One image shows Bethany modelling local designer Ieda Lima's clothing on the sea wall in the Brooklands area; another captures Jack and David at Elika and Suzanne's wedding. Many residents, Shaw says, compare the community spirit to the East End of decades ago.

What's behind the 'most deprived' label?

Jaywick was built in the 1930s as a holiday destination for Londoners. When the Butlin's resort closed in the 1980s, the jobs largely went with it. Today the village has a population of about 5,000, with 62 per cent living on some form of government benefit — the statistic that in part earned it the "most deprived" designation. The label travels oddly far: one of Shaw's images documents how, in 2018, the Republican politician Nick Stella used a Jaywick street in a Trump-campaign advertisement bearing the words "Only you can stop this from becoming a reality."

Earlier this year Shaw spent nine days in Jaywick on assignment for Der Spiegel, working with a German journalist who pointed out that labelling a place "most deprived" can vilify it. Shaw, who holds an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography from London College of Communication, took the point to heart. "When I look back at that first picture of the fly-tipped furniture, I realise how problematic it is," he says now.

He is careful not to dismiss the village's real social issues. The aim, he says, is nuance: "They say Jaywick is deprived because there isn't loads of money flying around. But it's rich in community."

Alongside the Dewi Lewis book, Shaw is setting up a programme to encourage young people in Jaywick to think about representation — handing the camera, in effect, to the people the headlines have been misquoting for four years running.