Photographer David J Shaw Reframes Jaywick, England's 'Most Deprived' Village

Jaywick has been named England's "most deprived neighbourhood" for the fourth consecutive year — and photographer David J Shaw has spent much of 2025 proving that the label misses most of the story.

Shaw first arrived in the Essex village, in Clacton — the constituency of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage — in January 2025. He came anxious, camera tucked under his arm. The deprivation headlines had drawn troughs of unwanted attention: nosey journalists hunting stories and YouTubers chasing cheap clips.

"I wasn't comfortable," Shaw remembers. "At that point I didn't really want to work there, because I didn't want to make a project about deprivation."

How a karaoke party changed the project

Shaw had walked down the high street and taken a single photograph of fly-tipped furniture when Robbo, a retired youth worker of around 60, struck up a conversation off the back of Shaw's Charlton Athletic FC shirt. "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, Shaw turned up at the Broadway Club. Robbo announced him 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," Shaw says. "Quite quickly my idea of the place completely changed."

What did it take to build the story?

Shaw lives around two hours away, so he bought a converted van and slept in Jaywick every week, three to five nights at a time. He pieced the community together slowly. He photographed young women at a winter dance hosted by Sonny's Army, a charity supporting families of children with long-term illness. He made portraits of 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 during Elika and Suzanne's wedding.

Many residents, Shaw says, compare Jaywick's community spirit to the East End of decades ago.

The village itself was built in the 1930s as a holiday destination for Londoners. When the Butlin's resort closed in the 1980s, many jobs disappeared. Today Jaywick has roughly 5,000 residents, with 62 per cent living on some form of government benefit — the statistic that in part earned it the "most deprived" designation.

Earlier this year Shaw spent nine days there on assignment for Der Spiegel, alongside a German journalist who argued that labelling a place "most deprived" can vilify it. The point stuck.

What comes next?

Shaw, who holds an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography from London College of Communication, is now preparing a book, Jaywick Sands Happy Club, to be published by Dewi Lewis Publishing and currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. He is also setting up a programme encouraging young people in Jaywick to think about representation.

"When I look back at that first picture of the fly-tipped furniture, I realise how problematic it is," he says. None of this, he adds, diminishes the village's real social issues — the goal is nuance. "They say Jaywick is deprived because there isn't loads of money flying around. But it's rich in community."