When Clacton-on-Sea, a seaside town in North East Essex, became the first parliamentary constituency gained by UKIP in 2014, it came as little surprise to me. Douglas Carswell, who had been a sitting Tory since 2010 before defecting to UKIP that same year, won the seat by a significant margin of 57.9 percent.

Clacton-on-Sea is the district home to Jaywick Sands, a village that had been consistently regarded as Britain’s most impoverished community for much of the decade prior to Carswell’s election. Either due to its longstanding reputation or the tourism it attracts, Jaywick might ring a bell: its representation in the mainstream press has been discriminatory, often veering between class prejudice and poverty porn. Over the last two years, it has also been featured in the news after Tendring council poured £2.5 million into developing a housing revival in Jaywick, in a bid to tackle its longstanding deprivation. In March this year, ten of the homes developed went on sale, despite reservations by the residents.

I grew up on a council estate in Colchester, a town adjacent to Clacton-on-Sea. As a teenager, I spent time in Jaywick and its atmosphere still lingers with me. I remember the one-story chalets that lined each lane, often decaying or sometimes burnt out and windowless. These were adjacent to washed-out, grey, wooden panelled houses, wound around by concrete, uneven, narrow lanes which often became waterlogged. On the beach, bleached cafes sagged alongside blue-faded fish and chip shops and derelict arcades. Yet despite its neglect, most residents I knew gave Jaywick life and colour.

In the early twentieth century, Jaywick’s story was quite different. Originally salt marshes, it was first developed in 1928 by entrepreneur Frank Stedman as a business venture. The still-standing chalets were created by Stedman as short-term holiday dwellings for working-class families from East London, on one of the many ‘plotlands’ developed before and after the Second World War. Plotlands were small sections of land sold for self-built ‘small dwellings’, predominantly in the South East of England. Most of these plotlands had been bulldozed by the mid-1950s, but in Jaywick they continued to be lived in.

After the Second World War, in the face of the rise of severe housing shortages, these chalets became permanent homes for workers. Without ensuring that proper electricity and plumbing were installed, and in the absence of a town’s usual infrastructure, Jaywick was founded on precarity and risk. There were consistent warnings of floods and dampness due to it being at sea-level and on a floodplain, and during serious flooding in 1953, Jaywick’s tide rose to 18.4 feet above sea level, killing 35 people and almost submerging the one-story dwellings. Today, if a tidal surge ensued in the nearby marshes of St Osyth, there could—as there was in 2013—be mass evacuations of residents.

Like many seaside towns in the 1960s which felt the burnout of local tourism in the face of cheap European holidays, Jaywick and Clacton also experienced a rapid decline in visitors. Coupled with its lack of social mobility and substandard housing, Jaywick continued to be forgotten and neglected by local authorities, residing in a state of decay. My teenage friends from Jaywick were ridiculed for where they lived, told—in a Thatcherite tone—to pull their socks up and make their lives better.

After Carswell’s 2014 win, mainstream media coverage considered Jaywick fertile ground for UKIP to blossom. After Carswell didn’t stand for re-election in 2017, Tory MP Giles Watling won back Clacton for the Conservatives – a seat which remains uncontested. As of 2019, 57 percent of residents received financial support from the state. Tendring district and Essex County councillor Paul Honeywood claims the new development will ‘improve the quality of housing, attract investment and jobs’. Yet the current housing, which is catastrophically impractical, demonstrates the continuing neglect of deprived areas and the continuation of unregulated leasing practices across the country.

Marketed at £200,000 each, the new properties are over twice the price of Jaywick’s £60,000 average home. Despite five of the homes being made ‘affordable’ to residents, this is still dependent on them passing credit regulations and having stable employment. A 9,500 square foot market also will be constructed along with these new houses, thirteen business units, a community garden, and ‘hard landscaping’ next to the seafront.

In theory, all of this sounds great. But it doesn’t seem likely these new homes would responsibly integrate—or consider—the livelihoods and realities of long-term residents who have suffered at the hands of systematic neglect and years of underinvestment and austerity.

Many of the original homes built in the early twentieth century remain privately rented, and with little council ownership, the houses have felt the brunt of long-term neglect and the deregulation of renters’ rights. In this climate, Jaywick has become a breeding ground for landlords to eat up housing benefits while renting out badly maintained properties, with no repercussions or prosecution and vulnerable tenants at their mercy. With little ethical intervention from the Tendring district council in the maintenance of the chalets, the new homes will merely sit alongside the systemic housing issues many long-term residents still live in.

It is important not to frame Jaywick as a place that doesn’t have residential pride: many of those I knew from Jaywick were incredibly proud of their area but wanted better living conditions and social opportunities. There are several reports in which residents express their dissatisfaction about the development, as the new buildings block out sunlight, are unaffordable, and don’t address longstanding issues in the community. The houses are poorly placed and loom large over the longstanding housing for residence; it is the smoothing over of longstanding issues of neglect that has generated friction in the community, instead of a disregard for Jaywick itself.

Generating material change for residents means tracing the longstanding political neglect of Jaywick. Marketed at nearly triple the price of older homes, the new development offers little material alternative to those with a long-term home. My memories of this seaside village—desolate and forgotten—differ from the optimism and promise the new development claims to generate for Jaywick. I remain suspicious of the plan’s ability to genuinely tackle the long-term neglect endured for decades by the residents of the town, for whom Jaywick remains, quite rightly, home.