What Went Wrong With Jaywick?

What went wrong with Jaywick? Today, our attention is on Jaywick, perhaps you can describe it as a sympathetic focus. Let’s travel to this formerly idyllic town of 5,000 residents that now has a terrible bout with misfortune. Those who lived in Jaywick several decades ago and its founding fathers will be saddened by the recent appearances of their dear city if they could see it. The recent coverage of the by-election in Clacton reveals certain ugly sides of this town that call out authorities and demand explanations. This also prompts a search into the past of the town with the goal of comparing the same with the present. All that begs the question, what went wrong with Jaywick? That’s the focus of this video. About Jaywick For the purpose of this video, it would be good to remind ourselves a bit about Jaywick. This is a coastal village located in the Tendring District of Essex some 3 kilometres west of Clacton-on-Sea. Lying on the North Sea coast of England, Jaywick is 97 kilometres from London and 27 kilometres from Colchester. It’s in the ward named Golf Green in north-east Essex. The town was an idea born in 1928 by developer Frank Stedman. It was built in 1930 as a holiday resort for Londoners. He had observed that Clacton was popular as a holiday resort and was convinced that if he could sell small plots to East End residents, holiday homes could be built there. Stedman convinced residents to buy land with plots being offered as little as 25 pounds, which would be equivalent to 1,600 pounds today. Buyers were even encouraged to self-build properties, as Stedman convinced buyers that a house could be built for as little as 395 pounds, which would be equivalent to 25,300 pounds today. What’s now Jaywick was initially fields and salt marshes not far from Clacton and St Osyth. Most shops in Jaywick are on Broadway Street. The Martello Tower on the coastline built over 200 years ago was later converted into an arts and heritage centre. Actually, the artwork, “46 Brooklands Gardens,” made by Nathan Coley was erected there as a three-month showpiece. Little did Stedman know that his dream town would over time be officially named the most deprived in the country. Initially, the emphasis was on well-being, health, and fitness. Outdoor exercises were popular among residents of the new town. However, Stedman was primarily motivated by money rather than altruism while planning this town. That could be part of the reasons his plans for landscaping the development, a lake, and a sports centre, never materialised. And this can also be a hint as to what actually went wrong with Jaywick. The Origin of the Woes We’ll be assisted to better appreciate the predicament of this town if we realize where it’s coming from. Thus, let’s go back the memory lane a bit. Architectural writers and teachers have seized upon Jaywick especially, to illustrate the horrors of uncontrolled development and the charm that can be inherent in an indigenous vernacular of makeshift design. No wonder the teachers of architecture at Oxford Polytechnic used it to illustrate structuring one’s own environment in defiance of authority. The architectural critic Sutherland Lyall says Jaywick doesn’t represent a shanty town jerry-building. Rather, it’s a figure of an indigenous British paradigm of the 20th-century bricoleurs’ direct response to their exigent circumstances. Frank Stedman in 1928 had freehold plots of land sold off to Londoners and Essex residents one by one. Since the intent was to build holiday homes only for use at weekends or in the summer, the buyers mostly put up wooden chalets and huts. In fact, they were often built by the families that bought them. The early photographs of the town show a town quite dense from the start. Towards the middle of the 20th century, there was some hostility to Jaywick from Clacton Council. Thus, the town received a direct blow when the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act halted the development of new plot land buildings across the country. Intensifying the blow, along with other east coast sites, was the North Sea flood of 1953 that claimed 307 lives in the UK. Some 37 of these were in Jaywick alone, though other East Coast sites suffered similarly. PHOTO CREDIT https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F... ✅ For business inquiries, contact me at [email protected] IMPORTANT INFORMATION This video contains images that were used under a Creative Commons License. If you have any issue with the photos used in my channel or you find something that belongs to you before you claim it to YouTube, please SEND ME A MESSAGE and I will DELETE it immediately. Thanks for understanding.