The village where 22-year-old Millicent has lived all her whole life is often her most closely guarded secret – at least until first impressions have been established. “It’s almost like a superpower,” she says. “I wait until people are comfortable with me, and then I’ll do the big reveal.”

It doesn’t matter where she goes, the story is always the same. “I’ll go to meet new friends and at some point I’ll tell them I’m from Jaywick,” says Millicent. “And it’s as if they go through the five stages of grief. They’ll say: ‘Oh, you’re not … oh, I’m so sorry’.”

If the name Jaywick sounds familiar, that may be because it is frequently cited as the most deprived place in England and was once the focus of the notorious Channel 5 TV series Benefits by the Sea. In more recent times it has become the favoured destination of YouTubers making mini-documentaries with titles such as Inside England’s Most Deprived Town: The Truth.

Does the negativity bother her? “It’s like a love-hate relationship,” she says. “On one hand, there’s not much here. But you saw me come out of my house – it’s right on the seafront. I just love that.”

• Kyle, Matt and Finn at Jaywick’s Martello Tower, now an arts site

Jaywick, a once-thriving seaside village with golden sands that began to fall into disrepair in the 1950s, has long been maligned by outsiders. But many residents, including Millicent, have frequently been documented over the years trying to set the record straight.

“It’s got such a nice community, and I don’t feel like the one or two bad people should be used to represent everyone,” she says.

What is without doubt, however, is the lack of local employment for those who grew up here and would like to stay. Jobseekers head to nearby Clacton, Harwich or beyond – that is, if they can get there.

Over the next year, the Against the Tide project from the Guardian’s Seascape team will be reporting on the lives of young people in coastal communities across England and Wales.

Young people in many of England's coastal towns are disproportionately likely to face poverty, poor housing, lower educational attainment and employment opportunities than their peers in equivalent inland areas. In the most deprived coastal towns they can be left to struggle with crumbling and stripped-back public services and transport that limit their life choices.

For the next 12 months, accompanied by the documentary photographer Polly Braden, we will travel up and down the country to port towns, seaside resorts and former fishing villages to ask 16- to 25-year-olds to tell us about their lives and how they feel about the places they live. 

By putting their voices at the front and centre of our reporting, we want to examine what kind of changes they need to build the futures they want for themselves. 

“It’s gotten to the point now where the bus service is so reduced that in some areas it’s actually stopped running because the roads are so bad,” says Millicent.

She has a fine arts degree from the University Centre Colchester, which makes her one of only 13% of people in Jaywick with a qualification higher than A-levels.

But at the moment, that is not enough to get her where she wants to be. “I have applied for 160 jobs in the last six months,” she says. “And my search area is getting ever wider.”

• Millicent finishes work at the Dovercourt holiday park, where she is an member of the activities team. She also volunteers at an arts centre in Colchester to use her degree

Currently, she works for Park Holidays, which operates several caravan parks along the nearby coastline. She is running art workshops for children but that ends in November, when the park closes to tourists, and then her options locally are close to zero.

The problem of finding long-term work is a familiar one in many seaside towns along Britain’s coastline where jobs, like the one Millicent has, often only last as long as the holidaymakers’ visits.

• The ferris wheel at Clacton Pier. Like many of the coastal towns, it has some of the most deprived areas in the Tendring district

Twenty miles further up the coast in Harwich, Hayley Lovett runs Teen Talk, a charity that offers counselling and support to 11 to 25-year-olds and their families in the Tendring area.

Tendring is the name of the wider district, which includes Harwich, Jaywick and other coastal towns such as Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton and Walton-on-the-Naze. Of its 89 neighbourhoods, 25 are among the 20% most deprived in England, according to the ONS, and 33% of people aged 16-64 do not work and are not looking for work (compared with about 20% for the region, England and the country as a whole). Jaywick was ranked as England’s most deprived neighbourhood in a 2019 government study.

Many of those who use Teen Talk’s services are looking for work locally, Lovett says.

“As a community visited regularly by holidaymakers, there are plenty of roles in hospitality and retail that rely on customer-facing roles,” she says. “But not all young people want this kind of work. Some with neurodiverse needs or anxiety, for example, shy away from these customer-facing roles, so this is limiting their opportunities.”

The area’s ageing population adds to the challenge of being young in Tendring. The average age in the area is 50, considerably higher than the national average of 40. Between the last two censuses in 2011 and 2021, the number of people aged 65 to 74 rose by 19%.

This is something that really irks 21-year old Kyle, who believes that the council is run “by over-50s for over-50s”.

Kyle works at We Are Music, the charity that he helps run with his friends Finn, Will and Toby (and Nigel, Finn’s grandad).“They are saying we need plants and flowers in parks, and we’re saying can you just give us something to do. The problem is we’ve never had a say.”

• Finn performs stunts on his scooter over Kyle at the Harwich skatepark, where the pair spent much of their childhood

Kyle left school without any qualifications but joined We Are Music as a child and now earns a wage from teaching through it (as well as playing in a band, Voyage, that was formed through the project).

Thanks to funding from a number of different sources, the charity offers free band lessons to children from eight to 18, as well as running free programmes in 15 primary schools and two secondary schools in Tendring.

“What they’ve done for me growing up: they gave me somewhere to go, they gave me a safe space,” he says. “If I ever had any problems, I knew that music was my escape.”

Living in an older community is also something that resonates with 21-year-old Jake, who “for better or worse” has lived in Harwich his whole life. The town, in his view, is not a place for “wild imaginations and dreams”.

• Jake, 21, who wants to perform, says: ‘I want to do what Harwich can’t provide … there’s no real theatre here’.

“I’ve wanted to be a performer on the stage for quite some time,” he says. “And as I said to all of my teachers in high school, I want to do what Harwich can’t provide since, well, there’s no real theatre here in Harwich.”

He joined a local theatre group where, among other roles, he played “a germaphobe who wouldn’t let anyone near him” in the Alan Bennett play Habeas Corpus.

He was a little embarrassed by the play, he says, as he felt it was not something suited to his age group.

“Since it was very old in style, the things that were said in the production you can’t really get away with in this day and age, but you had to say them,” Jake says.

Lovett says she has noticed that the young people coming to her over the years are socialising less and less.

“The availability of youth centres in the rural pockets of Tendring has dwindled due to a severe lack of funding, and there are fewer free safe spaces for young people to come and enjoy activities,” she says. “The question needs to be: how can we meet this need of creating safe spaces for young people, and what would they want to come to?”

Back in Jaywick, Tommy and Luke are brothers from the nearby village of St Osyth, meet us on the beach with smiles on both their faces. Tommy, 17, loves living by the sea and thinks Jaywick does not get a fair press.

• Brothers Tommy, 17, and Luke, 19

“People should come over and have a look for themselves what’s here,” he says. “It’s quite nice growing up near the sea, because if you live in a city you can smell the pollution but here you get lots of fresh air. I like to put headphones on and listen to music while I walk along the sand.”

The boys have formed a band, Bloom, through We Are Music and they meet to practise in Jaywick every Tuesday. Kyle says when he first met them they were painfully shy.

“Being in a band has helped massively with my confidence,” says Luke, 19. “With live shows I felt almost like I couldn’t do it but every time you do, it just gets a bit easier.”

• The band Voyage, which grew out of We Are Music. From left: Maisy, 18; Drew, 19; Tom, 18; Kyle, 21; Oliver, 18; Matt, 19; and Finn, 18

A local arts organisation has provided Millicent with a form of respite, as well as a chance to boost her skills. She attends weekly gatherings at Yak – the Young Art Kommunity, a peer-led group that organises events and activities through Firstsite, a visual arts centre in Colchester.

“We put on exhibitions, run paid workshops and do volunteer work with festivals,” she says. It often means she is working six or seven days a week but she has no complaints. “I’ve been very grateful because I’ve had the opportunity to pursue what I really want to do through Yak. I just hope one day soon it will help give me that foot in the door that I need.”

• The Against the Tide series is a collaboration between the Guardian and the documentary photographer Polly Braden