The rundown coastal location of Jaywick in Essex has received a lot of flak during the recent Clacton byelection, as officially the most deprived area in England. But that doesn’t mean it can’t inspire poetry - in particular, a poem installed around the base of the local Martello tower, built as one of a series around the eastern and southern coasts to deter Napoleonic forces two centuries ago.

The poet behind the project was Julia Bird, who was commissioned by Essex county council. She said: “I didn't know the area at all before I became involved. I'm from a landlocked county (Gloucestershire) and when we went to the beach as kids, we'd always go west or south, never try and battle through London to go east. The commission was part of a regeneration process for the region. The area round the tower is full of chalets that used to be holiday lets for 1930s East Enders, but now they're inhabited permanently. There's not much infrastructure to support the residents, and life can be hard there.”

She added: “The last thing that anyone who lives in Jaywick needed was a blow-in London poet to come and impose her ideas permanently in the landscape, so I worked closely with community groups in relationships brokered by the tower team to draw out thoughts and ideas to work with.”

She also wrote a poem about the Red Arrows poem while at the two-day Clacton airshow, which you can see from Jaywick beach. “It’s full of direct comments and reports from the people I was talking to, including my favourite: the little boy who said he wanted to learn to be a Red Arrow so he could write his mum's name in smoke.

“The main poem - the one that's now round the bottom of the tower - is written in concrete, not smoke. You can only read it if you walk round the whole tower clockwise, which felt very spell-like to me. Jaywick is at risk from the encroaching sea, the ghosts of Napoleon's forces, and the economic forces which have caused it to be such a deprived area. The idea is that every tower visitor who follows the poem round is casting the same spell of protection.”

She explains in her blog about the poem that the stanza lengths  - one line, two lines, three lines, two lines, one line -  correspond to the stepped design of the reclaimed timber pathway that circles the tower, which “stands in concentric rings of wooden walkway, gravel, concrete poem and wildflowers, like ripples. In between the words are stamped the regimental badges of the soldiers who were garrisoned in the tower in the early 1800s.”

 

Take a turn about the tower.

 

Follow in the bootsteps of the soldiers who came here

to guard the sea, to keep the coast clear.

 

Through summer’s heat and winter’s gales

soldiers, staunch as brick-built walls,

watched the horizon, watched out for sails.

 

A circle protects what’s yours to defend:

to walk this path is to stand your ground.

 

Follow the soldiers, follow them round.

 

Julia commented: “It's not often I find a job that combines the two halves of my poetry brain - I'm either organising projects for the Poetry School or as a freelancer, or I'm writing - but this one was the perfect mixture of poetry organising and poetry writing.”