From snarls to smiles in 99 miles

“They wouldn’t have been from Chorleywood,” says the girl in the florist’s dismissively when I suggest the reason everyone is happy here is because they’re all getting off with each other in Astras. “They would have been from Sarratt,” she deduces. “They have a swingers’ club up there.”

None of this gets me any closer to explaining why this small, unassuming town in a damp ditch at the southern tip of Hertfordshire beat off 32,481 other neighbourhoods in England to win its accolade. The Department for Communities and Local Government used measures of income, health, disability, crime, employment and living standards to compile its Index of Multiple Deprivation, and Chorleywood came out top, or rather bottom. Lorraine from the newly opened interior design shop above the florist concludes it must be something in the water. As if to prove it, she does an impromptu can-can. It’s only half ten in the morning.

The two women in the pet shop look astonished when I tell them the good news. I ask if it’s because everyone has dogs (not counting Crufts, I’ve never seen so many dog-walkers in my life). It could be ... but no, they reckon it’s actually because all the men work in London. This is, after all, stockbroker belt, John Betjeman’s “essential Metroland”, a mere 30-minute train ride from Marylebone station. The men are away all day. Bliss.

The women left behind are “ladies who lunch”, agrees another woman in the florist’s. “They have the perfect lifestyle. There are hair salons, coffee shops and wine shops.” Melvyn, the butcher at WH Higgins (serving the people of Chorleywood since 1901), is equally surprised. “Money?” he suggests. “It could be money.” But there are far richer towns, I point out. “Well, this is a very strong community. We get a lot of support.”

Has there been no sign of recession in Chorleywood, I ask. “Well, I suppose people are leaving the steaks alone in the week,” says Melvyn.

Opposite the butcher’s, there is a sign outside the dentist’s surgery. It says, “Chorleywood Dental Practice. NHS patients welcome.” I’ve never seen anything like it. This must be the reason: a free dentist. This and the lovely spring flower baskets wrapped around every street lamp. And the council litter-picker I watch doing two laps of the town in five minutes, ready to nab the slightest piece of litter the second, the very second it’s dropped. And the fact that there was no queue at the post office.

Outside one of the coffee shops (no Starbucks here, or McDonald’s, it’s all independent; there was a chain betting shop but it shut due to lack of interest), two men in tweed discuss how they like to squeeze in a round of golf before going to work. They don’t look much like they’re at work yet, even though it’s getting on for lunchtime. They seem very relaxed. So do all the residents I meet, even the ones up at the golf club.

Golfers aren’t usually very relaxed. They’re usually red-faced and shouting, either at themselves, a golf ball, a bunker, another golfer or, more often, a dog-walker. Up at Chorleywood Golf Club — established 1890, once a favourite of prime ministers, bishops and Harrow headmasters — they’re all smiles. “We’re not snooty here,” says Rod Botham, the club secretary, over coffee. He claims his members even get on with the dog-walkers.

Why is everyone so happy here, I ask him, because the sheer amount of smiling is becoming quite unnerving, as if all the locals are in on a big secret. He puts it down to the price of housing: “You’ve got to be well-off to own here. There’s very little rented. We’re largely owner residential.”

Two hours and 99 miles east, the same cannot be said for the Brooklands estate at Jaywick Sands, the most deprived area in England, according to the survey. Chorleywood feels like a very long way from this unloved stretch of coast hanging off northeast Essex. It’s hard to believe we’re in the same country. Standing in front of a vandalised prefab hut, I see the words “Jaywick is s***” scrawled across the front door. This is not an overstatement.

They’re not called huts; they’re called chalets, which is optimistic even by estate agents’ standards. They were built in the 1930s as cheap, temporary holiday accommodation for Londoners. The place was a thriving resort until the 1960s, when those Londoners began to find better holiday options. Shops shut, work dried up and the “chalets” are now permanently inhabited by a strange mix of itinerants, the long-term unemployed and fiercely passionate residents such as Mick the taxi driver.

“I love it,” says Mick, who moved here voluntarily nine years ago. He can tell I’m shocked that anyone would move here of their own accord and admits it’s challenging. “But I love a challenge,” he says with a wide grin. His “chalet” is one of the better ones. It’s not burnt out. It has windows rather than boards. It doesn’t have an abandoned sofa or an exploded caravan in its yard as others do. He has a fine sea view, but still, there are no flower boxes around, and the street lights don’t work (“It’s fine, I like the stars”).

Matt Rudd found that Jaywick lived up to its title of Most Deprived Area (Jeremy Young)

The roads are “unadopted”, which means the council doesn’t have to take responsibility for them. It also means I will never complain about the potholes on my road again. More worryingly, the alleys that run between the roads make the estate a burglar’s paradise. “Everyone knows who’s doing the robbing,” says Mick. “They get caught, they go to jail and they’re out a few days later.”

There’s one shell-suited family and a bored, tattooed man in the Broadway amusement arcade, but Tell’s Takeaway and Restaurant (offering Chinese and traditional food) is shut. A sign says: “Break in. Make my day,” which is service with a smile of a different sort. Further along, the sign promising “jellied eels and muscles [sic]” turns out to be only a sign. Apparently, there was never a shop attached.

By comparison, Chorleywood now seems like The Truman Show, a too-good-to-be-true town of coffee shops, butchers, fishmongers and grocers. Of course, we know there are deprived areas in England, but seeing the two extremes together is shocking.

In Chorleywood, people smile at you relentlessly from cars, adjacent pavements and far-flung fairways. In Jaywick, residents are more wary. Of those who will speak to me, most won’t be named. They talk with barely concealed fury at what they say is wilful neglect of the area. There have been endless promises from the local council, the county council, this government, the last government, but it never amounts to much. They blame the vandalism and crime on the high percentage of rented accommodation, bad landlords and worse tenants.

“Some of them just chuck their beer bottles straight out of their window,” says one resident. You wouldn’t get that in Chorleywood, and if you did, the litter-pickers would be on it.

“There’s only one thing worse than being skint and that’s looking skint,” says Mick, shaking his head, as we wander past yet another dilapidated hut. He shows an impressive knowledge of policies designed to lift places such as Jaywick out of their torpor. “In America, they have the philosophy that if a window gets broken, you fix it immediately. It stops more windows getting broken. That does not happen here.”

If anything, the residents of Jaywick are happy to have the dubious honour of winning Most Deprived Area in England 2011. They assume that now something will have to be done.

But they’re not getting their hopes up. They are used to the promised cash not making it this far. A couple of miles up the coast, Clacton is by no means the most beautiful beach resort in the world, but it has some of the newest traffic lights, cleanest streets and well-manicured gardens I’ve seen in a long while. It also has the sort of lovely new fountain that would make the people of Chorleywood jealous.

Why do they get all the money? Why don’t they share it out, I ask one Jaywick local. “It’s because Clacton is a through-road,” he says, as if it’s obvious. “But we’re at a dead end. We’re out of the way. No one notices us.”

In any other situation, that would count in its favour. The huts, sorry “chalets” (which go for just £40,000 compared to £1.2m for a detached four-bed in Chorleywood) are set on a quiet spit of land with views out across a beautiful reclaimed beach to the North Sea. At some point, you could imagine it “doing a Whitstable”. We’ll all be clamouring to weekend in Jaywick again, to eat “jellied eels and muscles”.

That day seems a long way off. Mick the taxi driver and Annie the mobility-scooter operator might love where they live with just as much enthusiasm as the people of Chorleywood, but they’re in the minority. On the way out, I stop in at the Never Say Die, an intimidating pub where men in singlets are playing pool malevolently. They’re probably really nice, but I’m not paid enough to ask them.

Instead, I ask the landlady why it’s called the Never Say Die, expecting a tale of gritty community spirit, perhaps even a David and Goliath battle against closure in the face of faceless bureaucratic opposition.

“It’s the ’orse,” says a man, ordering another pint of afternoon lager. “The Lester Piggott ’orse. Google it.” I leave after a sharp half.