The Architecture of British Seaside Piers E-Book

Fred Gray

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Of all the architectural delights of British seaside resorts, the most astonishing and idiosyncratic is the seaside pier. Remarkable visual spectacles, piers are architecturally extraordinary in concept and at times outrageous in execution. They brought together the Victorian genius for technological and material innovation, architectural ambition and engineering ingenuity in the search for new designs for leisure (as well as profit) over the sea. This superbly illustrated book explores the history of the design processes leading to the architectural and engineering innovations that have allowed people to walk on water in such diverse and delightful ways. Coverage includes the development of piers into the crowning architectural glory of British seaside resorts; the key people, materials, inventions and technologies in the field, particularly the work of Eugenius Birch, the greatest pier designer; the remarkable diversity of piers ranging from the earliest simple landing stages, through staid promenade piers and the glories of fully-fledged pleasure piers, to the boisterous joys of funfair and amusement piers; the rich variety of architectural styles, including exotic 'Orientalism' and streamlined Modernism and, finally, today's contemporary prospects for renewal and reinvention.

Leseprobe

THE ARCHITECTUREOF BRITISHSEASIDE PIERS

Llandudno Pier, May 2013. (Fred Gray)

THE ARCHITECTUREOF BRITISHSEASIDE PIERS

FRED GRAY

First published in 2020 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2020

© Fred Gray 2020

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 714 9

Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge the holders of the copyright of the illustrations used in this book. The author and publisher would be pleased to hear from copyright holders concerning any error or omission.

For CG, JHG and HKLG

Contents

Preface }

Chapter 1 } Walking on Water: Introducing British Seaside Piers

Chapter 2 } Making Piers: People, Materials and Techniques

Chapter 3 } Agreeable Promenades and Pioneer Piers

Chapter 4 } Revolution: Iron Takes Over

Chapter 5 } The Golden Age of Seaside Piers

Chapter 6 } Piers and the Sunny Seaside

Chapter 7 } The Rollercoaster Years

Chapter 8 } Prospect

References }

Further Reading }

Acknowledgements }

Index }

Preface

My earliest vivid pier experience was during a holiday to the Isle of Wight one summer in the late 1950s. My older brother and I hired a pedalo from Shanklin beach (or perhaps from the neighbouring resort of Sandown). Too young to control the unfamiliar vessel we got stuck amid the struts, ties and braces under the pier. Much to the amusement of the spectators peering over the railings above, the pier’s performing diver climbed down to rescue us. The details are hazy and just perhaps more imagination than accurate memory.

Living and working in Brighton from the mid-1970s, the town’s two piers provided a fascinating architectural backdrop whenever I visited the seafront. More significantly much of my teaching for the University of Sussex’s Centre for Continuing Education was about the seaside and seaside architecture, past and present. Adult students throughout Sussex shared my increasing passion for the subject and I benefited greatly from their knowledge and experiences. Teaching led to research, writing and organizing exhibitions about seaside architecture. Holidays and working visits abroad revealed intriguing new dimensions about the nature and shape of coastal built form in other parts of the world. When from the mid-1990s I became honorary historian and archivist for the Brighton West Pier Trust, I came to understand much more about the life history of one remarkable pier.

Blackpool North Pier, June 2018. (Fred Gray)

Across the decades since my pedalo adventure my personal and professional pier experiences have, of course, been shaped by broader social and economic changes to the seaside holiday and seaside resorts. The extraordinary architectural and engineering confections that make for the best of seaside piers have reflected these societal developments. And yet seaside piers have provided countless individuals with deeply personal memories and experiences; in this sense piers have as many meanings as there are people who have walked on the decks above the waves.

I was delighted when The Crowood Press asked me to write a book about the architecture of seaside piers. The task was more demanding than I originally envisaged, taking me on unanticipated excursions including, for example, the entwining of architecture with other aspects of design and engineering.

The book that follows does not provide an architectural history of all of Britain’s seaside piers: it would be impossible to do so. Some piers are mentioned briefly if at all. Instead the approach taken here is to focus on broader themes in the architecture of seaside piers, illuminating these trends, developments and changes over more than two centuries, with examples from specific piers at particular times. Much has depended on the (often uneven) information available. My favourite pier, Brighton West, has provided a touchstone allowing me to contrast what happened there with piers in other places.

Piers are made for enjoyment, and the intention of this book is to explore the design processes and their consequences that have allowed people to walk on water in such diverse and delightful ways.

Chapter One

WALKING ON WATER: INTRODUCING BRITISH SEASIDE PIERS

BEGINNINGS

Of all the architectural delights of the British seaside, the most astonishing and idiosyncratic is the seaside pier. Often providing a remarkable visual spectacle, piers also represent an extraordinary architectural and engineering feat.

Piers are rooted on dry land but then take an intrepid journey across the seashore and out over the sea. The architecture and engineering of piers is often extreme and often outrageous. The hostile and marginal coastal zone presents unique challenges of making a structure that is safe, secure and sustainable. But piers also need to lure visitors to venture on a journey over the sea and away from land-based entertainments. The architectural challenge has been to make piers ‘must see’ and ‘must experience’ attractions.

Dreams of pleasure, past and present. The Palace Pier and West Pier, Brighton, April 2011. (Fred Gray)

The essential foundations of all piers are piles, fixed into the shore and seabed, designed to provide security and support for the structure above. The piles are part of the substructure, of columns and arches, ties and braces, girders and associated lattice work, functioning to carry a pier’s superstructure safely above the many perils of the sea below. In turn, superstructures range from simple open decks with protective pier-edge railings to the grand pavilions, huge entertainment halls and associated paraphernalia of pleasure and amusement piers.

The experience of strolling on a piled seaside pier is unlike walking along a harbour arm or promenade wall. While waves glide around a pier’s piles and columns and seawater flows beneath its decks – at least, that is the intention of pier designers – the sea smacks or smashes against hard barriers.

What is nowadays often acknowledged as the first seaside pier, at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, was, according to Simon H. Adamson, technically the first major piled passenger pier.1 Early piers did indeed function as landing stages and select promenades, perhaps with a stand or shelter for musicians to entertain promenaders, but with few architectural embellishments. Today, the grandest of British seaside piers are architectural and engineering confections designed for leisure and pleasure over the sea.

Piers are moveable feasts, their architecture and engineering evolving and changing over time in response to the challenges of nature and the demands of society. Although designed for permanency, piers have often been the most precarious and transitional of built structures. Each pier developed its own particular life history, reflecting local and regional circumstances and events, as well as broader national and international changes in seaside holidaymaking and architecture. We can trace how piers begin, develop, are sometimes transformed or renewed, but on other occasions are ruined and, literally, disappear. In the latter circumstances, construction is eventually followed by deconstruction. Some piers started short but finished long. Others started long but ended up short.

The life history of the Brighton West Pier

The promenade pier shortly after opening, c.1870s. (Brighton West Pier Trust)

The fully-fledged pleasure pier with pier-head theatre and concert hall, c.1920s. (Brighton West Pier Trust)

The pier in transition: the miniature race track was installed in 1927. (Brighton West Pier Trust)

The closed and ruined pier, 1997. (Fred Gray)

The Funfair Pier, c.1950s. (Brighton West Pier Trust)

Metamorphosis: the West Pier in August 2019 with pierhead skeleton and a replica 1866 toll house, part of the i360 observation tower complex. (Fred Gray)

The West Pier as skeleton, 2006. (Fred Gray)

Although there are many variations and exceptions, it is possible to distinguish three overall varieties of seaside pier: first, the earliest and simplest promenade pier; second, the entertaining pleasure pier emerging more than a century and a half ago; and, finally, the amusement and funfair pier of the twentieth century and today. While some of the earliest promenade piers have remained just that – and are nowadays cherished as a civic asset – others have been transformed, in stages, into pleasure piers and subsequently into amusement piers. As to the number of seaside piers, while it depends on the particular definition used, approximately 60 piers survive from around 100 that were constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2

As cultural artefacts, piers may be seen as a material product of the evolving relationship between society and nature on the coast. These artificial structures above the sea enable the seaside to be experienced in a more intense manner than simply being on the shore or a seafront promenade. The senses – including touch and feel, sound, taste and smell – are all assailed more vividly away from the land. Piers transport people to other environments and, at their most powerful, may suggest other worlds, places and times.

The architecture of pleasure: Llandudno Pier in early May 2013. (Fred Gray)

Llandudno Pier in early May 2013. The pier-head pavilion was built in 1905. (Fred Gray)

Llandudno Pier was constructed in the mid 1870s. It was remarkably vibrant in early May 2013. (Fred Gray)

The seaside pier and its architecture are also full of symbolism, about the relationship between society and nature, and of the past, present and future. These varied meanings are reflected in how piers have been represented in the art and literature of the coast. The popular significance of piers is indicated by the huge variety of Victorian and Edwardian seaside souvenirs carrying images of the structures and the deluge of pier postcards sent to family and friends by twentieth-century holidaymakers. Piers became an important and often essential feature of many English and Welsh seaside resorts (there were very few in Scotland). At times the architecture of piers is used to characterize seaside resorts and society or nature more generally. The Victorians viewed their new piers as modern, enterprising and forward-looking. Since the 1960s, images of decayed or destroyed piers have often been used to represent the decline of coastal resorts or society’s ills more generally.

Themes and structure

This book is about the architecture of British seaside piers. Architecture is defined broadly, to include many aspects of design from the style of pier buildings to both engineering and interior design and decoration. It is also about the design process and how the use, purpose and very idea of piers have evolved over time and from place to place. No attempt is made to list and describe each of the seaside piers that have graced British seaside resorts. Instead, drawing on examples, the emphasis is on the ideas, issues and themes that explain the emergence of seaside piers, the rich diversity of their development and the varied processes of change over time.

The remainder of this introductory chapter places piers in the broader context of the development of the British seaside, coastal resorts and seaside architecture. One focus is on piers as an architectural expression of the evolving relationships between society and nature at the seaside. The chapter concludes with a brief look at the export of the idea of piers to other Western countries.

Chapter 2 turns to key themes in the making of piers. It centres, in particular, on the construction of piers during the crescendo of building taking place in the period from 1860 to 1910. One focus is on the key groups of people involved in the making of piers and another on materials and techniques.

The third chapter explores how, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stone harbour arms and timber jetties, designed for other functional purposes, also appealed as promenades to leisured visitors to the seaside. The chapter traces the development of simple piled landing-stage piers, designed to allow passengers safe and comfortable movement between ship and shore. Such piers quickly adopted a promenade role. The distinctive Chain Pier in Brighton, while a spectacular and unique structure, also presaged future possibilities.

The Chain Pier at Brighton, shortly after opening. Print made by John Bruce, c.1826. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

The story then turns in Chapter 4 to the revolutionary impact of iron, both cast and wrought, for the design and making of piers. Most of these early iron piers were simple promenade and landing-stage structures. One person, Eugenius Birch, stands out as the most original and important pier designer, whose work was to prove influential for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 5 moves to the extraordinary golden age of pier building in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It was a remarkable boom time for the British seaside, and a remarkable period for piers, with dozens of new pleasure piers completed and many older promenade piers transformed by the addition of pleasure pavilions, winter gardens and other entertainment buildings. Although never dominant, seaside Orientalism as a design style was in full flow. Piers also developed a distinctive vernacular architecture for using the sea, for music and dancing and for artificial amusements and funfair rides. The death of Queen Victoria coincided with a slowing in the number of new piers. The golden age drew to a close.

The focus of Chapter 6 is on piers during the interwar years of the twentieth century and the growing popular enjoyment of the sunny seaside. It was sometimes difficult for piers, with a leisure architecture from the past, to be adapted to meet the transformation in holidaymaking expectations. During the 1930s, however, some innovative and streamlined Modernist pier entertainment buildings were produced. And then came another World War. The chapter concludes by describing the profound consequences for seaside piers of a world at war.

A cold Sunday on Blackpool’s North Pier, c.1920s. (Fred Gray collection)

Once the war had ended, British resorts and holidaymakers heaved a sigh of relief. Chapter 7 begins by exploring how the demands of pier reconstruction and reopening were followed by early post-war vitality. But then, from the 1960s, and reflecting the declining fortunes of British resorts, many piers experienced an often traumatic and unpredictable journey of optimism, disappointment and decline. This malaise, however, was only part of the story and as one century ended, and another began, there were also signs of hope and renewal.

The concluding chapter outlines significant pier developments in the first two decades of the present century. The focus is on looking forward and using these illustrations to tease out the prospects for piers in the not-too-distant future.

THE CHANGING SEASIDE

The British invented the modern idea of the seaside as a place of health, leisure and pleasure. It became a great, if often unacknowledged, British export, spreading to coasts, especially hospitable ones, around the world. The first small, select resorts emerged three centuries ago. Subsequently, dozens of resorts, large – sometimes huge – and small, developed around the coasts of Britain. They became the most tangible products of the British fascination and love affair with the seaside.

A distinctive architecture of the seaside emerged to adorn and embellish coastal resorts, making them stand out both from each other and from more ordinary inland places. Seaside architecture, broadly defined, ranges from flamboyant shoreline entertainment pavilions to tiny seafront shelters and the minutiae of promenade railings and lamp posts, through grand hotels and cheerful guest houses, to Regency terraces and Modernist flats. It includes Victorian seawater baths and streamlined interwar lidos, and the planned open spaces of seafront promenades, parks and gardens. It is piers, however, where seaside architecture is at its most extreme and excessive. The twin challenges for the pier makers are to build in and over the sea, in the inhospitable and marginal coastal zone, and to produce a spectacular architecture that delights and attracts.

The sublime seaside

The emergence of seaside resorts in the eighteenth century allowed the sea, newly discovered by the leisured classes as a site of pleasure and health, to be consumed by individuals and social groups. Central to this new form of consumption were the assumed therapeutic and health enhancing qualities of seawater. Previously, elite groups had largely ignored nature at the margin between land and sea. Alain Corbin’s path-breaking history of the discovery of the Western seaside between 1750 and 1840 roots the emergence of seaside resorts in the Enlightenment.3 He details the ‘revolution’ that occurred in how people understood and appreciated nature and their own bodily consciousness.

Insignificant spectators, dwarfed by monumental stone harbour arms, wonder at the terror of the seas. George Chambers, Port on a Stormy Day, 1835, oil on canvas. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

Gradually the seaside became a ‘sublime’ awe-inspiring and terror-inducing place that was perceived to offer therapeutic remedies for the excesses and ailments of the ruling classes. In contrast to the malevolence of the cities and the overcrowded, dissolute inland spas, the seashore resorts offered a new closeness to nature, because, as Corbin argues:

The ocean represented indisputable nature which was more than just scenery, and which remained unaffected by falsehood … the sea became a refuge and a source of hope because it inspired fear. The new strategy for seaside holidays was to enjoy the sea and experience the terror it inspired, while overcoming one’s personal perils. … The sea was expected to cure the evil of urban civilization and correct the ill effects of easy living, while respecting the demands of privacy.4

The untamed, natural sea came to be seen as a source of society’s salvation and medical opinion galloped to aid and abet the discovery of the seaside. Doctors proclaimed the extraordinary medicinal virtues of seawater both for bathing and drinking.

From the late eighteenth century, however, elite society’s perceptions of the sea and shore began to change. There was a growing belief that the seaside should be appreciated for its beauty, for the visual delights it offered, for the nature it revealed, for the exercise and relaxation it could provide, and for the quality and purity of its air. Visitors were no longer so apprehensive of the sea. They learnt instead how to understand, admire and enjoy it. There was also a growing appreciation that the seaside’s joys and benefits would be made more intense by not just being beside the sea, but by promenading over it.

Early in this transitional period, existing stone harbour arms and wooden jetties, designed for other purposes, were adopted as promenades for appreciating and contemplating nature and mixing with polite society. Then, in the early nineteenth century came the first promenade piers. They were part of what Corbin describes as a process of ‘attuning space with desire’.5 With none of the disadvantages and dangers associated with boats, whether seasickness or the possibility of capsizing or even drowning, piers enabled visitors to leave the landward side of the sea and venture out over the water itself.

The growing interest in both marine aesthetics and the developing importance of the sea in the visual imagination led to views, panoramas and perspectives of the sea and coast being increasingly prioritized. By the middle of the nineteenth century, esteem for the glories of the sea view was deeply embedded in society’s consciousness. The horizon, for example, became an important part of the Victorian visual imagination, suggesting, ‘futurity, the space into which the imagination and inner vision may travel: it connotes expansiveness’.6 There was a sense, too, that the sea, or at least its coastal margin, was being tamed, domesticated and subjugated.

Increasingly during the nineteenth century, rather than just proclaim the virtues of bathing, the medical profession and the published guides and manuals also emphasized the value of sea air, coastal climate and the benefits of swimming. Doctors took to pronouncing on the climatic advantages of one region or resort compared to another, and even on the best location within a resort for invalids suffering particular complaints. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the cult of sea air became dominant. It was sea air and sea bathing that was thought to restore and transform.

Bathers and bathing machines close to Sandown Pier, c.1880s. The nature writer, Richard Jefferies (1848–1887) thought the pier promenade experience tedious. He did, though, enjoy looking from the deck of a pier to female bathers below. (Fred Gray collection)

Ozone as an element of sea air became a powerful recommendation of the coast, repeatedly analysed by doctors, vigorously promoted by the seaside authorities and endlessly debated in respectable society. Ultimately, though, its use and value were imagined rather than real and it was vainly hunted for by invalids searching for good health.7 The restorative value of sea air and its role in blowing away the malaise of work and the city continued to be acclaimed for much of the twentieth century, although it was to be rivalled and ultimately vanquished by the cult of the sun.

The Victorians and piers

British seaside piers were one of the most remarkable and idiosyncratic artefacts produced by the Victorians. The vast majority of Britain’s piers were constructed during Queen Victoria’s long reign from 1837 to 1901 and, indeed, toward the end of the period there was a fondness to name a new pier after the Queen. A mere seven were built before she came to the throne, and just a dozen in the century after her death.

Before the introduction of the steam engine and rail transport technologies, few resorts were within reach of anyone other than ‘persons of high rank and fashion’. It was expensive, of money and time, to visit the seaside. In Britain, Gravesend and Margate on the Thames estuary, with cheaper and comparatively easy access by water from London, were among the exceptions.8 It is in resorts such as these that the first seaside piers appeared.

In the mid-nineteenth century however, the coming of the railway permitted faster, easier and cheaper trips to the coast, eventually undermining the previous class basis of many resorts. As the cost of using the technology fell, an ever-increasing number of middle- and working-class visitors were carried by train to the expanding resorts, as day-trippers or to holiday by the sea for a week or more.9 In many resorts ‘railway mania’ led to ‘pier mania’.

At least the rain stopped. A damp and cool experience on Blackpool’s Central Pier. The open lattice seat backs were replaced by more substantial decorative cast-iron backs. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

The pier-building mania of the last four decades of the nineteenth century depended on the application of Victorian technology – often rapidly developing – to an extreme environment. In some ways it was ludicrous to attempt to build in and over the hostile margin between land and sea, particularly when a primary purpose of the new piers was as a place of leisure and pleasure. Technology was tested to its limits and in unsuitable locations, piers were quickly destroyed by natural forces.

But Victorian pier designers, promoters and entrepreneurs had the confidence – often tinged with arrogance – that their plans would be successful and, in turn, yield a substantial financial gain. The very notion of seaside piers was bound up with what Victorians thought about society and nature both at home and overseas. Piers transformed many Victorian seaside resorts and, for those Victorians able to venture to the coast, the experience of being beside the sea.

Piers provided a platform and associated architecture for consuming nature, improving health, enjoying leisure and engaging with society. Walking on to a pier was to be transported ever closer to the natural environment, heightening both the sense of admiration of nature and the accomplishment of the individual making the visit. Moreover, sea air was surely purer and more beneficial when breathed in over the sea before it was tainted and adulterated by the land. And there was the camaraderie to be enjoyed by walking on water with like-minded people. There were new panoramas of the coast to view, storms and sunsets to marvel at and horizons to contemplate. The pier, as a platform from which to view the horizon, allowed people to reflect on themselves, other places and other times. Although it was of course an illusion, the pier was remarkable in seeming to enable people to journey a little closer to the unobtainable.

By 1860 there were just a dozen piers in British resorts, most serving both as landing stages and promenades. And yet by 1900 Britain’s seafront architecture had been transformed. By that date, there were eighty piers, with some resorts having two or even three of the structures.

The first wave of this deluge of pier building in the 1860s and 70s was of promenade piers proper; structures some harbour authorities described as ‘not made for trade’.10 These piers became fashionable and select extensions to seafront parades and drives. The inevitable band apart, promenade piers had little in the way of artificial entertainment. As John Walton suggests, they were an ‘established recreational institution with pretensions to gentility and even “rationality”.’11 In reality, promenade-pier builders underestimated the continuing radical transformation of many resorts and the business of being beside the sea.

Gazing at promenaders on Clacton’s timber pier from the first-floor balcony of the 1893 pavilion. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Clacton’s pier-head pavilion in 1997. (Fred Gray)

The Palace Pier, Brighton, opened within weeks of Queen Victoria’s death. (Fred Gray collection)

Over the following decades, rising standards of living and improved holiday entitlements allowed an ever-broader range of people to holiday by the sea for a day or more.12 The broadening of the potential class make-up of resorts, facilitated by significant technological changes in transportation, had major implications for seaside towns and their architecture.13

The new seaside visitors with new demands were a major factor in the transformation of seaside piers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Although the ubiquitous enjoyment of a stroll over the sea was still available, in many resorts the traditional landing-stage function for anything other than pleasure trips on the sea disappeared. And, by the end of the period, the open-deck promenade pier had also disappeared from the largest and most popular resorts. From the 1880s, a second wave of new fully fledged pleasure piers engulfed the coastal resorts.

The pleasure piers – either newly constructed or transformed from earlier promenade structures – were sites of artificial entertainments and amusements. Many echoed and developed what was to be found in inland cities, including opera, theatre, orchestral music, music hall and variety, dancing and roller-skating. Pleasure piers burgeoned with pavilions and theatres, concert halls and winter gardens, refreshment rooms and shops.

The business of piers

The new piers were represented as modern and community ventures in which a resort and its inhabitants had an important stake. Piers were usually speculative private enterprises. Shareholders included wealthy people mostly living locally or regionally, and also others of much more modest means, owning just a few shares.14 Other financial models included both the construction of piers as part of much larger coastal development schemes for new resorts, and the involvement of local government boards wishing to enhance resort facilities.

The completion of a new pier was invariably a cause of civic pride and the opening an occasion for public celebration and rejoicing. One of the earliest of the many spectacular events marking the opening of a new pier was in Blackpool in May 1863. Almost 20,000 people flocked into the town – it had fewer than 4,000 residents – to join the ‘magnificent festival … to celebrate the opening of the pier’, the emerging resort’s first.15

Two decades later, in 1885, a perceptive commentator described Margate, one of London’s great seaside leisure sites, as ‘a great business, the gross receipts of which total about a million a year received from visitors.’16 Piers were a critical part of the infrastructure and commercial success of the largest and most vibrant resorts; they were part of the process through which the seaside was commodified.

There was money to be made by enabling people to walk out above the ocean. Apart from entrance tolls, the pier companies found other ways to generate income. New entertainments were invented, and large pier buildings provided a wealth of attractions. Exterior architecture and interior design were important parts of the process and pier buildings were designed to attract and entice, using various leisure motifs and symbols. The most successful pleasure piers became architectural spectacles in their own right while also offering dazzling entertainments.

The celebrations for the opening of Blackpool Pier. (The Illustrated London News, 30 May 1863)

Frolicking in the sea at Hastings, May 1920. The increasing accumulation of buildings on the pier was designed to increase the pier company’s profits. (Fred Gray collection)

Piers became extraordinary make-believe worlds and an essential feature of the most successful resorts. There were ways in which the seaside location was used to provide a unique experience. Most pleasure piers hosted a plethora of maritime entertainments ranging from steamer excursions – providing, for the majority of voyagers, otherwise unobtainable views and panoramas – through aquatic entertainers and performing divers, to water fetes and bathing facilities. It was this combination of maritime entertainments and other indoor and outdoor pleasures over the sea that made piers such an important feature of the British seaside experience to the mid-twentieth century.

The economic historian John Clapham, looking at the pier building obsession of the last decades of the nineteenth century from the vantage point of the early 1950s, thought Victorian piers ‘were as symbolic of what archaeologists call a culture as are axe-heads and beakers … There they stood. No visitor to the island could miss them. From them the least seafaring of the islanders could watch his ships go by with the joy of vicarious ownership.’17

Despite the proliferation of new piers the pier development process was not always plain sailing. Sometimes proposals were abandoned because resorts were too small, finance inadequate or local political opposition too great.

Existing vested interests, antagonistic to pier proposals, attempted to delay or foil them. A new pier might threaten the livelihoods of boatmen ferrying passengers between ship and shore. In the early 1840s the watermen at Gravesend, resorting both to law and riot, delayed the building of Britain’s first iron pier by four years. In 1864 Deal’s boatmen, whose businesses were jeopardized, denounced the new pier. One commentator saw it otherwise, describing ‘those predatory gentlemen’ with exorbitant charges, who shot passengers out of their boats ‘on a shingle beach up to their knees in water’.18

The class character of a resort also had consequences for pier enterprises. In one extreme example, in 1874, Portsmouth’s antagonistic class and political relations resulted in riots over the control of land by the entrance to the first pier at Southsea. The pier company wished to enclose the land, thereby excluding the local working people, and turn it into an exclusive and private space reserved for respectable pier visitors. The several nights of protest by the traditional local users of the common land included the burning of newly erected fences, attacks on the pier – the angry crowd pelted the promenaders and pier buildings with stones – and the quelling of the unrest by police, volunteer assistants and troops.19

Some select and late-developing resorts in counties such as Devon eschewed piers because of the fear that such developments ‘would drive away affluent visitors who wanted to avoid both noisy, flashy amusements and the working-class excursionists they attracted.’20 There was no such concern in high-class and exclusive Eastbourne, a resort under the patronage and control of the Duke of Devonshire. In what was called the ‘Empress of Watering Places’, ‘the pier, with its bands and its theatre, only offered the highest class of entertainment.’21 In contrast, Blackpool’s eventual three piers were able to accommodate different degrees of respectability and popularity. Over time many of even the most socially exclusive resorts bowed, at least to some extent, to the growing demands of working-class visitors. Entertainments and amusements responded in kind.

A golden pier for the ‘Empress of Resorts’ glowing in the late afternoon winter sun. The 1925 shore-end pavilion was destroyed by fire in 2014. (Fred Gray)

Local councils were crucial in advertising the delights of a resort; piers were a major attraction. (Geoffrey Mead collection)

Even though dominant landowners continued to have a formidable influence in some British resorts, from the middle of the nineteenth century seaside town councils became progressively more interventionist.22 The resort public authorities frequently saw piers as crucial assets. If the privately owned enterprise was threatened – perhaps because a pier was making a loss or had suffered major damage through storm or fire – town councils intervened surprisingly often to take it into municipal ownership.

The municipal authorities increasingly judged and determined the architecture of the seaside and what should be built. This eventually extended to funding and designing individual seaside buildings, such as new pier pavilions, and producing the design and architecture of the principal open spaces, particularly the important mood-creating and tone-setting seafront promenade and public gardens. The resort and its architecture, including piers, were then vigorously promoted through official guides and other advertising mechanisms.

The coming of the sun

Despite the abiding appeal of the seaside and seaside resorts – the fascination with the sea, the lure of the beach, the extraordinary array of both natural and artificial seaside pleasures and entertainments, the wonder of being away from work and domestic duties and actually on holiday – the British seaside had been in a state of continual flux. Whether it was everything that made a seaside resort or the very visitors enjoying its pleasures, nothing stayed the same for long: everything evolved.

‘Getting away from it all’ had always been one of the chief attractions of the seaside. But in fundamental ways the notion was an illusion. Seaside resorts and the pleasure piers always reflected and responded – albeit sometimes in a distorted or limited fashion – to an array of societal change.

Relaxing on Brighton’s West Pier, August 1922. The photograph reveals the signs and paraphernalia of the public bathing station below. (Fred Gray collection)

Cover of Southend Pier’s musical entertainments programme, early June 1934. The architecture of the pier’s late Victorian pavilion was partially hidden by the 1931 Art Deco entrance structure. (Fred Gray collection)

The first four decades of the twentieth century were a period of acute change. Particularly in the largest resorts, the seaside market broadened and became ever more popular. New groups of people, including many from the working classes, enjoyed the seaside for the first time. They were carried to the coast by railway trains, powered by steam or electricity, or by motor coach or charabanc using the improving road network. As the technologies of rail and road travel developed, so one of the old roles of the earliest seaside piers – as landing stages for visitors carried to the seaside by ship – faded away. Whether day trippers or staying visitors, the new seaside holidaymakers expected new forms of amusement and entertainment.

From the late nineteenth century, the sun emerged first as an accompaniment to sea air and then, by the 1930s, as the dominant natural force shaping what people searched for, did and built at the seaside. As with other uses of seaside nature, it is difficult to untangle popular movement from expert prescription in the developing interest in the sun.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the medical profession promoted the therapeutic use of the sun, particularly in combating tuberculosis – consumption – then still a scourge of many parts of the Western world. By the 1930s the medical benefits of the sun were widely acknowledged.

The sun, though, seized more than the medical imagination. It had class and gender dimensions. Previously, the social and economic elite preferred white skins for the indication of both status and health; the suntan was distasteful in part because of its connotations with degrading physical activity.23 Similarly, until the 1920s, the feminine ideal of wealthy women stressed pallor, fragility and whiteness. The coming of the sun, however, inverted these existing values. A suntan became a ‘distinguishing trait’ for the elite and ‘a new symbol of modern times, an external manifestation of prosperity.’24

At Hastings the increasing popularity during the 1930s of swimming at the seaside was combined with new illuminations on the pier; night-time swimming was one result. (Steve Peak collection)

Shown here in May 2001, although in a truncated form, Cleethorpes Pier survived into the twenty-first century. The pavilion dates from 1905. Put to a variety of entertainment uses including as a night club, in 2019 the pavilion was a fish and chip restaurant, claimed to be the largest in the country. (Fred Gray)

The joys of hunting under a pier. Cleethorpes, May 2001. (Fred Gray)