The West Pier in Brighton was built in 1866 but closed in 1975 , slowly rotting for the next quarter century. During the last five years, it has suffered calamity and disaster, not all of it accidental. I won’t recount the details here as they are well documented on Wikipedia, but it makes sad reading.

However, I went to Brighton three times for the TMA Conference and in October 2002 I had the opportunity to visit the pier. The Trust organised visits on certain days and the previous year I was out of luck schedule-wise. We assembled in one of the little buildings on the promenade (the white octagonal one which doubled as the gift shop). We then signed liability waiver forms (which we were told probably wasn’t worth the paper it was written on) and dressed for the trip, donning hard hats, hi-viz jackets and even life jackets. I didn’t have my camera that day, but I have found some free use ones on the Web from a year or two earlier, photo credits Robert Shifreen.

Our first visit was under the land end structure, where we found the store of rescued pier flotsam. Much of it was ironwork from structural columns (many with screw-like bottoms) along with cross-braces, balustrades and decking. Our guide explained that much of the debris was left on the sea bed as it remained in-situ and didn’t deteriorate a great deal. At the time the Trust had ambitious restoration plans but they were to be rapidly thwarted over the next eighteen months.
The pier was linked to the beach by a long thin walkway which had a secure gate surrounded by razor wire to keep out the curious. This gate was unlocked and then re-locked after our party passed through it. We then walked towards the first building which was the oval concert hall which dated from 1916. Before we entered we were warned that we would not be alone…
…as we entered hordes and hordes of starlings shrieked and flew off through the broken windows and gaping holes in the roof.Our guide clapped her hands every now and again to chase away the more curious ones. The place was riddled with bird lime and here and there glimpses of the sea could be seen through holes in the floor. Even though it had been derelict for more than quarter of a century, it post-dated decimalisation and curling signage betrayed this.
We went further onto the walkway but could only go about half way to the far structure which was the 1897 1,400 seat Concert Hall which subsequently became a 1,000 seat theatre six years later. The reason our visit was curtailed was due to storm damage: one of the new walkway supports had been swept away over the weekend. The building was tantalisingly close- you could count the lamps in the West Pier sign which I had seen lit the night before. I had naively assumed that the pier was open for business again but on wanderi ng along to look at it, the warm glow of the sign and the floodlighting of the facade made it obvious on closer inspection that there was still an awful lot to do.
The visit was both fascinating and disappointing. It was rather ordinary in a way, the signs of recent use being familiar from other tatty seaside arcades & resorts of my childhood. It would have been better if we had been told at the start that we couldn’t go into the far building, as that was what I was more interested in. The photos of it online, however, show it as an (empty) arcade space rather than a theatrical space. A couple of months later, the first of the disasters happened.

The future of the pier is now all but doomed. However, a new vertical tower structure has been approved on the site- the i360 observation mast.

The Brighton West Pier Trust has a Website with buckets of background information about the Grade 1 structure that was the West Pier and their valiant (but in the end sadly futile) efforts to save i. The newsletters in the archive make fascinating reading for a social historian.