West Pier - Brighton, UK
N 50° 49.245 W 000° 09.070
30U E 700654 N 5633760
The West Pier at Brighton was destroyed by fires in 2003. The skeleton of the end of the pier still stands and can be clearly seen a short distance out to sea. The co-ordinates are for where the pier used to land on the coast.
Waymark Code: WMVD8T
Location: South East England, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 04/04/2017
Views: 4
Wikipedia has an article about the West Pier that advises:
The West Pier is a pier in Brighton, England. It was designed by Eugenius Birch, opening in 1866 and closing in 1975. The pier was the first to be Grade I listed in Britain but has become increasingly derelict since closure.
The pier was constructed during a boom in pleasure pier building in the 1860s, and was designed to attract tourism in Brighton. It was the town's second pier, joining the Royal Suspension Chain Pier of 1823. It was extended in 1893, and a concert hall was added in 1916. The pier reached its peak attendance during this time, with 2 million visitors between 1918 and 1919. Its popularity began to decline after World War II, and concerts were replaced by a funfair and tearoom. A local company took ownership in 1965, but could not meet the increased maintenance cost, and ultimately filed for bankruptcy. They could not find a suitable buyer, so the pier closed in 1975 and subsequently fell into disrepair.
The West Pier Trust now owns the pier and has proposed various plans to renovate it. Some schemes have been opposed by local residents and the owners of the nearby Palace Pier, who have claimed unfair competition. The pier gradually collapsed during the early 21st century. Major sections collapsed in late 2002, and two fires in March and May 2003 left little of the original structure. Subsequently, English Heritage declared it to be beyond repair. Structured demolition took place in 2010 to make way for the observation tower i360; further structural damage from storms has occurred since.
The West Pier Trust website also tells us:
2003 was a catastrophic year for the West Pier.
On 28th March the Pavilion was destroyed in an arson attack, and then on 11th May the Concert Hall, already seriously damaged in a huge storm the previous December, was also deliberately set on fire.
English Heritage was commissioned to report on whether after such damage, the restoration was still viable. It concluded that despite the significant damage, given the wealth of salvaged material from the pier and the considerable photographic and video archive, repair and reconstruction of the pier was still viable. It was therefore bitterly disappointing that at its meeting on 28th January, the Heritage Lottery Fund decided to withdraw its funding of the project.
With the loss of lottery funding the restoration of the West Pier became impossible. Deemed a public hazard, the burnt-out Concert Hall was removed in 2010. The skeletal remains of The Pavilion, however, were left to become a feature of Brighton’s seafront. Its desolate beauty makes it much discussed, wondered about and photographed. The Trust has no intention of removing the remains unless overwhelming safety issues arise. But now beyond repair, they will inevitably degenerate and be reclaimed by nature. However the Trust remains hopeful that, with the success of British Airways i360, in due course a new contemporary West Pier, reflecting the brilliance of the original, will be built.
The West Pier is a Grade I listed structure with the entry at the Historic England website telling us:
Pier. 1865-6. By Eusebius Birch. Cast and wrought-iron, wood, glass and lead.
EXTERIOR: the structure of the pier consists of cast-iron columns carrying beams and girders with diagonal bracing and lighter struts. The pier was particularly badly damaged by the hurricane of October 1987; and the causeway leading from King's Road to the former concert hall was demolished in 1991, along with the kiosk at the north end of the concert hall. The principal surviving structures are the former concert hall, the former theatre, and the kiosks at the north end of the theatre.
The concert hall is oval in plan and consists of a continuous arcade of elliptically-arched tripartite windows between pilasters, with decorative voussoirs; parapet with cartouches and swags and urns on pilasters; coved roof, the central part having dormers on either side and continuous toplight with pedimented ends from which a decorative balustrade of scrolled profiles runs down to the parapet. On the final stage of the platform, there are octagonal kiosks flanking the north end of the former theatre, of cast- and wrought-iron with roofs of lead; cast-iron columns on bases with a round-arched aracade between, the details of the opening originally loosely resembling those of a Palladian window; brackets to deep eaves; shallow coved roof with lantern. There is a smaller, ogee-roofed kiosk to the west of the theatre. The theatre itself is of 3 storeys with a verandah to ground floor on the west and a roof coved in 2 stages; small towers to either side of north end with ogee roofs, and a 3-storey porch wing between them.
INTERIOR: not inspected.