Victorian pier attractions
The piers which sprang up around the UK in the 19th century became an essential part of summer seaside breaks, says Amanda Randall
The seaside pleasure pier developed predominantly in England and Wales during the late 19th century. During the pier building boom of the 1860s and 1870s an average of two piers each year were built. After that time, development tended to be focused on the pavilions, transforming them from functional shelters to magnificent palaces of entertainment. These ornate, complex structures celebrate the vision of Victorian designers, engineers and entrepreneurs. The melting pot of technical development, political will, commercial ambition, landscape, creativity, changes in social codes, and popular taste created the environment for seaside piers to emerge.
The pier offered everything a respectable man or woman needed for a day away from hard work and grimy city air or as a change from suburbia. Until 1914, around 100 piers enriched the British coastline – familiar icons made of wood, cast iron and glass, tough but seemingly delicate to the eye, sitting above the waves and offering novelty, entertainment and perhaps romance. Piers feature in songs, books and films, their losses are reported in national newspapers, preservation campaigns organised. They are part of our shared heritage and can enhance our own family history research as we discover more about the lives our ancestors and older relatives led.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, society’s wealthy increasingly enjoyed the seaside for leisure and for health, travelling to destinations by coach or by slow sailing boat. From 1815, new paddle steamers capable of making short coastal voyages made getting to the most fashionable resorts easier and cheaper. However, a solution needed to be found to the problem of transporting passengers to shore in places without adequate landing facilities. Landing jetties were a common sight along inland waterways, usually near factories for the delivery and collection of raw materials and goods, but the decorative pier jutting out to sea and built specifically to cater for leisure activities became an important part of Britain’s coastal scene and signified fundamental changes in society.
The first simple wooden pier built for leisure passengers opened in 1814 at Ryde, Isle of Wight, which was already a popular holiday destination. Until then, passengers had to engage a porter to carry them through the shallows, and then walk a mile across the beach at low tide. This first pier was 530m (1,740ft) long and just 3.6m (12ft) wide. The pier was a success, as landing charges for passengers and cargo brought income to local traders. It proved so popular with the public that both the pier and pierhead were extended several times during the 1820s. Daily steamer journeys to and from Portsmouth and Southampton were established and excursions from Ryde Pier to Lymington, Bournemouth and Brighton were fashionable. Ryde Pier attracted locals from the shoreside too and business owners quickly recognised this trend as a lucrative commercial prospect. Visitors and residents alike enjoyed being able to walk out to sea in relative safety – a thrilling experience with a hint of danger as the waves rolled and rippled beneath the boards.
The railway came to Ryde in 1864, with the town’s station opening in August that year, bringing even more visitors. The 600m (1,969ft) pier presented a walking challenge to visitors and an opportunity for entrepreneurs to supply the necessary service. During the 1860s and 1880s, a tramway pier and then a railway pier were built alongside the original, connecting the town station to the pierhead. The broad pattern of pier development at Ryde was repeated in resorts all around the coast as ever more holidaymakers aspired to visit these ‘palaces of pleasure’.
Railways and holidays
The 19th century railway-building boom connected previously remote locations with bigger cities and with the coast. As the rail network grew exponentially, travel became cheaper and more people could afford an afternoon or a day away from home, especially once paid time off became more common. Wages increased and more young single women entered the workforce, particularly in offices and shops, and for the
Visitors and residents alike enjoyed being able to walk out to sea
first time earned a small amount of disposable income.
Workers had no paid holiday entitlement until the 1871 Bank Holidays Act, which established four bank holidays in England Wales and Ireland: Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day. Good Friday and Christmas Day were already established as common law days of rest in England and Wales. The act added New Year’s Day, Good Friday, the first Mondays in May and August plus Christmas Day as bank holidays in Scotland. Later in the 1870s, most skilled workers took Saturday afternoons off. Manual workers earned the same concession in the 1890s.
During Wakes Week, when factories were closed, Lancashire workers tended to head for Blackpool with its three piers built in the 1860s. North Pier opened in 1862, the second of 14 piers designed by the innovative London-born engineer Eugenius Birch (1818-1884), it is the oldest surviving example of his work. North Pier was the most exclusive of the three, catering for ‘the better classes’ and charging an entrance fee of a shilling per head – £ 22 in today’s money. Once inside the magnificent Indian Pavilion, audiences loved to listen to orchestral and band concerts or to laugh at respectable comedians who were chosen especially for their lack of vulgarity. The pavilion served as Blackpool’s premier indoor entertainment venue until the Winter Gardens opened in 1879. Central Pier was known as ‘the People’s Pier’ where open air dancing was all the rage right up until the outbreak of the Second World War. A short film of North Pier in 1902 can be seen on BFI Player, ( player.bfi.org.uk/ film/ watch- blackpool- north- pier-1903-1902), which reveals the high-fashion clothing and hats worn by the well-to-do customers. One question to ask when assessing this archive film is whether the crowds were the usual numbers for that location, or were more people attracted by the presence of the camera crew.
Birch’s piers
The first pier Birch built was at Margate, known as Margate Jetty to distinguish it from Margate Pier Harbour wall. It was both the first iron pier and the first screwpile pier in Britain, opening in 1855 before its completion in 1857. Birch’s innovation was to add a blade to the iron piling, which could be driven further into the seabed and created a deeper, more resilient support structure. He had travelled widely in the Far East and his style ideas were influenced by what he had seen overseas. He also built spectacular piers at Brighton ( West Pier opened in 1866), Aberystwyth (1865), Scarborough (1869) among others including the shortlived Hornsea Pier in the East Riding of Yorkshire (opened 1880, demolished before 1900). He is perhaps the foremost designer of Victorian piers.
Birch’s pier at Hastings (opened 1872) was the first to have a pavilion large enough to seat 2,000 people. A popular destination for more than 60 years, the pier then had an Art Deco facelift in the 1930s at the beginning of its true golden age. From the mid-1970s, the pier’s future became much less certain with several changes of ownership and a slow decline in its condition. A vigorous ‘Save the Pier’ campaign began locally. After a series of
near-disasters (fire and storm), structural engineers concluded that the pier was “one good storm away from collapse”. However, in 2016 the newly-renovated Hastings Pier reopened, winning the 2017 Pier of the Year award as voted by members of the National Piers Society.
Being built in such vulnerable locations, fire, storm, accidents, collisions and neglect many have been lost such as those at Alum Bay, Isle of Wight, and Edinburgh’s Leith Trinity Chain Pier. Alum Bay’s pier opened in 1887 but steamer traffic from Southampton and Portsmouth declined after the First World War, it succumbed to a severe storm in 1927. Leith Trinity Chain pier, built in 1821, declined in use after harbour improvements at Dundee, Stirling and Grangemouth, which diverted shipping away from the pier. It was destroyed in a storm in 1898.
Holiday fever
As resorts blossomed, the need arose for large-scale entertainment venues to cater for enthusiastic crowds with money to spend. A wealth of leisure facilities sprang up, including the public Winter Garden, a planted green space with sea and pier views and, crucially, an enormous conservatory in which people could sit, listen to music, stroll around and enjoy the plants and gardens regardless of weather. The first were at Southport, Bournemouth and Torquay. Other attractions included bandstands; spectacular towers (Blackpool’s opened in 1891); funicular railways or ‘cliff lifts’ (Bournemouth’s opened in 1908); water parks for boating; and illuminations, which all drew enormous crowds eager to see the sights and to be seen as being affluent enough to afford leisure time and activities.
In the 20th century holidays increasingly came within the reach of ordinary family budgets as incomes improved, more women worked outside the home and working hours reduced. Piers still drew holidaymakers to glamorous theatre shows featuring top stage stars, amusement arcades, fairground rides, dances, competitions, restaurants, ice-cream parlours and cafes. Around 50 piers still survive, some are thriving assets but others are in poor shape. Nevertheless the seaside pier remains a symbol of civic pride and local history. They give us a tangible connection to the novel leisure activities that our Victorian and Edwardian ancestors would have enjoyed on their rare days off.
Perhaps the best way to find out about Britain’s piers is to go and visit one. Walk along it, take the train, see a show, buy an ice cream or a bag of chips, look out to sea and then back towards land. Local archives and museums, which all need your support, will have information about these attractions so do your research in advance and have a wonderful time exploring this glorious aspect of our country’s coastal and entertainment heritage. Amanda Randall is a social historian interested in everyday lives