ANOTHER VOICE

Why Britain's piers should be allowed to slip beneath the waves

MATTHEW PARRIS

What is the point of seaside piers? Why are they 'heritage'? Why are huge sums of government money being siphoned off to weld, paint, repair and shore up these ridiculous structures against the natural effects of salt water, wave and tide? Who precisely are the citizens whose view of the seaside is importantly enhanced by the prospect of a pier — another pier — and what is the argument for using public funds to preserve these views?

Forgive me for asking, but too many con- ventional wisdoms go unchallenged in Britain. They should be challenged. Why does our shared culture demand the pro- hibitively costly upkeep of boring, pointless or naff structures which have outlived their purpose? Why, because another age con- structed them, are piers viewed with the ignorant reverence and unthinking defer- ence accorded to antiquity? If we really wanted to honour Victorian values, should we not apply those values as the Victorians did to useless relics of a former age — and sweep them, unlamented, away?

It was many years ago, as the guest of Charles Moore, that I dined in Brighton with Hanif Kureishi, the director of the film My Beautiful Laundrette. Kureishi is the creator of new and worthwhile things things of our own time — which deserve and get our support. He described the ruined West Pier at Brighton in a phrase I shall never forget: 'a drowning chandelier', he called it. His language, which was mod- ern, was beautiful. The pier, which was dying, was beautiful in its demise. At night it wallowed, unlit, in a black sea. By day, peeling and grey, it reeled among the waves. The drowning West Pier was arguably the most beautiful thing in Brighton.

Now they are shoring it up. A million pounds has come from the National Lot- tery just to halt its decay. Another £20 mil- lion or £30 million are needed to restore it to the questionable glories it exhibited half a century ago, when already it was failing to attract the visitors it needed for its upkeep. This is presumably so the pier can resume the unprofitable operation which was final- ly abandoned when its last commercial owners found no case for keeping it open.

And I simply ask, why? The purpose for which piers were originally constructed has largely passed away. The first were built as glorified jetties on tidal beaches to allow paddle-steamers to call at holiday resorts rather than scruffy docks. In the last centu- ry you could sail from Bournemouth to Swanage and the Isle of Wight — or Black- pool to the Isle of Man — departing from a pier. There is no call for this any more.

Later — in an effort which from the first proved an uphill battle — the floor area of piers was turned to commercial purposes, with arcades, zoos, switchback rides, tea- dancing and fortune-tellers. Early piers tried to be rather socially exclusive, but the need to maintain revenue soon opened the gates to the great unwashed. For a while the fashion grew, and some piers made a little money. Blackpool pier paid dividends of 12 per cent for its first 50 years; Hastings paid 10 per cent and Brighton's West Pier struggled at 71/2 per cent. Cassells Magazine in the 1890s suggested that `if the popula- tion and industrial wealth continue to increase as they have done of late years, while the means of locomotion go on improving, it will be necessary to alter the map of England and represent it as a huge creature of the porcupine type, with gigan- tic piers instead of quills'.

But the fashion faded fast. Indeed, for most it had been touch-and-go from the start. Weston-super-Mare paid no dividend at all for its first 17 years, was never a money-spinner — and now wants millions from us to carry on. Yet one of the myths the pier lobby now propagates — anxious to persuade us that piers only require 'seed money', 'pump-priming', a 'kick-start' — is that the demise of piers, being recent, could easily be reversed. But the demise of piers is not recent. The Financial Times for 14 June 1963, headlined 'It's hard work to keep the piers above water', reports that almost nowhere was it easy to make a pier pay, while 'many are deserted hulks, sadly rusting away in small resorts'.

The whole concept was, after all, absurd. Why erect buildings over the sea when we have dry land to built on? Piers wash away; storms topple them; boats slice through them; salt corrodes them; fire rampages along their decking.

Already, in the early part of this century, local government was moving in to bail out failing pier enterprises. Local government has a habit of boarding sinking ships on the same tide as that upon which the rats leave; and still there were optimists who kept their faith. It seemed unshaken even when Marxist historians conceived an interest in the socio-economical underpinning to piers. Anything which becomes a subject of local government support and Marxist stud- ies is surely doomed.

Yet still some kept the faith. Did they not waver when Virginia Bottomley declared 1996 the Year of the Pier, and 30 June National Piers Day? Marx, Bottomley, local government — and a 'Year of desig- nation too. Liberal Democrats support piers and places with piers support Liberal Democrats. Will nothing persuade thinking people that piers are a lost cause? Only trams (another lost cause) share the same fatal sponsorship.

There is a case, I concede, for the preser- vation of one British pier as an exemplar of a more vulgar age. The remaining 42 should be allowed to fall into the sea. We do not need super-marine structures on which to place our amusement arcades. If you want to hear sexist, racist, unfunny mother-in-law or otherwise offensive jokes, these can be encountered inland in the North of England: there is no need to build platforms above the waves for such enter- tainment. Piers are not beautiful, novel or architecturally interesting. Go to the Kings Cross gasometers if you want to look at Victorian ironwork.

Suppose the seafront at Cromer or Bournemouth was at present unencum- bered by these inelegant metal construc- tions — and First Leisure applied for per- mission to erect them and place video games, lager bars and karaoke joints upon them. The very people who now lobby for state money to preserve piers (and wind- mills) as 'heritage' would take time off from collecting petitions against wind farms and start signing letters to the Times lamenting the disappearance of clean sands, unbroken vistas and open coastlines.

Strewn around me as I write are photo- copies of 30 years' newspaper cuttings about piers. Every one of them assumes affection for Britain's pier heritage and calls for taxpayers' (and now lottery) money to sustain them. To the best of my knowledge this is the first pierosceptical article ever published in English. Down with piers!

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.