West Pier: A Brief Modern History

Situated on the South East coast of the United Kingdom, The West Pier is the worlds only grade one listed pier. It opened in September, 1866. It was designed by the great engineer, architect and artist Eugenious Birch.

The pier enjoyed great success and gradually evolved until its temporary closure during the Second World War.

The West Pier never really recovered from this closure and in 1970 the pierhead was sealed off as dangerous. The rest of the pier was closed to the public in 1975.

Since 1975 and despite numerous rescue bids, the West Pier continues to decay and areas collapse. Due to this, tours of the pier have been stopped and a seventy five metre exclusion zone introduced around the pier.

This is disastrous for the pier but provides excellent photo opportunities. The fallen debris has created a man made reef below the pier. Many photographs of the creatures to be found there can be seen in the underwater section of this site.

On December 29th 2002 the concert hall partially collapsed which was great cause for concern. Then on January 20th 2003 the building gave way and was left looking rather 'lopsided'.
Then in spectacular fashion, the seaward pavilion was totally destroyed on March 28th 2003 by fire. Columns of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air as the flames tore through the crumbling remains.

The final blow for the West Pier came when on May 11th 2003 the already unstable concert hall was severely damaged by fire. A suspected arson attack. Although the brave fire crews tackled the blaze a secondary fire gutted the concert hall for ever the day after. Luckily the fire crews allowed Sean Clark, the creator of this website, access into the smouldering building on the 11th to make a photographic record of the building. As far as we know this is the last photographic record ever actually taken on the West Pier.

Following this, the financial backers for the restoration project pulled out. This combined with legal actions from the neigbouring Brighton Pier (previously known as the Palace Pier) meant all current attempts at restoring the West Pier have ceased.

The latest pier proposal comes from the people behind the London Eye in the form of a huge thin tower on the former site of the West Pier. Click here for more.