The End of the Pier Show

# Powder your face with sunshine

# Put on a great big smile

The story of the seaside pier

is the story of many of our seaside resorts.

Birth,

glorious heyday,

decline,

and demise.

It's a familiar tale, repeated all around the coast.

But while many people believe

the golden age of the pleasure pier is over,

one town has other ideas.

MUSIC: "Pretty Vacant" by The Sex Pistols

Plans to resurrect its once-great seaside attraction...

..and start a brand new chapter

in the story of the great British pier.

# Pretty vacant

# And we don't care. #

The seaside used to be a working environment,

a place where merchants, fishermen and smugglers plied their trade,

and soldiers stood guard against invasion.

But in the late 18th century, change was in the salty sea air.

Suddenly, people rediscovered the seaside

and thought that the wonderful health-giving air would improve them,

particularly under royal patronage during the Regency period.

The south coast in particular became really fashionable,

places like Brighton and Bognor and so forth.

But along this coast, there is a real problem.

You've got fantastic beaches, but actually, you don't have

any harbours, so how do you get to these places before railways?

And the solution was to build piers.

The first seaside piers were simple wooden jetties.

And the oldest, at Ryde on the Isle of Wight,

is 200 years old this summer.

It opened on July 26, 1814.

Two more jetty piers were built in the 1820s...

..and seven more in the 1830s,

enabling the upper classes to walk from ship to shore

without getting anything wet.

It's believed that the salt water

had lots of health benefits for your aches and pains and rheumatism.

It was a sort of cure-all.

It was a place where, really, the genteel could afford

to take their retinue to have a dip in the sea,

so you needed to have the finance and the funds

to be able to afford a trip to the seaside.

But with the arrival of the railways in the 1840s,

the seaside opened up to the masses.

People were beginning to have money, they begin to have days off.

These places became hugely popular.

By 1870, more than 40 resorts had a pier.

To keep up with them, the town of Hastings needed a pier of its own,

so turned to Eugenius Birch,

the architect who designed Brighton's West Pier.

For Hastings, he came up with something new:

a pioneering pleasure pier.

More than just a jetty that could be added to later,

Hastings Pier would have entertainment built in.

What's interesting about Hastings is that there is a need to put

attractions on the pier to get people to go

and pay the toll to walk on to the pier, and so,

this is the first pier that Birch built

with a pavilion at the pier head.

Work began at three in the morning on December 18, 1869,

with men winding a capstan to screw the pier's first column

deep into the Wadhurst Clay below.

It took 16 months longer than usual, because one of the problems was that,

buried in the Wadhurst Clay,

there are remains of this very ancient forest,

and the birch screws were snapping on the timbers,

and they had to actually dig out some of these timbers,

which were four feet in diameter.

A real feat of engineering, of conquering nature,

which is what the Victorians were very good at.

The Victorians were also very good at inventing things,

like bank holidays...

..introduced in 1871 by Sir John Lubbock.

Initially, the grateful public called them St Lubbock's Days,

so after two and a half years of construction,

Hastings Pier opened on a wet August St Lubbock's Day in 1872,

her Oriental pavilion providing entertainment

and shelter from day one.

It allegedly held 2,000 people.

When you look at the postcards of it, you wonder how that was possible.

Hastings was now a high-class resort,

with a pier that drew in nearly half a million visitors

in its first year.

It was extremely successful, and by 1883, on St Lubbock's Day,

9,400 people went through the turnstile on that one day,

so even by today's standards, that's a lot of visitors.

It was a golden age for seaside resorts all over Britain.

By the time St Leonards Pier opened in 1891,

less than a mile from Hastings Pier,

there were more than 70 piers around the country,

and the best way to get from one to another

was to travel by steamer.

Something you can still do today on the Waverley,

the only seagoing paddle steamer left in the world.

There's a tendency for pier owners, of course, to say,

"We want people to spend a lot of money on our pier,

"on the funfair, we don't really want them

"getting off the other end and going somewhere else."

But it can work two ways.

You can bring people on a ship to their pier,

and on their way into town, they can spend a lot of money.

It's all right.

I think it is an essential component of a pier,

because it's the historical reason

for which piers were originally built.

By the 1890s, pleasure piers were much more than jetties.

They were thriving, bustling attractions, open to all.

When you stepped onto the pier,

you went into a sort of fantasy world.

It was a kind of republic of fun,

and you left behind all your social structures.

If you were a young lady, you would be able to walk unchaperoned

or with your female companion which, on land,

even in a park or any other public setting,

was a complete no-no. You didn't go anywhere,

wherever it was, you just didn't do that.

But what's interesting about the pier is that

it really was a melting pot.

The pier was the place that they really all came to.

This was the place of entertainment, the place of pleasure,

the focus of the seaside resorts.

To attract a wider range of customers,

Hastings Pier began to change.

A bowling alley and other attractions were added.

And during the First World War,

the slender deck at the shoreward end was transformed

into a huge square with a bandstand in the middle.

The pier was now a favourite destination for soldiers

seeking rest and recuperation.

But in 1917, after a concert for Canadian troops

stationed nearby, disaster struck.

The fire, probably started by a discarded cigarette,

destroyed the Birch pavilion.

But the pier survived, and five years later,

was reborn with a new, slightly shed-like pavilion

to entertain the post-war crowds.

Good news for local legend Biddy the Tubman,

and his unique seafaring antics.

The '20s and '30s were great decades for Hastings Pier.

In one week in 1931, 56,000 people passed through the turnstiles.

There was entertainment day and night.

The pier grew wider still...

..and even enjoyed a fashionable Art Deco face-lift.

But a few years later, the surgery was much more severe.

AIR RAID SIRENS

The English Channel was the place where the Nazis were going to land,

and these piers in particular were seen as places,

very vulnerable places, where the stormtroopers would come ashore.

And so, they were requisitioned by the military,

and modified in such a way to stop this happening.

What they did here and a number of other piers

is actually just chop them in half, remove the central section,

so even if you did land at the far end,

you couldn't actually get ashore.

'When the armies reached Dunkirk, it was the end.'

The Second World War spelt death for many piers.

In 1940, bomb damage and fire devastated St Leonards Pier.

A storm in 1951 destroyed what was left.

After the war, really everything kind of changed,

but in the old days, the concert parties on the beach here,

you'd have had the Pierrot troupes playing on the beach.

Those were the variety shows that wouldn't go on to the pier.

That was too low-grade for what you'd expect on the pier.

But that then changed.

Those concert parties, those Pierrot troupes,

became the seaside shows that then occupied the pier theatres,

and so, that goes on through the '50s, just up until the '60s, really,

by which time, everything was changed again,

people are beginning to go abroad for their holidays,

and the piers begin to become really sort of like little fairgrounds,

and many of the pavilions are turned into

amusement arcades and slot machines.

MUSIC: "Shakin' All Over" by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates

As the frugal '50s morphed into the swinging '60s,

the widening decks of Hastings Pier were suddenly popular

with a new kind of customer with lots of money to spend...

# Shakin' all over... #

..the teenager.

In the '60s, you didn't have very many

1,000 to 2,000 capacity venues.

All you had was ballrooms.

Otherwise, bands were playing in cinemas, so The Beatles

and The Stones used to play in cinemas most of the time.

So the ballrooms, the seaside ballroom venues,

were a fledgling part of the UK rock and pop scene.

MUSIC: "You Really Got Me" by The Kinks

I remember going in the bar one time, and The Kinks were there.

And all the bands used to drink in the bar before the gig.

You know, you only see these people on Ready Steady Go!

or something like that,

and then you're in your local ballroom,

and there they are, talking to everyone.

I mean, that was great.

We were spoilt in Hastings,

because we had a lot of bands come to Hastings

just prior to them taking off.

A lot of the artists that appeared there in late '63, '64,

went on to become the British Invasion in America.

Gerry And The Pacemakers, The Hollies, people like this.

So we saw the creme de la creme of British pop down here at the time.

The pier ballroom was a well-used venue through the '60s,

'70s and '80s, but the biggest crowds came for the live music,

and some of the best gigs 60 pence could buy.

Really significant gigs, as well.

Pink Floyd played on the pier,

and it was the last ever gig with Syd Barrett,

took place on that pier.

Joe Strummer played on the pier three days before he died.

And then when you start to look into the stage of people's careers

when they played on the pier. For example, Jimi Hendrix,

it was the absolute peak of his career.

He'd just played the Monterey Pop Festival in the June,

and then in the October, he comes and plays on Hastings Pier, you know?

The Sex Pistols, similarly, were at the height of their powers.

They hadn't gone to the Sid Vicious times, they hadn't started

the downward slope, Anarchy In The UK was about to be released.

But for the big names of the day,

Hastings Pier presented a unique problem...

LOUD SCREAMING

# The joint was rocking... #

..how to get on and off again without being spotted.

Legend has it that when the Rolling Stones played here in 1964,

they were driven from Hastings police station

in the back of an ambulance.

A policeman opened the door,

and the Stones rolled out as fast as they could.

Turn round, Brian Jones,

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts.

Belting out the back of the...

And we're turning round to our mates to tell them,

by which time it had all happened, they'd gone, and no-one believed us.

Precisely how Jimi Hendrix got on and off the pier in 1967

without being mobbed is a mystery.

But one band that made a memorable entrance to the pier

in the 1970s was Dutch rock group Golden Earring.

MUSIC: "Radar Love" by Golden Earring

They arrived with a quadraphonic sound system in the back of a truck,

and nearly lost the lot to the English Channel.

They were advised not to take the lorry onto the pier,

but I think something was lost in translation,

and they went on, stopped, and then there was a...

IMITATES CREAKING

..as the nearside rear wheels went through the deck.

With the pier 100 years old, and beginning to feel her age,

the last thing she needed in 1973 was a Status Quo concert,

with more than 2,000 fans crammed into the ballroom.

People really going for it,

and the floor was going up and down and up and down.

In time with the beat. We were thinking,

"Just a little more, and we're going to be in there!"

You know? In the sea.

The Victorians were very good at overengineering,

-with all their cast iron and everything.

-Yeah.

But I swear, the pier was bouncing up and down

and I was thinking, "Oh, God!"

Because everywhere you went on the pier,

there were gaps between the floorboards,

and there was nothing...

The only thing underneath it was the sea,

unless it was low tide and it was sand.

In the dressing rooms, it was even worse.

Doors didn't fit, and there certainly weren't any locks

on anything, and they were just gaps here, there, and everywhere.

Hastings Pier wasn't the only place feeling seasick.

By the mid-1970s,

many of Britain's once-thriving seaside resorts were on the decline.

MUSIC: "Ghost Town" by The Specials

Most people didn't go abroad until the late 1960s, 1970s,

and that's really when the visitor numbers

to seaside towns start to fall.

And it's not only that, but people stop

going to seaside towns to stay.

They go for day trips, rather than staying visits.

MUSIC: "The Modern World" by The Jam

# This is a modern world

# This is the modern world... #

The steady drop in tourist income took a toll on all our piers.

Those that were well-run and maintained managed to survive.

But those that weren't...

# This is the modern world. #

..didn't.

I think these two piers in some ways sum up the fates of seaside towns,

the contrasting fates.

In one case, there's decline, there's dereliction,

there's falling visitor numbers, a lack of investment,

and in the other case, it's a buzzy, successful,

ever-changing pier, which reflects more investment

and reflects the success, the present-day success of Brighton.

By the turn of the new millennium, Brighton,

like its old Palace Pier, had enjoyed a change in fortunes.

But Hastings Pier was struggling on.

In 2004, having survived major storms and several owners,

the ailing pier became the legal property

of a mysterious offshore company based in Panama.

But without regular maintenance and repair, the structure deteriorated,

while a peculiar mix of businesses came and went on the deck above.

It had all these very strange little business units,

a computer repair shop and a language school,

and these quirky things that you think,

"What is this doing on a pier?"

It certainly lacked love and care and attention.

For a long time, the council were waiting for a fairy godmother

to come along with a load of money and sort it out,

but even if that had happened, that would have been a business,

a private company, who would have had

responsibility to shareholders,

rather than responsibility to the building,

and that's a problem, particularly with piers.

They need responsible owners who will take the money

that comes off the top and put it back in underneath.

That didn't happen at Hastings,

and in August 2008, after a colourful life of 136 years,

the structure was declared unsafe and the pier was shut down.

And there she stood, uninsured, unvisited,

but not, apparently, unloved.

A group of determined local people had formed a trust,

and the campaign was well under way to get Hastings Pier

back into the hands of Hastings people.

There was a sense that nobody else could deal with it.

The only people who can't walk away are the people who live here,

and so there wasn't another option.

With the campaign gathering pace, the trust met on October 4, 2010,

to discuss plans for a compulsory purchase of the pier.

I was chairing the meeting, which was the official announcement to say

what the situation and the plans were,

and then I went to bed that night,

and I was working in a place called Cwmbran in South Wales,

so I had to get up at four o'clock in the morning,

and so I had a nice sleep, and about 3:45,

I noticed a text to say, "the pier is on fire."

And I thought, "Well, that can't be right."

So, I then got out of bed, got ready as I would normally,

and instead of turning right towards Cwmbran,

I turned left and could see, oh, yes, there's a fire.

-OVER RADIO:

-'Yeah, this is pretty terrible.'

Who started the fire and how has never been established,

although two men were arrested at the scene.

They were never charged.

If I could have got to the person who set the fire,

I would have strangled them.

That was just my...

almost my entire life between about 10 years old and about 30,

something like that, just up in smoke.

People were crying the next morning.

It did feel like a daughter of the town was dead,

and also, it wasn't just a tragedy.

People were angry that it had been left for so long,

that it was uninsured, that because it was unsafe,

the fire engines weren't able to get on it.

I'm looking at it,

and then just tears started rolling down my face,

cos I realised it was the pier, Hastings Pier, being burnt down.

And I just thought, God, you know...

It's just too much, watching this.

Hastings had been on the endangered piers list

for several years before the blaze.

Now, it seemed destined to become Britain's 42nd lost pier.

Of the 15 original piers that once stood

on the coast of Kent and East Sussex,

only Eastbourne,

Brighton,

and Gravesend have survived intact.

Deal is on its third pier, and so is Herne Bay,

although its pier head has been detached from its body since 1980.

But nine other south-east piers have disappeared completely,

many of them destroyed by fire.

But in Hastings, the flames had a strange effect.

They burnt the pier, but they also fired up the town.

From that moment onwards, I think I joined everybody else

in Hastings in thinking, "We now must save this pier."

By morning, we'd rethought how we were going to do it,

and we were out on the promenade, talking to people and saying,

"We are not giving up. Don't give up."

I was straight on the phone to Kerry Michael

at Weston-super-Mare pier, and said, "Our pier has just burnt down.

"You've been through this experience. Can I come and see you?"

The grand pier at Weston-super-Mare was badly damaged by fire

two years before Hastings.

But this pier had insurance to cover the £40 million repairs.

Hastings was a dangerous structure

with no sign of its offshore owners, and no money.

But seven weeks after the fire,

the trust had worked out how much it needed to rebuild the structure,

and put in a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund.

They came down and the town was plastered with posters

saying "everyone loves the pier",

and "just say yes to the people's pier", and all these things.

The Heritage Lottery said to me since

that they've never seen anything like that,

that normally they come and they have a bit of a visit,

they don't normally expect that kind of level of support locally.

In total, £14 million was needed, but while fundraising carried on,

nothing else could happen until the trust secured ownership of the pier,

a process that took three years.

One of the reasons I have stuck with it all these years is

because I wanted to prove that local people could make this big change.

And that's all the local people, not just a few trustees,

but all the volunteers, all the members,

all the people who've come out for marches and for events,

for tea dances and quizzes and raffles and everything,

all of those people have made this difference.

They didn't think they could, but they have.

The community in Hastings is very unusual,

because it really has a strong sense of itself.

There is a belief that you can get things done as a community,

and I think, actually, in Britain, we've kind of lost that a bit.

One more. That's it. Thanks.

After years of campaigning, the pier finally became the property of

the Hastings Pier Charity in August 2013.

CHEERING

Work began to bring this great attraction back from the dead.

MUSIC: "Voodoo Chile" by Jimi Hendrix

The initial work involves measuring

every inch of the Victorian metalwork

with a 21st-century laser scanner to produce a 3D jigsaw puzzle,

with the size and shape of every new piece worked out precisely.

In a strange quirk of fate,

a former Hastings teenager is overseeing this part of the process.

This section here is the area that was demolished

during the Second World War, and we can tell that from the construction.

These girders here are made out of iron and steel,

and not cast iron,

which is what the Victorians used originally.

Most of the 14 million is being spent below the deck

to repair and secure the structure.

So the plans above deck are simple.

In a way, it's a return to the kind of pier Eugenius Birch

envisaged all those years ago, with just two buildings.

One, the only survivor of the fire, will be a restaurant.

The other will be a visitor centre,

with mirrored walls reflecting sea and sky.

The rest of the pier will be open space,

an urban park over the water, where activities can come and go

as the weeks, months, and seasons change.

We see the pier and the visitor centre both as being

very flexible venues to allow

a whole range of different activities to take place,

whether it's a visiting circus, markets,

a funfair, what have you.

Different activities that also work throughout the course of the year.

In winter, it might be Christmas markets,

it could be ice-skating.

Autumn, it could be a harvest festival,

it could be a music festival,

in addition to what you'd expect to find in the summer time.

A pier is for everyone.

It's for all ages, for all classes, and it's completely accessible.

It's a flat space. You can get a buggy on it,

a wheelchair on it, so it really is

for the whole town and for every kind of visitor.

I think the architects have come up with a great vision, actually,

that retains the history and feel of the pier,

but at the same time, makes it really modern and unique.

And the idea of stripping it back and reconnecting it to the sea

is just a very basic idea, but it's a lovely one.

Not only does it give us that opportunity

to leverage all kinds of different activities

at different times of the year,

but, of course, the maintenance costs of an open space

mean that we can probably concentrate

more than previous owners on making sure that the substructure,

which, after all, is the thing that supports everything,

whether it be buildings or open space,

but that's the element of it which needs to be properly maintained.

The pier has to be able to fund its own maintenance,

and the business plan is relatively conservative.

It involves 325,000 visitors a year, each spending £4.

And if we're able to meet those numbers, then that should

provide sufficient funding to ensure

that the pier itself is maintained, as the priority of the charity.

It's not just a new kind of pier.

It has a new kind of owner, too, with a community share scheme,

enabling anyone to invest £100 or more

and have a say in his future.

Every shareholder has a single vote, regardless of how much they invest.

In a sense, it gives everybody a right to participate

in the way in which the pier develops.

It'll be nice to come back in Easter 2015, when it's due to open,

and feel, "Well, I own a bit of this."

I look forward to it very much.

MUSIC: "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?" By The Clash

It's 145 years since construction began

on Eugenius Birch's pioneering pleasure pier.

The world has changed a lot since then,

and Hastings Pier has changed with it.

And maybe that willingness to change,

along with the tenacity of the townsfolk,

will be the key to its future success.

We always wanted a 21st century pleasure pier.

We weren't harking back to the 19th century,

so now we really can make that happen.

For heaven's sake! You just have to come out here!

It's a wonderful place. It's exhilarating. It's beautiful.

This will be here in 200 years' time.

Thank God for the people of Hastings! They've saved it.

# Should I stay or should I go now?

# Should I stay or should I go now?

# If I go, there will be trouble

# And if I stay, it will be double

# So you got to let me know

# Should I cool it or should I blow?

# Should I stay or should I go now?

# If I go there will be trouble

# And if I stay, it will be double

# So you've got to let me know...

# Should I stay or should I go? #