Travelling the country for Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain, exploring old buildings in search of their secrets was, of course, an absolute pleasure from start to finish. Except for one morning. Sometimes you agree to do something on the spur of the moment and realize immediately it was a mistake. But you can’t pull out without coming across as a bit of a wimp. So it was when I signed up to go sea swimming with Britain’s oldest swimming club. The swimming bit was fine. It was the place and the time of year that concerned me: the English Channel in the month of March.
Brighton Swimming Club was founded in 1860. The idea had been to go back to the town’s origins as a seaside resort by celebrating the very thing that brought everybody there in the first place. It was the sea that fuelled Brighton’s economy, defined its magnificent seafront architecture and shaped its carefree, slightly raffish air. And it was the sea that inspired the West Pier, that iconic, now vanishing structure that is the subject of this chapter. It therefore made sense that the sea would be a good starting point for me too.
When the day dawned this seemed like a rash decision. The outside air temperature was 9°C and there was a sea fret. My preferred mode of interaction with the ocean was to sit in a seafront cafe with my hands round a cup of coffee and admire it from a distance. At least the good people of the swimming club had thought to supply me with a wetsuit, even if they were wearing swimming costumes and trunks. So it was that a dozen of us changed in the club’s premises, in one of the old fishermen’s arches at the back of the beach, and charged down the sloping shingle for our icy constitutional.
The wetsuit, I’m happy to say, mitigated the worst of the effects, but it didn’t cover my hands and feet which became painfully cold, a sensation that gradually spread to the rest of my body. And boy was it penetrating and intense. I remained close to the shore but stuck it out for a respectable few minutes, floating on my back and posing gamely for a photograph taken by a fellow swimmer on his waterproof camera. Then it was back on the shingle and a vigorous rub-down with a towel. Some swimmers, meanwhile, had made it nearly as far as the end of the Palace Pier.
As I massaged some feeling back into my extremities I was joined by one of my fellow masochists, a sprightly chap who needs a walking stick when not buoyant in water. ‘I’ve got arthritis,’ he told me. ‘It’s affecting my spine and neck, and cold water relieves the pain. And above all it gives me exercise.’ This seawater remedy, he said, ‘was handed down through the family’. The sea, you could say, is in Brighton’s bones.
But you didn’t have to be in it to enjoy it – which was precisely the principle on which the pleasure pier was conceived. Having showered and dressed, I walked west along the seafront with a spring in my step and a glow on my skin, resolving, St Augustine-like, to do more sea swimming in winter – but not quite yet. As I drew alongside Brighton’s latest showstopping attraction, the ‘i360’ (more of that later), I looked out to sea, between two rows of pilings driven into the shingle beach that once supported the entrance ramp to the West Pier.
Those pilings frame a view of all that is left of the pier. Opened in 1866, it was once one of the most elegant pleasure piers in the country, extending more than 1,000 feet over the ocean and comprising many different features, including a pier-head pavilion. It closed to the public in 1975, was damaged by storm and fire over subsequent decades and has now been reduced to a strange cast-iron skeleton resembling a 3-D computer graphic, marooned offshore and prey to continuing erosion from wind and wave.
It is a haunting spectacle. Cities like Athens and Rome have been defined by their ruins. Since the West Pier fell derelict, its ghostly hulk has also been a key part of Brighton’s seafront. But while the ruins of the classical age have been preserved for posterity, stabilized against further decay, the West Pier is living on borrowed time and will, sooner or later, slip beneath the waves. I was anxious not just to set eyes on it, but to get as close to it as possible while there was still something to see. That meant going by boat and the boatman who had offered to take me was a locally based marine engineer called Jon Orrell, who has been carefully monitoring the pier’s gradual decay for the past two decades. There was a bit of swell running as we bobbed among the barnacle-encrusted pilings, encircled by dangerous reefs of submerged ironwork, but Jon, like an old river pilot, knew where the dangers lurked.
Had we been in this position a century ago we’d have been directly beneath the pier-head pavilion. The sound of the orchestra would have been drifting on the wind. Now it was merely the cry of seagulls we heard. ‘The pier was very well built, in really thick cast-iron sections, and even today in the North Sea we use cast iron as a great durable material,’ said Jon. ‘The Victorians really knew how to build robustly. There will always be something here even if it’s just left as it is. But I would say that in another twenty years it won’t be recognizable as a pier.’
Eugenius Birch, the euphoniously named architect who designed it, along with thirteen other pleasure piers, would be horrified and saddened by the fate of his masterpiece. When it opened in 1866 it was essentially an open deck for promenading, graced with six villas in an oriental style to add a touch of glamour. But over the decades it acquired a bandstand, landing stages, a pier-head pavilion and a concert hall, setting new standards in design and amenities.
Pleasure piers are, or were, a definably British phenomenon. In their heyday in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at least 100 of them studded the British coastline, from Dunoon in the Highlands of Scotland to Dover in Kent, enabling visitors to take the sea air and be sustained and entertained while doing so. At the time of writing just fifty-nine are left, the rest having been removed or destroyed by vandalism or arson. With them has gone a distinctive part of the personality of the seaside resort.
By the time the West Pier opened, Brighton had been known for a century as a pleasure and health resort, especially since George, Prince of Wales and his entourage of sybarites made it their bolthole of choice in the 1780s. But it wasn’t until the 1840s, when the railway came to Brighton, that the resort began to attract holidaymakers on an extensive scale. The town’s piers, built to accommodate thousands of visitors at a time, symbolized that democratizing process. (Brighton has had two piers in addition to the West Pier – the Chain Pier, which opened in 1823 and was destroyed by a storm in 1896, and the Palace Pier, which opened in 1899 and is still in rude health.)
Back on dry land I returned to those pilings in the shingle to sit down and read about the West Pier in an old guidebook I had picked up in a second-hand shop in Brighton, Ward Lock & Co.’s A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Brighton and Hove from 1920. Admission then was ‘2d.’ and a bathing ticket was ‘6d. (including tax)’. The guidebook gives a thumbnail sketch: ‘A broad flight of steps, with side inclines for bath chairs and other wheeled vehicles, leads to the main portion of the Pier, along the middle of which runs a continuous shelter, with seats protected from wind and rain. The Pavilion at the pier-head is used almost daily for theatrical entertainments, at which leading London artistes appear …’
My next witness, Leonard Goldman, is 102 years old, which makes him the oldest person I met in the course of researching Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain. It also makes him one of the last living witnesses to the golden age of the British seaside and it would have been appropriate if we could have strolled together along the pier on which he spent so much time as a boy. Instead we sat on deckchairs on the beach, gazing on all that is left of it as we talked. ‘I think I can call it my second home,’ he said. ‘I went on it as often as I possibly could. It had a fascination. As soon as you got on the pier you would get to feel a certain freedom – you weren’t in the sea but you were on the sea.’
Len moved to Brighton with his family in 1920, the year that old guidebook was published. By then the Palace Pier, a little over half a mile to the east, had been open for twenty years and a rivalry had developed between them. Some said that the Palace Pier and its environs were where true Brightonians chose to take their simple pleasures. The West Pier was for the posh visitors who stayed in the grand squares of Hove, or ‘Hove, actually’ as Brightonians referred sarcastically to the more salubrious town on their doorstep. For Len there was no contest. ‘The West Pier was the pier so far as I was concerned,’ he said. He always made a beeline for the end of the pier, past the pavilion, where there was a swimming pool with diving boards.
Sometimes proficient divers put on displays. ‘This Amazonian lady came there,’ he said, ‘shouting through a loudhailer: “Any more for the diving in the bay at the end of the pier?” She came round with a collecting box, which of course we kids ignored. She stood up there and did some dives that would not have disgraced an Olympic diver. A very high board. Somersaults. All the stuff.’
Len loved swimming off the end of the West Pier. The days of segregated bathing had ended two decades before, at the turn of the twentieth century. Beaches were no longer designated male or female and the old bathing machines – essentially, wooden cabins on wheels from which one descended into the sea – now served as stationary beach huts or had been broken up. But there was still a strict etiquette about what you could wear in the sea. Men and boys were expected to cover up just as much as women.
‘You were not allowed to go bare-topped, even then,’ recalled Len. ‘Eventually I got the prized swimsuit, the Jantzen. It had great big holes at the side so you exposed as much as you possibly could legally!’ But the interwar years were a period of rapid social development that was reflected in changing habits at the seaside. Less than twenty years after a young Len Goldman was obliged to keep his torso under wraps, exposed, bronzed flesh was what holidays in Brighton were all about.
To understand this evolution I travelled 5 miles east, along the coastal road, past Brighton Marina and Rottingdean, to a little piece of California tucked into the last folds of the South Downs as they slope down to the chalk sea cliffs. This is the Saltdean Lido, an outdoor swimming complex that reflected an entirely new attitude to seaside leisure when it opened in May 1938. ‘In its luxurious equipment and surroundings, it is without rival in Southern England,’ claimed an advertisement of the time. It is, sadly, largely derelict now but a charitable trust is committed to restoring it to its former glory and the pool itself has already reopened to the public. My guide to the site was the historian Dr Kathryn Ferry, who specializes in seaside structures and cultures, from bathing huts to bandstands.
This lido, she told me, was one of scores built in Britain and America in the 1920s and 1930s. They took their name and inspiration from the Lido in Venice, a beach resort where men, women and children bathed and soaked up the sun together in a notably relaxed atmosphere and the body beautiful was not something to cover up or be ashamed of. The Saltdean Lido was designed in the Streamline Moderne style, reminiscent of the grand ocean liners of the day.
‘Architecture at the seaside is very much about giving people some glamour on their holidays,’ said Kathryn, as we stood on one of the old sun decks and looked down at the pool. ‘Bright, white, shiny, clean lines. Nothing you’ve ever really seen before, and what an amazing place to have a swim.’ Constructed of reinforced concrete, the crescent-shaped building was arranged around a central rotunda with changing rooms, sun terraces and cafe, all facing south to catch the sun and embrace the swimming pool. Whether you were taking tea or working on your tan, all eyes were on the people splashing about in the water.
‘Flesh is very much on show,’ Kathryn went on. ‘It’s very interesting that buildings like this catered for more spectators than swimmers. There were these massive lidos all round the coast and the amount of seating for spectators was always greater than for the swimmers themselves because of the flesh that was now on show.’ It was a remarkable shift away from the modesty of just a generation earlier and it was probably to do with exposure to the more sexually relaxed mores of Continental Europe.
‘People had been going abroad for their holidays and they’d seen that, actually, nothing terrible happens when men and women bathe together,’ said Kathryn. ‘The big change to where we are now happens in the interwar period. It comes about because of the fashion for sunbathing, because this is the new health cure. You had sea bathing in the eighteenth century that was supposed to be the cure-all. Now it was sunshine.’ But, just as the Saltdean Lido was taking off, the war intervened. The site was occupied by the National Fire Service for the duration of the war and fell into disrepair and dereliction for a number of years afterwards.
Elsewhere the popularity of the British seaside was apparently undimmed. In 1949 some 5 million holidaymakers had strolled on Britain’s piers as families made their annual summer pilgrimages to Brighton, Blackpool, Scarborough and myriad other resorts. They revelled in the simple, age-old pleasures of donkey rides, ice cream, and fish and chips. But the unreliability of the British weather ensured there was usually an element of stoicism to these holidays – of rainy days spent huddling behind windbreaks or sheltering in stuffy cafes.
The advent of the cheap package holiday abroad, in the 1960s, gave people the chance to vote with their feet. Preferring to spend their hard-earned cash on guaranteed sun and warm seas, the sun worshippers who had packed the beaches of Brighton till there was not a square foot of pebbles to be seen decamped to sunny Spain. The British seaside would never be quite the same – though Brighton itself, in inimitable fashion, has managed to reinvent itself as one of the most sophisticated and progressive towns in Europe in the past thirty years.
The country’s evolving holiday habits were reflected in the fate of the West Pier. In its Edwardian heyday it had been thronged with the better class of holidaymaker, the ladies in fine dresses with parasols, the men in straw boaters and blazers, all turning about in a leisurely promenade of fashion and wealth. In 1919 it recorded its highest-ever annual attendance, of more than 2 million visitors. But its exclusive status began to slip. In the post-war years it incorporated funfair attractions – visible in the 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War, which was shot partly on the West Pier – and went cheerfully downmarket. By the time it closed, for safety reasons, in 1975 it had turned downright tatty.
Back on Brighton’s seafront, I walked along for one last look at the relic of the West Pier. And on the way I ran into some familiar seaside characters. They were a puppeteer called Glyn Edwards and his hook-nosed partner in crime, Mr Punch. The traditional Punch and Judy show, performed with glove puppets in a red-and-white-striped canvas booth, has certainly not gone the way of the Saltdean Lido and the West Pier. I found Glyn and his puppets wowing an audience of mums and children on the beach. As I stopped to watch, Punch was having a disagreement with a policeman. ‘You’ve been a naughty boy, I’m going to take you to jail,’ said the policeman, rather unwisely. In reply Mr Punch swiped the hapless officer with his stick. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ he declared in time-honoured fashion.
‘Mr Punch is basically an Italian immigrant made good,’ said Glyn, a Punch and Judy ‘professor’ of long standing, after the show. ‘He has somehow tapped into the English love of authority being poked fun at – in a safe way – by someone else because if they do it they get into trouble.’ Glyn told me he had seen his first Punch and Judy show ‘in about 1950, 300 yards from where we are now standing, under the West Pier’. But this disrupter-in-chief has been around a lot longer than that, the first mention in this country being in Samuel Pepys’s diary on 9 May 1662 when Pepys records seeing ‘an Italian puppet play’ in Covent Garden.
The character was known as Polichinello or Pulcinella then. Shortly afterwards the name was anglicized to Punch and when the railways first brought mass tourism to the British seaside, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mr Punch (not to mention his shrewish wife Judy) hitched a lift down with the seaside entertainers of the day. They have been here ever since. ‘Because Brighton was the premier, the largest and the best seaside resort, Punch and Judy picked up on its popularity and in turn Brighton helped embed Mr Punch as the seaside anti-hero,’ said Glyn.
I am intrigued by the origins and character of Mr Punch, a foreigner who had the objectivity to satirize the eccentricities and puncture the vanities of life in Britain. Neither, surely, is it a coincidence that a place like Brighton should have taken to this mischievous Italian, for seaside resorts have always been receptive to influences from across the waves. In buttoned-up Victorian society, and indeed ever since, Mr Punch has acted as a safety valve for generations of strolling holidaymakers. Through him they have been able to escape the chains of daily life, if only for a few minutes, by laughing at institutions such as marriage, parenthood, the law and even politicians.
Ah, politicians. This gave me an idea and after a quick word with Glyn we put it into practice – Glyn having given one of his puppets a quick makeover with a mop of tousled blond hair. Michael Portillo Productions then announced to an expectant audience the world premiere of The Stabbing of Boris – A Fantasy. It had a suitably gory ending and a topical punchline: ‘Stabbed in the back! Look for Michael Gove!’ But the audience appeared nonplussed and Mr Punch whispered to me afterwards that I should stick to the day job.
For his part, Mr Punch will not be short of work. His brand of iconoclastic humour will never run out of targets, especially in today’s febrile political and social climate. Those with a nostalgic affection for the West Pier, on the other hand, had to bow to the inevitable and accept that it was no longer what the public wanted. But there is an intriguing postscript to its sad story, and it rises 530 feet in the air from the spot where the pier entrance once stood.
This is the British Airways i360 observation tower, which opened in 2016 amid claims by its architects that it was inspired by the West Pier and represents a cutting-edge version of the pleasure-pier concept. It consists of a doughnut-shaped ‘viewing pod’ that climbs the central tower like a ring on a spindle to a height of 450 feet. On a really clear day you’re supposed to be able to see the Isle of Wight, 50 miles away. When I rode up there with one of the i360’s architects, Julia Barfield, the sea haze limited my scope, but I did manage to pick out Worthing Pier in the west, the green rectangle of Regency Square immediately inland, the line of the South Downs on the northern horizon and Beachy Head to the east.
What really drew my eye, however, was the view almost directly below of the blackened geometric skeleton of the West Pier. ‘It’s the reason we’re here,’ Julia confirmed. ‘We’re like a vertical pier, really. Piers in their day were all about walking on water and, if you like, we’re now walking on air. They were about going out to sea and looking back at Brighton. And we’re doing that in a very twenty-first-century way. This is a contemporary answer to that innovation of the late nineteenth century.’
My journey through the hidden, abandoned and vanishing buildings of Britain was coming to an end and this was a suitably elevated vantage point from which to gather some thoughts. The Brighton story, it seems to me, is a salient one that finds echoes in many of the places and events I have explored. The sea that gave Brighton its uniquely vibrant identity – at once elegant, irreverent and ever so slightly sleazy – has all but reclaimed its most iconic monument, the West Pier. But the idea of the pier lives on in the new attraction of the i360. If Britain can be said to have a unique genius, it lies in the fact that we have always managed to find new ways of staying the same.