Pier Review

by Jon Bounds

  Describing itself as the 'ultimate indoor theme park', it is a surprise to arrive at the arcade complex to the sound of David Essex telling us to hold him close and not let him go. Surely the soundtrack to the 'ultimate indoor theme park' is frantic European techno? Or 15-ft robot Vengaboys playing Jive Bunny covers on an endless loop? If we'd been further on in our trip, we wouldn't have been surprised at hearing David Essex, because David, as we would find out, haunts the south coast like a varnished cockney ghost.

  WESTON-SUPER-MARE Grand

  Opened: 1904 (Architect: P. Munroe; Angus Meek for 2010 rebuild)

  Length at start: 1,300 ft (396 m), extended temporarily by 1,500 ft (457 m) in 1907

  Length now: 1,300 ft (396 m)

  Burn baby burn? Twice, once in 1930, and again in 2008.

  The last of the so-called 'Grand Piers' to be built, it was extended in 1907 to dock steamers at the sea end, but the currents proved too strong and the extension was demolished. Still supported by 360 original cast-iron piles from 1904 along with 71 new steel piles added in 2010.

  The Grand Pier is a proper pier, one you'd imagine if I said the word to you out of the blue, with arcades, shops and candyfloss. The shops are very keen to tell you all about the rebuilding by letting you purchase books and DVDs. I flick through a book that tells me proudly that a scene from The Remains of the Day was filmed on the pier, and of the many, many fires and many, many owners in its history. It does seem a little like the wrapping has yet to be taken off – for a building that's designed to be so open to the elements, it's not got a mark on it. Like the shopping area, it's a little too clean – antiseptic even – a bit corporate. We're searching for a bar, for something to do as much as anything. The eating area is service-stationesque and dry. It occurs to us that we need to work out what we'll be doing when we get to these piers. Walking their length and reaching the end of each is already off the agenda, for here only corporate clients get to do that.

  * * *

  The massive multistorey arcade looks like London's Trocadero. Or how the Trocadero used to look, not how it looks now, which is like a post-apocalyptic bartering hall. Weston Pier has several floors of exciting, but closed-looking, rides and huge arcade machines. Hidden about them are still the tuppenny sliders and ratty eighties fruit machines. I'm not sure if they ran out of attractions or kept some of the old ones for the nans. We note the 4D cinema and postulate that perhaps a pedant pointed out that time is also a measurable dimension. We walk past the Laser Maze, the dodgems, the go-kart track and Crystal Maze (which is just a hall of mirrors rebranded for the 'meh' generation). The Psychedelic Experience, from what I can make out, is a series of darkened rooms with black lights and decorations you crawl around while wearing paper glasses with light-polarising lenses. It's branded as a 'sixties experience', suggesting the only notable thing about the decade that brought us civil rights, youth culture and leaps in technology was mind-bending drug use. I swipe a pair of the gaudy paper glasses.

  * * *

  Captain Jack's bar is in darkness, the doors from the arcade are locked, the dark wood looks cold, the shadows gloomy. We approach it from the outside – the 'stunning outside terrace'. A woman with a pushchair struggles with the door but gains entry. Danny inches in, shuffling against the wind, leaning forward, letting his open shirt billow around his T-shirt like a cape. But an unlocked door is not an invitation to the Captain's table. There is no more life in the saloon than in the fibreglass Johnny Depp that guards it. Naming a family bar after a Disney character, even one that's a notorious alcoholic, is an odd move. Not that this Jack is in any way official. Like the insurance-pimping meerkats in the claw games, this is culture appropriated, not licensed. Better surely, would be a Merchant Ivory-themed tearoom.

  Oddly appropriated too. The rebuild happened in 2010, years after the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, so it can't have been at its most ubiquitous, and piracy doesn't seem to be a very Weston thing in any event. It's not a grand naval town or port; it doesn't even have the history of smuggling that the Cornish coast can claim. It seems part of the fourth film in the franchise was filmed not too far away, about 150 miles down the road in St Ives. So it's possible that after exhausting the heady, arty delights of the mini Tate they have there, the faux-pirate band could have sought a more boisterous tavern up the A30.

  * * *

  Holding onto Midge's shirt so he isn't carried off in the wind, we walk back towards land, trying to ignore the frantic sound of the Walls-ice-cream-branded flags snapping backwards and forwards in the wind.

  Jon wants what's known in the drinking game as an 'evener', that is a drink during a hangover to get you back on an even keel. Personally, I try never to drink before 3.30 p.m. because, well, a man's got to have rules. But on holiday all rules are suspended so I am eager for the first official pint of the trip.

  The sea is always out at Weston and the pubs are always shut, it seems. After several failed attempts to get into a clearly open tourist information office we chance walking into the town. The further from the front you go, the more Weston transforms into an average working-class market town; a shopping centre, bored-looking youths and vomit shadows in the fire escapes. We detour back towards the front and finally settle for the Wetherspoon's because if we can't open a set of doors that haven't stopped several old people from getting into the tourist information centre, I don't fancy our chances in town.

  * * *

  Johnny Depp may indeed have stumbled, Keith Richards-like, into the very same Wetherspoon's pub we do now. The nautical stylings and cheap burger offers may have attracted him. It may have been, as it is with us, that all of the more interesting and independent-looking places were shut at 3 p.m. on a Monday. We have scouted and baulked at venue after venue until, eventually, the consistency of a chain has triumphed over the desire to see the town properly. Standing at the bar there's a sort of decision to be made. We have our pier budget, but we've been unable to decide quite what this covers. We've had plenty of time to think about it, but we've been lazy and often a bit drunk when we were planning. We're discussing this, still working out our new, more intense relationships while ordering, and the barman struggles to focus on what we're after (lagers and a coke for the driver).

  * * *

  The Cabot Court Hotel is large and has many levels, mostly decked out in the uniform Wetherspoon's decor: new wood stained old, coffee-house beige and framed history on the walls that only the most socially awkward or stood-up will ever read. One level is themed quite convincingly as below deck on the most relaxed ship ever, even going to the trouble of having two large window-shaped screens showing the wake of what one would presume is a large boat. I decide we should sit outside and perhaps enjoy the last of the sun. As soon as we step outside the gale takes a quarter of my pint, turns it into lager vapour and distributes it over a spluttering, near-blind Midge. We head inside laughing at our soaked friend.

  * * *

  While it's not exactly the interior of the Black Pearl, there are maps and moody lighting – enough to convince you that it might be the skinny one from The Office sitting in an unlit alcove talking to a girl in jeggings.

  We're starting to appropriate culture too. David Essex's big hit 'Hold Me Close' was playing as we entered the Grand Pier and it's an instant hit with us. It's one of those songs that it's impossible not to 'do the accent' for when singing, which enhances its comedy potential and makes it acceptable for men to indulge each other with. Danny starts first, a wavering cockney attempt at the title line, which soon overwhelms sentient thought. Which means it's started: leave a group of males together for an extended period of time and conversation will soon be drowned in a mess of stock phrases and in-jokes. Less than four hours into the trip was a little sooner than I expected, but I guess that the planning stages brought us together and exhausted the 'gettingto-know-you shit' that might have held this point off.

  I don't know Midge well, but just how well I've come to know Danny Smith is s
till a little unnerving. Like Midge, I first met him at a meeting in a city-centre pub for – and yes, this is a bit nerdish – bloggers. That is, people who defined themselves by the fact they wrote blogs on the Internet. Midge I liked, still like a lot, and see in a fair number of social situations. But Danny and I have become much closer than that.

  The reason for this is something to do with shared backgrounds; most of the people who live near us, and most of those in our social circle, are not 'local'. Graduate careers and easy mobility (geographical if not social) do mean that you end up spending a lot of time with people where the common ground is culture and the now. The past is more difficult to work with. The lack of a race memory of where you live means that experience gets homogenised. No matter how much you have in common, place will create a deeper bond. We're both a little obsessed with a 'local businessman' (his words and, officially, those of the police too) from the seventies and may surely be the only people in their early thirties to have read his poorly written and boastful autobiography.

  We also have class in common, both being educated workingclass kids now a little uncomfortable both in our middle-class surroundings and with our history, and that has to be part of the roots of this project. Working-class people of our age from Birmingham didn't go to the seaside for summer holidays. We were born at the boom of the package holiday, and if you're not from the Midlands you can't understand just how alien the coast seems to us. We have a foot in both the future and the past: and piers seem to have that too.

  Danny knows things about me that almost no one else does, including many of my trigger points for self-destruction. I've just got to trust him, myself and Midge as well. Our driver, too, will have learned much that's unpalatable about me by the time we reach the last pier.

  * * *

  Weston-super-Mare has two piers. The creeping spectre of our own poor planning shows its ghoulish humdrum face when we realise that we have no idea where the other pier is. Our mobile devices, those slick slabs of plastic and magic that all three of us expend furtive glances and spare minutes on, are rendered near useless. It seems that out of the major cities in England, mobile phone coverage is as rare as Tory tears. After a few minutes of screen-tapping frustration without any signal, Jon exhales angrily and mutters 'I have no idea how these animals live' as he heads to the bar to ask the less-than-cognisant bar staff for directions.

  Assured it's 'that way', we head off. We asked for the list of all the working piers in England and Wales from the National Piers Society; it never occurred to us that it could be wrong. We neither had the arrogance nor the motivation to check and so took the list as gospel. This, in a sense, is probably the only logical way of doing it. There has to be an official list from another party or else we could have got lost in an ever-decreasing spiral of details and semantics around what constitutes working or what is a pier.

  Birnbeck Pier was closed to the public nearly 20 years ago, roughly 130 years after it had opened in 1867. It was originally used and abandoned as a jetty to visiting steamers and pleasure boats because of the notoriously varied tidal waters of the Bristol Channel. At the moment it's a gothic sketch in iron and barbed wire that we can't get near. Of all the piers we are never to get on, this one haunts me the most. Its old, weather-worn, wooden buildings and Victorian ironwork tell of ghost stories and Boy's Own adventures.

  In 2006 the Manchester developers Urban Splash bought the pier and held competitions to decide how they should redevelop it. Everything from luxury apartments to an aquarium were suggested, but the £4m price proved too costly and the pier was sold privately in 2010. The future of Birnbeck Pier is often speculated upon locally, but I think the romance and danger of the rusting iron struts and lonely, distant island framed by a low setting sun will almost certainly be ripped away and a focusgrouped concrete 'complex' will be put in its place.

  WESTON-SUPER-MARE Birnbeck

  Opened: 1867 (Architect: Eugenius Birch)

  Length at start: 1,150 ft (350 m)

  Length now: 1,040 ft (317 m)

  Burn baby burn? A few sparks in the long-gone arcade, and part of the pier collapsed during a storm in 1903.

  Now closed, it was home to the Weston-super-Mare Lifeboat Station until 2013. In 1891 Weston's second ever telephone was installed here, six months aft er the first one was installed in the town. In the sixties, the Beatles staged an early publicity shoot around the pier, posing in Victorian bathing costumes.

  Our next pier is our first non-pier, no nearer to being open than most of the shops on the sand-battered prom. As we strike out vaguely north, assisted by sporadic GPS, I'm most disappointed that a shop called The Rock Shop Newsagents is shuttered. Not only does the name promise proper seaside delights, and newspapers, it announces itself 'Home of the Steve Yabsley Outside Broadcasts'. I don't have much of a clue what those might entail. It could be the newsagent with a megaphone, or it could be some endearingly terrible hospital radio DJ who does his request show live from there on a Saturday morning.

  When I get back home, weeks later, I look at a picture of it. In the picture the shop is open: postcards on a spinning stand, a hatch through which to serve ice cream, various windows full of seaside ephemera. I also find out all about Steve Yabsley, including that the show is an 'annual Saturday spectacular'. Nothing like defining yourself by a seasonal event, which is very seaside indeed, I suppose. I also spend as much time as I can stand listening to Steve's output. It is exactly how I suspected it would be, which makes our decision later in the trip to listen to as much local radio as possible for local colour even more baffling.

  Turns out that there's an easy route and a hard route to Birnbeck Pier. The easy way is to take the road. Instead, we hoist our trouser bottoms and cross a kind of path circling an inlet, the sea breeze smoothing water across the concrete. If it were dangerous it would be roped off, we reason. The same with the uneven causeway that's at the end of it. The rock pools contain the usual mix of potential sea creatures and discarded wrappers. When we get there, our trust in Britain's paranoid health-andsafety culture allows us to get up close to and even underneath the fading structure. It's not much more than a framework, and the island that it reaches and then forks off – which, if I were being critical, might make it more of a bridge – may be all that's holding it up and out.

  And that's it. We don't have a ritual to perform, so we head back to the car and, after Midge complains greatly about the biting point and the handbrake, to the real nearest pier to Birmingham.

  * * *

  Logically, the next pier would have been first, but Weston-super-Mare is where we needed to start, not where we should have started. If logic or reason were part of the trip then it would have already never happened four or five times over. So we get in the car and drive the 20-mile diversion back to Clevedon.

  * * *

  As we park on a coast road, the sun is slowly fading and the junction between land and water is looking more English and peaceful than I've ever seen. My seaside has always been the commercial seaside; this is not, it's just quiet. Nice.

  And it's closed.

  We arrive at the toll gate at 5.50 p.m. and are just working out how to pay when the realisation that closing time is 5.30 p.m. pops a crimp in our visit. There's nothing we can do but gaze through the wrought-iron gates. The gates look darker than they should due to a thick coat of green paint, and the pier looks older and more fragile than it should due to the growing end-of-season dark.

  * * *

  Although we had been assured that piers rarely close for the season any more, they do, apparently, close for the day. Clevedon Pier towers above the beach, jutting out from the slope of a hill. It's designed simply, with a walkway and a small seating pavilion at the end. It was opened in 1869 and lasted, despite minor upsets, until the seventies when it was closed after stress testing collapsed some of the boards. Then began a long scrabble for funding. The combined efforts of local councils, a preservation society, and grants from English Heritage
led to its reopening in 1989. It's now the only Grade I listed pier in the country.

  It's nice to be by the coast: in Birmingham the canal is the closest we really get to nautical. In a country of ports, smugglers, pirates and market towns, the Midlands are exceptional in their isolation from the sea. We have no real affection for the canals, despite every few years the council trying to rebrand them as exciting redevelopment potential or inner-city resorts. If you believe the hype, the canal system in Birmingham is a cross between a corporate, open-air gym and a cosmopolitan, cafe-culture paradise. But people in Birmingham rarely think about the canals. To us they're a quirk of our industrial past, and everybody half suspects they're full of dead rats, shopping trolleys and near-sentient fungal diseases.

  In Birmingham we're divorced from nature almost completely. Most of us are third-generation inhabitants of dark factories, as far from the sea as the population of gulls that live on the rooftops near our high streets and in our concrete school playgrounds. Jon actually asked me once in which direction the sun set. Perhaps even more shamefully, I only knew because I remembered it from John Wayne films as a kid.