Pier Review
Page 16
GRAVESEND Town
Opened: 1834 (Architect: William Tiernwey Clark)
Length at start: 260 ft (79 m)
Length now: 260 ft (79 m)
Burn baby burn? No.
Gravesend Town Pier is the oldest surviving cast-iron pier in the world and is Grade II listed.
We're back on that A road, in what I think is the other direction.
* * *
The sun has beaten off the last of the antiseptic skies by the time we reach Herne Bay. Jon and Midge are openly arguing about where to park and my back is beginning to show signs of sleeping on floors all night and sitting in cars all day. We walk to the front, me creaking audibly as my spine cracks and pops into an upright position.
Herne Bay Pier is closed. Very closed. Metal railings bar the way and 'Danger, Demolition' tape covers those railings to underline the point. The first thing that strikes you is the wonderful municipal building. Big and angular, it has the striking ugliness of all council places built in the seventies – the locals' nickname for it is 'the cowshed'. It has a yellowing sign that says 'Roller Skating, Sports Hall, Fitness and Dance Studios and Squash Courts'. It was built when the grand pavilion ironically burnt down at the end of a £158,000 refurbishment, the victim of what they suspect was a stray welder's spark during the finishing of the entrance.
Herne Bay was the second-longest pier in Britain until a storm destroyed sections and isolated the pier head. You can still see it from the shore: an architectural fly preserved in amber. Because of the distance and the sun's hazy-heat blur, it almost seems a mirage. A Polaroid from history, developing in reverse, framed by the very real but pleasantly ridiculous wind farm behind it.
HERNE BAY
Opened: 1832, rebuilt in 1873 and extended in 1899 (Architect: Thomas Telford, then Wilkinson and Smith, then E. Mattheson)
Length at start: 3,633 ft (1,107 m)
Length now: 320 ft (98 m)
Burn baby burn? The first pier that occupied the site was sold for scrap in 1871. The theatre burnt down in 1928. In 1953 floods damaged the pier. After £158,000 was spent on rebuilding the Grand Pavilion in 1970, it burnt down before ever being opened. In 1978 storms destroyed the main neck, isolating the pier head out at sea.
Ken Russell used the pier as the backdrop to his first film, French Dressing (1964).
* * *
We spot a 'Pier Trust' shop opposite. I can almost feel the excitement building in Midge – he loved the one in Hastings.
This one is different, white and pastel, with very little shop and very little trust, as the guardians eye us with a form of disdain reserved for the unwashed. I've washed often, but not well. They are completely uninterested in our mission, and it seems like they are willing the demolition of the pavilion rather than hoping to preserve the heritage. When it's gone the space will apparently make a 'lovely spot for a farmers' market'.
* * *
The lady behind the desk largely ignores us for a good ten minutes, even though a good portion of those ten minutes is spent with us at her desk trying to talk to her. Her desk is covered with the mild sort of women's magazines, the ones with puzzles, true-life 'it happened to me' stories, and tips for recycling jam jars. We do chat for a bit, but you can see she is neither impressed nor happy that three scruffy, working-class men are poking around her shop. Jon starts paying attention and stands a little closer, something he does when I'm about to do something stupid, or dangerous, or say something he'll regret. It must be something in the dismissive tone of her answers or the increasing contempt in my voice that has put Jon on high alert. She eventually tells us the plans for the pier.
'Still, it's a shame to get rid of such a glorious example of seventies architecture,' I say, and it is, because the current trend to pull down any buildings built between 1970 and 1985 is going to leave a massive gap in our architectural history.
'Well, some people don't like it,' she sneers down a nose that is spider-webbed with red lines. I look at her, from her Marks & Spencer elasticised trousers to the milky coffee in her Winnie the Pooh mug, and see her and the Herne Bay Pier Trust for what they are, retired NIMBY do-gooders with no real agenda apart from the destruction of the building they probably wrote letters to the local paper about 40 years ago.
'Well, we better go,' says Jon looking at the watch on his wrist that doesn't exist.
I fume inside and start my swearing as I'm guided out of the door. 'Did you hear her? The snooty, pinch-faced, old hag woman.'
'She wasn't that bad,' says Jon.
'Wasn't that bad? Drinking her fucking Mellow Birds from a Tesco mug, judging anyone that disagrees with her. Bitch.'
'Is your back sore? You might be overreacting a bit.'
'I spotted every inch of her and saw into her soul,' I say, ignoring Jon.
Midge walks ahead saying nothing.
* * *
Dan bristles at one of the women in particular; the selfappointed curators of heritage are winding him up something rotten.
'It's a decision to destroy a building on a fashion whim.'
That's something we know about from Birmingham: the really quite stunning Central Library is being knocked down essentially because the Council don't like it. Lots of fun in new, fashionable buildings; lots of meetings and admin in keeping the past working in the present.
On the front here is a classic piece of Englishness, a coinoperated stall that promises a glimpse of something. Danny puts 'any coin' in and starts the ball rolling – literally. The ball drops into a wheel, like roulette but more slowly and with a dull, rubber thud rather than a ping of excitement. It falls into a slot and a striped can rotates in primary colours. It shows us the Tweenies – children's TV characters already starting to fade from view. We could have seen the Fraggles, which no child now can remember, or Miss Piggy. Characters frozen in time, picked up cheap and as necessary. That's how a culture builds.
There is news on the radio that an old cinema, now a bingo hall, round the corner from my house is on fire and is probably burning down. We're losing the past.
* * *
Sitting in the car watching suburbia melt into the countryside like a boring zoetrope, I reflect that I am hopelessly fucking lost. All the long-term plans I can imagine sound as pointless as the ones I've tried and found wanting. The ideals of my ancestors are as empty as a Coca-Cola billboard and the only joy I've achieved has arrived in three- or four-minute bursts, no longer than a punk song.
* * *
It wouldn't be an English journey without a traffic jam, and the M25 is the classic English place to have one. We sit stationary, then moving, almost organically jockeying for position with cars in other lanes. Danny, fed up with losing count of how many piers we've seen and now aware that it's the second question anyone asks us, has started a tally chart. The army-camouflage pier in Gravesend has its own 'bonus piers' section, and the fivebar gates are building up.
The chart is on the writing side of a Linda Lusardi postcard – an eighties Page Three version of seaside raunch, which says as much about the mainstream eighties as any number of archive shots of men in shiny suits talking into large mobile phones. The eighties, or what we saw of the culture of London in the eighties, were a place without warmth, humour and compassion – and full of tits.
Linda faces out and Dan much enjoys the reactions of those that spot it from the next lane.
Driving in to Southend, we go down a road called Orwell Street and I think about my literary hero. The place seems unconnected to anything about him. It's truly suburban; the sort of suburb where cars are being 'worked on' on the grass in front gardens.
I mention Orwell to Danny. Some time ago we had an idea for a computer game, based around my obsession with the Spanish Civil War. We imagined a first-person shooter – you know the sort, where you just see the end of your gun at the bottom of the screen – in which you would take the role of Orwell fighting the fascists. And to make it a two-player game, a friend could pick up a rifle as Ern
est Hemingway. They were both in Spain as the war raged around them, but came away with very different views of the same thing.
Who on our trip is Orwell, who is Hemingway?
'I'm Orwell,' says Dan.
'But I'm the big Orwell fan. I do the politics.'
'I'd rather be Orwell.'
'I don't think I'm butch enough to… '
'I'm Orwell, I'll fight you for it.'
And that's the point at which Danny became Hemingway.
* * *
I have a good sulk in the car, and slowly my mood shifts. I may have been a little unreasonable and a bit tired and in a lot of pain earlier. Jon starts trying to find a local radio station and ends up on a local dance station. I think it's called 'Funky', because they use the term once every three words in every jingle they play. Which is approximately every two minutes or so. It's a good job too, because the DJ is as unprofessional as they come – even for local radio.
'Thanks for all your requests, I just got round to looking at the post from a couple of weeks ago, so thank you if sent anything in,' comes the voice between indistinguishable dance tracks and funky-laden jingles.
At one point he openly berates the last DJ (for drinking the lager out of the fridge without putting anything in the kitty) for the length of an entire link. And after one song, he sounds distracted. 'I've just been on the phone about a job, so that's good news, eh?'
Me and Jon dub him DJ Slapdash, Essex's fourteenth-best dance DJ, and take it in turns talking over him, providing lazy, half-arsed links in our best radio DJ voices.
'That was a song by those guys with the funny hair, it's got a dog on the cover if you want to seek it out.'
* * *
Funky nights in funky clubs that the funky listeners must get funky down to.
* * *
'I might nip to the shop during the next track. You want anything, Steve?' And eventually just the jingle we invented:
'SLAPDASH
DJ
DJ
SLAPDASH
funkyFUNKYfunky'
'Shut up! Just shut up, will you,' Midge erupts from the front.
At first I'm shocked, but it can't be easy driving and navigating on as little sleep as we've all had. I feel bad at first, like being told off by a dinner lady.
We drive along a packed seafront looking for parking spaces. The nearest is 300 yards away from the pier and costs a small fortune from a ticket machine that is 100 yards further on from where we park.
* * *
Southend is full of beachfront stalls, and shops, and funfairs, and commerce – it's as tacky as anything we've seen so far. Mostly it's full of people, people with what our ears detect to be London accents.
* * *
There is no real beach to speak of, just a concrete slope into a brown sea with suspicious brown foam. In the distance over the water you can make out the mills and heavy machinery of industry. You can never be sure if something's a silhouette or it's actually just black in colour. As we walk, someone is emerging from the water and a crowd has gathered. I imagine them bemused as to why he went in there to begin with. We pass the occasional hut selling cheap fried food or plastic swords for the kids.
Before we get to the pier we see a funfair that, while not being totally pirate-themed itself, is having a pirate weekend in order to squeeze the last out of the summer trade, and it's working. Southend is pretty full.
The reason the pier exists is to grab the visitors that were previously skipping Southend in favour of Margate. Most people in the early 1800s travelled down the river on boats, which often had trouble docking. Southend, for example, has an incredibly low tide, and when the tide is out it leaves a mile or so of mud between the shore and the sea. So in 1830 they built their first pier, and when they discovered it wasn't long enough a few years later they added to it, and then they added to it again until it became the longest pier in Europe.
We find the entrance and speak to the people in the office, who aren't quite expecting the reaction they get when we find out that the pier was closed after a boat had drifted into it earlier in the year, which rotates between disbelief, swearing and at one point falling to our knees and crying with laughter. Probably it's just as well. Brummies don't do well on Southend Pier. In 1931 a drayman from Ansells Brewery, Ernest Turner, while here on a works do, fell from one of the trains on the pier and landed under the wheels of one coming in the opposite direction. Let's face it, he was probably absolutely pissed at the time. In my childhood I remember my nan, as not only the matriarch of the family but also as a local figure in the community, organising coach trips to the seaside: entire streets of people piling onto a couple of coaches and drinking from five in the morning till gone 12 at night when you got dropped off. I only realise in retrospect that everyone was drinking, because at the time I was too young to know.
SOUTHEND-ON-SEA
Opened: 1890 (Architect: James Brunlees)
Length at start: 600 ft
Length now: 7,080 ft (2,158 m)
Burn baby burn? Southend Pier has had no fewer than four major fires and numerous accidents with boats drifting into it. The worst of these was in 1980 when the MV Kingsabbey crashed through it, entirely severing the pier head from the mainland and leaving a 70-ft gap.
There was a wooden pier on the site long before the iron one that opened in 1890. It had opened in 1830 and became the longest pier in Europe after an 1846 extension. Some of the boards from that earlier pier were used to make the Southend mayoral chair. The iron pier that replaced it in 1890 became the longest pier in the world after an 1898 extension.
In the end credits of TV show Minder, Arthur Daley and his bodyguard Ray are shown walking down the pier. When they reach land, Arthur realises that he has left his lighter at the sea end and they proceed to walk all the way back.
The pier is also mentioned in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When the hitchhikers are thrown off a spaceship, Arthur remarks that it looks as though they're standing 'on the seafront at Southend'. However, the set used for the pier in the TV adaptation (the show started life as a radio comedy) looks nothing like Southend.
In May 2011, plans to redevelop the pier were delayed by months because of nesting birds: ruddy turnstones.
We can do nothing but press our noses against the glass at the ticket desk. This place is the most modern pier we've (nearly) been on: airline-uniformed girls behind melamine desks inform us that it's not likely to open any time soon. There's no point in staying any longer, except that we've put two hours on the parking meter.
Midge has an idea of what to do with the time. He broke his sunglasses at some point and has been driving with them on in the style of Eric Morecambe doing van Gogh for at least a day. He's got very exacting standards and this leads us from Primark to Poundland to Poundstretcher, in fact any shop noted for its cheapness.
* * *
The shopping centre is odd. Actually, that's not true. The shopping centre is completely normal. It could be any shopping centre anywhere in Britain. It has the same shops and the same music, and even the temperature is air-conditioned just this side of comfortably cool. It's us that are odd. We don't know how to behave around these people. We stride around with the confident purpose of those that have a very specific goal. A purpose is rarely seen in a place made specifically for browsing. The roof seems too low and the smells too strong. We soon leave and head to the front, hoping a gift shop might have a pair of sunglasses that will fit Midge's unusually small head.
* * *
This is a little more interesting, and I focus on a set of Frank Sinatra plates. Another bit of culture that will be forever stuck in time.
* * *
On the way back to the car I buy a plastic sword for the car. Midge rolls his eyes but if we are attacked by plastic pirates I will be ready.
As we drive away from Southend, the sun starts pushing solid rays of light through the cloud that has gathered over the dramatic Essex skyline.
*
* *
On the way to Clacton we listen to more of Rich Gold Funky FM – the banter is not so much inane as deliberately artless, simply repeating banalities about everyday life – it's media as one of us. Afraid to challenge, recognition is how we connect these days.