Hastings Pier ready to rise from the ashes

BBC spotlight on the pier

Stand by for a special treat – a half-hour special about Hastings Pier, courtesy of BBC South East, to be aired on BBC1 this Friday at 7.30pm. Producer Matthew Wheeler took a break from editing the programme to fill Nick Terdre in on the background.

While the rest of the country will be watching A Question of Sport, we south-easterners will have the pleasure of watching The End of the Pier Show. After the pier burnt down in 2010, the blurb says, “…we follow the local campaign to save her. Can she rise from the ashes and reinvent herself?”

“It is a special programme, a one-off half hour,” Matthew confirmed. “Initially just being shown in the south-east, but due to be repeated on the BBC News Channel soon as well, and we hope it will get a network repeat in the summer – possibly in July.”

It is Matthew’s boyhood memories of the pier that helped bring about the programme. “The BBC occasionally asks the regions to pitch stories with a strong regional angle that have national significance – and I thought Hastings Pier ticked that box, so pitched this about a year ago,” he said.

“I grew up in Hastings and spent many hours on the pier in the 80s and 90s, and it struck me that the story of Hastings Pier – from birth to fire to rebirth – mirrors the story of the British seaside resort. So this documentary is really about all piers, and all resorts, but told through the eyes of Hastings and its pier.

“It’s a good story! Hastings Pier got global attention when the fire happened, and it’s surprising just how many people seem to have a connection to it, and care so much about it. I think that’s the ‘famously Hastings’ effect. Everyone seems to have heard of the place, and the pier, even if they’ve never been.

“We spoke to a whole range of folk, from Simon [Opie] at the Hastings Pier Charity, and several trustees (Jess Steel and Ray Chapman), to Archie Lauchlan (a local filmmaker making his own film about the pier), to people doing the initial work (the engineers from Ramboll), to Gavin Henderson (president of the National Pier Society) and the actor Timothy West (a patron of the National Pier Society and the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society).

I wondered if making the programme had thrown up anything surprising or unexpected. “Seeing pictures of Hastings Pier when it first opened was a surprise,” Matthew said. “I didn’t realise it had begun life as a much more slender and elegant structure than the one I was accustomed to.

“It was also a surprise to discover that Hastings Pier was something of a pioneer. Piers up until then had all begun life as jetties, some were seen as promenading piers offering refreshments and maybe a bandstand or pagoda, but Hastings Pier was designed with a large pavilion from the word go, so it could be argued was England’s first purpose-built pleasure pier. Cowes Royal Pier might dispute that, but it seems it only had pagodas and fairly small-scale entertainment. And Portobello Pier in Scotland opened a year before Hastings and had a pavilion.

“But both of those piers are long gone, so it seems to me that Hastings can lay claim to being the oldest surviving purpose-built pleasure pier (although it’s changed a lot since it was born of course).

“Also, I’m ashamed to say, as someone who lived in Hastings for 20 years, I had no idea St Leonards Pier ever existed. So discovering that pier’s history was a huge surprise.”

The End of the Pier Story BBC1, 7.30pm, Friday 7 February.

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