Brighton’s oldest pier

This week in 1822, work began on Captain Samuel Brown’s Royal Suspension Chain Pier, the town’s first true pier and a bold answer to Brighton’s surf that made boat landings treacherous. Brown, a naval engineer fresh from his Trinity Chain Pier in Edinburgh, drove the first piles on 18 September 1822. The 1,134-foot structure opened on 25 November 1823: four towers carried swept iron chains, a 13-foot-wide timber promenade ran out over the sea, and a toll gate on the esplanade kept order. 

The pier was conceived as a packet-boat stage to France and quickly doubled as a promenade lined with amusements: a camera obscura at the head, a reading-room and library, kiosks and a weighing machine, military bands, even shower baths. William IV came to admire it; Turner and Constable painted it (see Constable on the beach, and The Pavilion pivots 90°). Early blows, however, came with storms in 1824, 1833 and 1836. Here is a diary entry by Gideon Algernon Mantell, a surgeon famous for his diary (and for his fossil collection).

29 October 1836 - ‘A dreadful hurricane from the SSW at about eleven AM it was terrific - houses unroofed - trees torn up by the roots: chimney-pots and chimneys blown in every direction - sea mountains high. Went to the Pier, and was present when violent oscillations began to be produced by the hurricane: the whole lines of platforms and chains were thrown into undulations, and the suspension bridges appeared like an enormous serpent writing in agony - at length one of the bridges gave way, and planks, beams, iron rods - all were hurled instantaneously into the boiling surge! The tension of the bridge being thus set at liberty, the remaining bridges gradually became motionless; the damage done to this beautiful structure cannot be much less than £1,000. Some persons were killed by the falling of chimneys and lead blown off the houses.’ For more on Mantell, see Brighton in Diaries.

Steamer trade ebbed to more sheltered Newhaven, so managers turned to entertainment and spectacle. The town grew around it: the Aquarium arrived to the west in the 1870s; the West Pier opened in 1866 and pulled crowds; by the 1890s a grand new Palace Pier was authorised on condition the ageing Chain Pier be dismantled. It closed in October 1896, already tired, its oak piles and ironwork strained after seven decades of gales.

On 4 December 1896 the Channel finished the job. A fierce winter storm tore the old pier to pieces and hurled wreckage along the front, battering the half-built Palace Pier. Brighton salvaged what it could and kept the memory close to shore. The dainty Gothic toll kiosks were later re-erected at the Palace Pier entrance; the signal cannon that once boomed a steamer’s arrival still sits on the deck; masonry footings cling to the beach and, at the very lowest tides in recent years, the stumps of piles have shown and gone again under shifting shingle. 

Sources (text): Wikipedia, National Piers Society, Institute of Civil Engineers; (images) The Regency Society (aquatint drawn and published by Joseph Cordwell, 1823-1824) and John Huddlestone’s The Brighton Story.