We gave it away to the crabs

Piers are stepping-stones
out of this world, a line of poetry
flung out to sea on a whim,
a dazzle of sea lights
glimpsed between floorboards.

This is the opening stanza to Hugo Williams’s poem i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003), first published in the London Review of Books four years ago today. It’s an affectionate portrait of the old pier but far from sentimental, capturing instead the tension between seaside gaiety and slow decay, and placing the ruined structure firmly in the realm of memory and mortality.

Williams, born in Windsor in 1942, is the son of actor Hugh Williams and model-actress Margaret Vyner. Educated at Lockers Park and then Eton, he began publishing poems while still at school and went on to build a career marked by wit, intimacy and a finely-tuned autobiographical eye. His first collection, Symptoms of Loss, appeared in 1965, and over the decades he became recognised as one of Britain’s most distinctive voices, blending humour, candour and a conversational ease with themes of family, memory, illness and love affairs. His marriage to Hermine Demoriane has provided a recurring source of inspiration, as have the lives and deaths of his siblings, and his later years brought powerful reflections on dialysis and transplant surgery.

Williams’s books include Love-Life, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Billy’s Rain, which took the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Collected Poems, which secured him the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Although most of his life has been rooted in London, he has long contributed travel writing, journalism and poetry that reach into England’s coastal imagination. His work often circles themes of seaside towns, childhood holidays and the shifting moods of shorelines, placing him within a tradition of poets for whom Brighton and other resorts serve as shorthand for both freedom and transience.

Williams’s poem i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003) was first published in the London Review of Books (Vol. 43, No. 18, dated 23 September 2021), and can be freely read on the LRB website. It later appeared in book/pamphlet form in The West Pier, published by New Walk Editions in 2022.

The poem is considered an elegy to the Brighton beach ruins of the West Pier. Written in his typically spare and understated style, Williams evokes the pier as a decaying skeleton of its former grandeur, a structure whose collapse into the sea mirrors the erosion of memory and time. The poem treats the West Pier as both a civic monument and a personal touchstone, registering its slow disintegration not with nostalgia but with a wry acceptance of impermanence. In Williams’s hands, the pier becomes an image of loss that is as much about the inevitability of decline in human life as it is about the destruction of a beloved seaside structure. See also: the Sphinx Review; The London Magazine; and my own reflections on the ruins (written before I knew of Williams’s poem) - see In a silvery sea of time.

The portrait of Williams is a screenshot taken from a video of him talking to camera last year, when the T. S. Eliot Prize team invited him into a film studio to reflect on having won the T. S. Eliot Prize five years earlier.

i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003) by Hugo Williams

Piers are stepping-stones

out of this world, a line of poetry

flung out to sea on a whim,

a dazzle of sea lights

glimpsed between floorboards.

For 50p you can study eternity

through a telescope

and never have to go there,

only promenade to nowhere and back

in an atmosphere of ice cream

We used to take the speedboat ride

between the two piers,

pulling the canvas up to our chins

when the spray flew in our faces.

Now we stand and stare

at the remains of our innocence,

twisted girders piled up

in a heap of dead holidays,

while Brighton limps out to sea

on its one good leg.

*

There it is over there,

a little rusty island moored off-shore,

the empty cage of its dome

lying lower in the water

every time I come down.

Where are the luminous dolphins

on the merry-go-round?

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West?

We could have saved the old pier,

but we gave it away to the crabs

and put up a giant pogo-stick

on the seafront,

a middle finger to its memory.

Now only seagulls cry

in what’s left of the concert hall,

only storms shift the scenery.

It sinks below the horizon,

a black and tangled sunset

surrounded by bubbles.

Madame Esmeralda, gypsy fortune-teller,

presses her lips to the glass

of her waterlogged cubicle

and gurgles her apologies

for getting it all so wrong.