Bawden’s Palace Pier

Edward Bawden’s linocut of ‘Brighton Pier’, first printed in 1958, has become one of the most widely recognised artistic images of the city, fixing its iron structure, domes and sea-edge setting in a form that feels both modern and timeless. It is also my favourite image of the pier, and, after this year of daily articles for BrightonBeach365, I’ve browsed a lot of them!

Bawden approached the Palace Pier not as a picturesque subject but as a feat of design. The linocut pares the structure down to interlocking systems of line, pattern and repetition: the under-pier lattice reads like a piece of industrial ornament, while the deck, lamps and flags advance in disciplined rhythm towards the horizon. The sea itself is reduced to parallel marks, resisting any hint of naturalistic drama. 

Around the pier, Bawden crowds in domes and façades that recall the Royal Pavilion and the dense theatricality of Brighton’s seafront. The result is not a view so much as a diagram of pleasure architecture, in which Victorian engineering and Regency fantasy are fused into a single graphic statement. That same year it was first published, the print (very large, about 1.5 meters wide) won first prize in the Giles Bequest, confirming both the technical assurance of the image and the growing acceptance of linocut as a serious artistic medium.

That confidence had been hard won. Born in Braintree, Essex, in 1903, Bawden trained at Cambridge School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art, where he formed a lasting friendship with Eric Ravilious and absorbed Paul Nash’s encouragement to look closely at the structures and textures of the everyday world. Linocut appealed to him precisely because it resisted softness. Working directly into the lino forced decisions, and Bawden exploited this by combining bold outlines with intricate internal detail, often enriching the surface with hand-colouring or subtle tonal variation. By the time he turned to Brighton, he had already established himself as a designer and illustrator of rare versatility, producing book illustrations, posters, wallpapers, murals and ceramics alongside his prints.

Brighton fits naturally into Bawden’s long-standing fascination with buildings and engineered landscapes. Although he never lived in the city, the south coast featured intermittently in his work, and the pier image sits comfortably alongside his prints of Kew Gardens, Westminster, London streets and continental cities, all treated as systems of form rather than romantic scenes. He did make other seaside and coastal images, though not of Brighton Beach. His war-time and post-war work includes coastal architecture and harbour settings, and his illustrations frequently return to the visual language of promenades, railings and marine structures.

After the Second World War, in which he served as an official war artist in North Africa and the Middle East, Bawden settled in Great Bardfield, becoming a central figure in the group of artists who opened their studios to the public and helped redefine the relationship between modern art and everyday life in Britain. Later, in Saffron Walden, he continued to work with undiminished precision and wit until his death in 1989.

More than half a century on, the print still shapes how Brighton is imagined. It strips the city back to its essential structures while quietly celebrating their extravagance. In doing so, it also encapsulates Bawden’s achievement: an art rooted in observation and design, capable of turning a stretch of beach and a mass of ironwork into an enduring emblem of place.

The image above is copied from from the Jerwood Collection. It lists the linocut print as ‘BRIGHTON PIER, 1958 (SIGNED 1961)’, ‘from the first edition of 40 impressions’, and ©The Estate of Edward Bawden. Other sources include Wikipedia, Goldmark, and Art UK.

Sky Surge thrills

Have you tried Sky Surge yet? It opened on Brighton Palace Pier last summer as one of the most visually assertive new rides to arrive at the pier end in recent years, its long bench of seats swinging riders high above the deck with sudden drops and rolling spins against an open sea backdrop. Installed during the peak season and promoted heavily on social media, the ride marked a clear statement of intent by the pier’s operators to refresh the thrill offer with a contemporary, continental-style flat ride that photographs well and signals novelty.

The ride was teased publicly in early July 2025, when a short night-time video showed large components being craned through the pier entrance and transported along the deck to the seaward end. The pier described the arrival only as ‘something exciting’, inviting speculation before confirming later in the summer that Sky Surge would open as a headline attraction for the 2025 season. By mid-August it was operating daily and featured prominently in pier publicity as ‘our new ride for 2025’.

Sky Surge is a modern ‘Miami’ ride, a format developed in continental Europe in which a long gondola of outward-facing seats is mounted on a rotating arm. The arm lifts the gondola through steep angles while the seating assembly spins independently, creating a combination of lateral swing, rotation and brief weightless moments. On Brighton Palace Pier the ride is presented with a brightly coloured cityscape backdrop and LED lighting designed for both daytime impact and night-time visibility.

Although the pier has not formally named the manufacturer in its own publicity, the ride has been identified by fairground and coaster enthusiasts as an SBF Visa Group Miami, a fixed-site version of a model widely used in European parks and seaside resorts. The configuration, restraint system and motion profile match SBF’s Miami design, and the Brighton installation appears to be a park model rather than a travelling fair version.

Operational details published by the pier list a minimum height of 1.2 metres, with riders under 1.4 metres required to be accompanied by an adult. Standard health and safety exclusions apply, including restrictions relating to back, neck and heart conditions. The ride is priced at £5 per go and is included within the pier’s unlimited ride wristbands.

Public reaction on social media was largely positive, with commenters welcoming visible investment at the pier end and praising the ride’s scale and movement. Others focused on the logistics of installation on a narrow, historic structure, noting the complexity of bringing large ride components onto the pier deck and assembling them in situ. Trade coverage also highlighted the use of cranes and partial roof lifting during the delivery process.

Rides of the same Miami type can be found elsewhere in the UK and overseas. Notable examples include Mamba Strike at Chessington World of Adventures and Surf’s Up at Alexandra Gardens in Weymouth, both identified as SBF Visa Group Miamis, as well as similar installations at Steel Pier in Atlantic City and in amusement parks across Europe, North America and Australasia.

The Waltzer’s yaw and whip

The Waltzer on Brighton Palace Pier belongs to the modern era of the pier’s ‘funfair at the end’ identity. That shift began after the Noble Organisation bought the pier in 1984 and, two years later, removed the old theatre, freeing the seaward end to fill with rides and amusement structures rather than staged variety.

A Waltzer is a classic British flat ride: cars sit on a rotating platform and spin as they run over an undulating track; the rider’s weight shifts and the ride’s motion combine to make each car yaw and whip. Operators traditionally add to the chaos by giving cars an extra shove as they pass. That basic mechanics-and-showmanship mix is why the Waltzer has stayed so closely tied to British and Irish fairground culture, even as safety rules and fixed-site queuing have changed how it is run.

The pier’s own ride page bills the Waltzer as a ‘true fairground classic’, warns that ‘this ride spins’ and you should be ‘ready to get dizzy’, and sets the published height rules: 1.2m to ride, and 1.4m to ride unaccompanied (with riders between those heights needing a ‘responsible adult’ who also has a ticket). The same page lists the practicalities that shape the ride experience on a busy, windy pier: no loose items, hats and scarves off, phones forbidden, and closure possible in adverse weather.

As for this specific machine, ride databases record the current installation as an A.R.M.-built Waltzer that was ‘new to the pier’ in 1991, replacing an earlier Waltzer listing. These photos underline why it works so well in a compact pier-head funfair: the canopy’s stars-and-moons, the bulb runs, and the big lettering do half the job before the motors even start.

A.R.M. is usually expanded as ‘Amusement Refurbishment & Manufacture’, and the company is recorded as having previously traded from Oxford, after earlier trading as ‘Turnagain’. That lineage places Brighton’s Waltzer in a very particular strand of late-20th-century British ride-building: firms that didn’t just import new concepts, but modernised, rebuilt and re-engineered established crowd-pleasers. An example survives in an archive note on Turnagain/ARM’s work manufacturing the Trabant ride from the late 1970s, describing an Oxford-based engineering outfit producing updated machines and iterating designs for greater visual impact. Brighton’s 1991 Waltzer sits neatly in that same world: a classic form, built for heavy use, engineered to be maintained, and designed to shout ‘fairground’ in lights

Public feedback on the pier’s Waltzer tends to cluster around three themes: intensity, operator-led ‘extra spin’, and nostalgia. The pier promotional text urges visitors to ‘be daring’ and ‘scream to go faster’. In visitor reviews of Brighton Palace Pier, the Waltzer is regularly singled out as the ride people go on to feel properly flung about, the one that still delivers that unpredictable, stomach-lurching swing between laughter and mild panic. And on nostalgia threads and comments, ‘the fastest waltzer’ is often the hook people use when they talk about Brighton’s seafront amusements and the rites-of-passage of teenage summers.

Waltzers also remain a staple beyond Brighton in static seaside parks (not just travelling fairs), which is one reason the ride reads as ‘traditional’ even when the machine itself is relatively modern. Dreamland in Margate keeps a Waltzer as part of its retro mix. Skegness Pleasure Beach lists ‘Waltzer’ among its core line-up. Clarence Pier in Southsea is another long-running seaside setting where a Waltzer is treated as part of the expected soundtrack of lights, music and spin.

Sources include Wikipedia, the Fairground Heritage Trust, and Dreamland. 

The famous Brighton novel

Brighton has inspired scores of writers, but none has left a deeper mark on the seafront than Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The novel, which has been published in hundreds of editions (see Good Reads), portrays the beach, the pier and the summer crowds as a stage of glittering daylight and hidden menace, a version of the city so sharply drawn that anyone crossing the shingle can still feel its shadow.

Graham Greene, born in Berkhamsted in 1904, spent long stretches of his early career as a journalist and later as a roving novelist and reviewer. His first known stay in Brighton came during the mid-1930s, when he took rooms near the front while researching a short story; he returned repeatedly while working on Brighton Rock in 1937, walking the Palace Pier, the racecourse, the lower promenade and the warren of streets behind the seafront. (The photograph of him below was taken in 1939 not long after Brighton Rock was published for the first time in 1938.)

Although the town appears in several of his other works, it is Brighton Rock that locked the place into his imagination. The novel follows Pinkie Brown, a teenaged gang leader determined to cover up a murder on the seafront. He courts and marries the innocent waitress Rose to prevent her testifying, while the indomitable Ida Arnold, half sleuth and half conscience, pushes back against his fatalism. The story is set largely between the pier, the racecourse, the shabby boarding houses off the front and the bars and kiosks that once crowded the lower esplanade. Its famous opening, set just yards from the beach, establishes at once the collision of sunlit day-trippers and the violence brewing beneath. The Brighton of the book carries the familiar rhythms of the beach in season - music, heat, the gulls, the press of crowds - but all refracted through Greene’s stark moral universe of damnation, innocence, chance and fear.

In world literature, Brighton Rock occupies a rare place as both a crime novel and a major novel of belief. Its Catholic undertow - Pinkie’s terror of damnation, Rose’s trust in redemption, Ida’s secular certainty - gives it a depth beyond the gangster genre. Critics routinely class it among Greene’s finest works, alongside The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter, and it remains a touchstone for how fiction can convert an ordinary English seaside town into a theatre of metaphysical conflict. For Brighton, the book is an ambivalent gift: it fixed the Palace Pier, the shingle, the boarding houses and the summer crowds into an international literary image that still shadows the real beach today. (Sources include Notre Dame Magazine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the full book can be read online at Internet Archive. Green’s own much later introduction to the novel can be read in this edition.)

Here, then, are the great novel’s opening paragraphs, so quickly drawing the reader in: ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong - belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.

It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost. in Brighton. Fifty thousand people besides himself were down for the day, and for quite a while he gave himself up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics wherever his programme allowed. For he had to stick closely to a programme: from ten till eleven Queen’s Road and Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle Square, and after that he had to make his way all down the parade to the West Pier and then to the station by the Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and widely advertised sentry go.

Advertised on every Messenger poster: “Kolley Kibber in Brighton to-day.” In his pocket he had a packet of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route: those who found them would receive ten shillings from the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for whoever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and with a copy of the Messenger in his hand: “You are Mr. Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize.” This was Hale’s job to do sentry go, until a challenger released him, in every seaside town in turn: yesterday Southend, to-day Brighton, tomorrow -’

NB: ‘Sentry go’ is an old military phrase meaning a turn of sentry duty - a shift of walking a set route, keeping watch, following a fixed pattern until relieved.

In memory of the Palace Theatre

One hundred and thirty years ago - on 4 December 1896 - a violent winter storm tore through Brighton and shattered the already-condemned Royal Suspension Chain Pier, its timbers battering the under-construction Palace Pier and scattering wreckage along the seafront. The loss cleared the last obstacles to completing the new pleasure pier - and with it the Palace Pier Theatre, the end-of-the-pier playhouse that would dominate Brighton’s skyline and seaside entertainment for much of the 20th century.

The Brighton Marine Palace and Pier Company had begun work in 1891, but money and engineering problems meant the pier opened in stages. A 1,760-foot promenade deck with oriental domes and minarets welcomed its first visitors on 20 May 1899. The ‘marine palace’ proper - a large pier-head pavilion with a 1,500-seat hall ringed by dining, smoking and reading rooms - was finished in early 1901, and opened on 3 April with a concert by the Pavilion Orchestra and the town’s Sacred Harmonic Society for some 1,500 guests.

Initially more concert hall than playhouse, the pavilion was remodelled in 1910-1911 as a full theatre and café. Its Moorish exterior - arcades, minarets, a great domed roof - remained, but inside it gained raked seating, a deep stage and improved backstage areas. With around 1,300-1,500 seats looking out over a proscenium arch set above the sea, the reworked Palace Pier Theatre specialised in variety and music-hall attractions. Brighton quickly became a key date on the national circuits: both Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin honed early routines here before leaving for America.

From the start the pier-head building was used inventively. Alongside orchestral series and choral festivals, it was showing moving pictures by 1907. Film impresario James J. Russell secured exclusive rights in November 1909 to screen certain Kinemacolor films in Brighton, making the pier one of the town’s earliest regular cinema venues. Programmes mixed films with live variety long before that became common elsewhere, with audiences stepping straight from the promenade into songs, sketches and coloured films while the Channel rolled beneath the piles.

Between the wars the theatre settled into the classic end-of-the-pier pattern: long summer seasons, touring plays and one-week engagements testing new work. It became an important pre-London try-out house, with productions such as ‘Dr Syn’ (1926), ‘Dr Angelus’ and ‘Cosh Boy’ running here before wider tours or West End success. Legitimate drama and variety sat side by side, feeding promenade crowds into matinees and two-house nights.

The theatre closed during the Second World War, reopening in 1946 to resume summer shows. The post-war years are often remembered as its heyday. Performers’ memoirs list comedian Tommy Trinder, Elsie and Doris Waters, Dick Emery, Gertie Gitana and Gracie Fields among those appearing in pier revues or nostalgic ‘Music Hall at the Palace’ bills. Variety and panto regulars such as Bob and Alf Pearson and Nat Jackley featured in a 1973 ‘Music Hall at the Palace’ programme - one of the last surviving records of its casting. For performers like Margery Manners, the Palace Pier stage remained a prestigious stop alongside venues such as the Palladium and Liverpool’s Royal Court.

By the 1950s and 1960s the theatre followed a steady rhythm: brisk summer variety, winter and spring runs of plays and thrillers, and occasional cinema or special events. Local exhibitors, including Myles Byrne - later associated with the Brighton Film Theatre - helped run it as part of a wider circuit of cinemas and live venues. For audiences the setting was as memorable as the bill: walking out along the boards, buying a programme in the sea breeze, then stepping through Moorish arches into a plush, enclosed auditorium with the tide surging below.

The end was abrupt. In 1973 a storm tore a 70-ton barge from its moorings at the landing stage; driven by waves, it smashed into the pier-head and ripped away deck and ironwork around the theatre. Badly damaged, the building never reopened. Brighton theatre historians date its working life as 1901-1940 and 1946-1973, with the 1973 storm effectively closing it for good. When the pier was sold to the Noble Organisation in 1984, permission to remove the derelict theatre was granted on the understanding that a new one would be built. Instead, in 1986 the old auditorium was demolished and replaced by a tubular-steel geodesic ‘Pleasure Dome’ of amusement machines, the pier-head beyond filled with rides and rollercoasters - a clear shift from live performance to fairground operations.

The programme cover above is taken from Palace Pier by Albert Bullock and Peter Medcalf; and the two other images are from  Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. Sources and more pictures: Arthur Lloyd, Brighton Pier, Wikipedia.

Pier Xmas tree is up

The Palace Pier Christmas tree is up. A tall Norway spruce now stands on the pier forecourt beside the clock tower, strung with oversized coloured bulbs that sway in the onshore wind. It seems that Brighton has no official record of when this seasonal marker first appeared, but photographs show a large decorated tree in this exact spot by 2013, and by 2014 it was already being treated as a familiar feature of the seafront in December. Images from 2017 onward confirm it as an annual fixture, always in the same position, always forming part of the pier’s festive display rather than the city’s wider Christmas lights scheme.

Although the space sits hard against the public promenade, the forecourt immediately in front of the gates is managed by the pier’s operators, now Brighton Palace Pier Group plc. Seasonal decorations placed there follow the pier’s own branding and schedules, and in 2019 the tree was given a formal ‘lights switch-on’ hosted by the pier and handed to local children’s charities, leaving little doubt about ownership. The tree has never appeared in council lighting budgets or BID-funded lists, and it has never been tied to a sponsor. Everything points to it being a privately installed and privately funded tradition maintained by the pier’s operators.

This year’s tree matches the pattern: a full-sized spruce brought in early, anchored on the forecourt and fitted with the pier’s preferred warm-coloured bulbs. For more than a decade, thus, it has acted as the seafront’s unofficial marker that Brighton’s festive season has begun, standing just long enough to see out the winter storms before disappearing, and the bulbs heading into storage.

Sources: Urban75, Latest TV, Alamy, and Ebay.

Signal cannon relic

The small black-painted gun that sits on the Brighton Palace Pier today - now rather forlorn and out of place beside the men’s toilets and perhaps appropriately close to the thump of the funfair - is one of the surviving signal cannons from the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, which stood a few hundred metres to the east between 1823 and 1896. The Chain Pier operated as both a pleasure promenade and a working embarkation point for cross-Channel vessels, and its cannons played a practical role in that maritime life. They were fired to announce the departure or arrival of packet boats, to signal in thick weather, and occasionally to warn small craft off the pier’s immediate approaches. Contemporary guidebooks note that visitors often gathered to watch the gun being discharged before a steamer cast off, a brief spectacle folded into the pier’s daily rhythm.

The guns themselves were small muzzle-loading pieces mounted on simple timber beds, never intended for defence but for audible reach along the seafront and out to sea. Contemporary accounts confirm that a signal gun was kept on the Chain Pier and fired on ceremonial occasions. John George Bishop’s The Brighton Chain Pier: in memoriam describes how, during the celebrations for King William IV and Queen Adelaide’s arrival in 1830, ‘a signal gun was fired from the Chain Pier, as well as from the Battery, to indicate the welcome intelligence that their Majesties had arrived.’ Moreover, surviving pier toll records are said to indicate routine maintenance costs for ‘signals’ or ‘signal guns’, suggesting they were kept in regular working order through the pier’s lifetime. By the late nineteenth century, as the Chain Pier aged and cross-Channel services shifted west to the Palace Pier landing stages and to Newhaven, the signal guns fell gradually out of use.

The storm of 4-5 December 1896 destroyed the Chain Pier completely (see Brighton’s oldest pier), scattering its timbers along the beach. Some fittings were salvaged by the Palace Pier Company, including ironwork, lamps and at least one of the old signal cannons. It remained in storage for decades before being brought onto the Palace Pier as a heritage object. The weathered wooden carriage now visible beneath it is a modern reconstruction, but the barrel is original to the Chain Pier era. The small plaque on the pier deck dates it to the operational life of the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, 1822–1896, and stands as one of the last tangible artefacts from Brighton’s first great pier.

Sources: Wikipedia, Brighton & Hove Museums. PS: The full original name of the pier was the Brighton Marine Palace & Pier Company which explains the BM and PP initials on the wall behind the cannon. 

Hooray for Horatio’s

At the far end of Brighton’s Palace Pier, and settled easily into the funfair area, sits Horatio’s, an elegant all-purpose bar with what must be nearly 40 years of history. It evolved as the pier shifted from Victorian theatreland into full-blown seaside spectacle, and by the late 1980s it had become the pier’s resident big, breezy social hall - a place where the smell of sea spray and hot doughnuts drifted through the doors and where the floor could tremble slightly whenever the Turbo Coaster launched its cars overhead.

In 1984, when the pier was purchased by the Noble Organisation, it introduced free admission and new attractions. Two years later, it also embarked upon an £8 million refurbishment and enlargement programme which included new entrance kiosks, a remodelling of the Palace of Fun, and the opening of both the Fish and Chip Café, Victoria’s Bar (now the Palm Court Restaurant - see Fish and chips or moules) and Horatio’s Bar.

As the pier modernised, so did Horatio’s. It grew from a simple drinking space into one with occasional music events. Local bands began to play weekend sets, filling the glass-fronted room with Brighton’s familiar mix of covers, ska, indie guitars and the odd sea-shanty revival. Jazz arrived too, and Horatio’s became one of the venues used for the Brighton Jazz Festival, hosting double-header evening concerts with world-class players performing as waves thudded beneath the ironwork. Dance nights joined the offerings - Cuban salsa sessions with live percussion and teaching pairs leading crowds through rueda circles under the rope-woven ceiling.

A collaboration with The Latest led to a variety of performances not just music but spoken word events, film showings, club nights, art exhibitions, comedy nights. ‘We host everything,’ the Latest website says ‘from the monthly talk-based Cafe Scientfique and the infamous Catalyst Club events, to music shows hosted by The Great Escape, burlesque performance nights, Fringe theatre, charity events, kids events and loads more.’ Latest TV, meanwhile, broadcasts live interviews and band sessions directly from Horatio’s. 

A major refit in the late 2010s gave Horatio’s a more modern coastal look - rope-woven ceiling panels, timber slats and bi-fold doors that open straight onto the sea. But its essence hasn’t changed. This is still where parents take a breather between rides, where football fans crowd around big screens, where local musicians cut their teeth on stormy midweek evenings, and where - now and then - the whole place rocks gently when a winter sea pushes hard against the pier piles.

Sources: Wikipedia and My Brighton and Hove (but note the text here is taken from Tim Carder’s printed book, The Encyclopaedia of Brighton).

Steamer trips from Palace Pier

This poster - found in Palace Pier by Albert Bullock and Peter Medcalf - advertises P. & A. Campbell’s Brighton excursions to the Spithead Naval Review of 1924, one of the great maritime set-pieces of the interwar years. The Review took place on Saturday 26 July, with the King observing long lines of capital ships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines anchored across the Solent. The event brought together around two hundred vessels, including representatives of the Dominions and visiting fleets assembled during the Imperial Conference. It was the first major Review since the war and was intended as a demonstration of stability and naval cooperation after the upheavals of the previous decade.

Brighton had its part to play. Campbell’s Sussex steamers - most prominently the earlier Devonia and the newly renamed Brighton Belle - were advertised on the Palace Pier railings and along the West Pier concourse, offering passengers a full afternoon cruise along the Sussex coast before joining the mass of small excursion craft mustering off Spithead. Leaving Brighton in mid-afternoon and early evening, the steamers carried holidaymakers through warm Channel air, past Shoreham and Worthing, and on towards the Isle of Wight, where the lines of warships stretched out like a floating city. Once darkness fell the fleet was illuminated from stem to stern, with searchlights sweeping across the water as the royal yacht made its slow progress through the anchorage.

Before the war and on this stretch of coast, the most powerful steamer, operated by Campbell, had been the Brighton Queen, a broad-sponsoned paddler that dominated departures from the pier. Recognisable from her high funnel (see photo, also from the Palace Pier book), she would shoulder out into deeper water before turning. But in 1915 she had been lost on minesweeping duty, and by 1924 she existed only in postcards and recollections traded on deckchairs below the pier head.

In 1924, the scale of the Naval Review would have been impressive, ships ranged in perfect alignment, their electric outlines reflected perhaps in still water, and the succession of salutes and night-time illuminations that carried on long after the King had departed. For Brighton’s excursionists it was a full day and night away, but the piers were busy again before breakfast, with talk of the searchlights, the size of the battleships, and how the holiday steamers seemed tiny against the bulk of the fleet. It was one of the last great Reviews before the naval reductions of the 1930s, and for those who embarked from the Palace Pier that July, it was a rare glimpse of the world’s largest fleet assembled within a day’s sail of Brighton Beach.

It is worth noting that the authors of Palace Pier mistook the poster above as advertising a much earlier and pre-war event. The caption (in the book but edited out of the poster image) reads ‘The coronation of King Edward VII was to have taken place on 26 June 1902. A few days before the coronation the King was taken ill with appendicitis and the Naval Review was postponed. The King made a speedy recovery and the event took place on 16 August 1902.’ However, the Brighton Belle, one of the two vessels making the round trip to Spithead, was not even built until 1905!

See also Palace Pier light and dark.

Prof. Powsey’s West Pier feats

At the height of the Edwardian seaside boom, few spectacles drew a crowd like the high dives of ‘Professor’ Powsey. From a spindly wooden tower on Brighton’s West Pier he hurled himself into the Channel from 80 feet up, sometimes head first, sometimes astride a bicycle. His name appeared on countless postcards, his performances billed as ‘Professor Powsey’s Sensational High Dive of 81 feet’ or ‘The Great Cycle Dive’.

The most widespread image of his act shows him riding off a platform above the West Pier, still in the saddle. But other, less common photographs do still exist - such as the two on the left above that passed through Toovey’s auctioneers at one time or another.

Powsey’s Brighton Beach performances took place around 1905-08, part of a circuit of seaside stunts that included Margate, Blackpool and Scarborough. Yet Brighton became his signature setting. On clear afternoons he climbed the narrow frame above the pier, waved to the crowd, and dropped into a small patch of sea fenced off by boats. These were feats as much of nerve as of balance, undertaken in unpredictable tides and wind.

The diving tradition continued with his daughter, Miss G. Powsey, who performed on the same pier a few years later. A postcard from the Royal Pavilion & Museums collection shows her captured in mid-dive before the domed concert hall, continuing the family’s blend of danger and elegance that had thrilled the seaside crowds. See also Powsey Family History.

Picture credits: Top left - Toovey’s; top right - Wikipedia; bottom left - Toovey’s; bottom right - Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.

Houdini’s West Pier stunt

The extraordinary escapologist Harry Houdini died 99 years ago today, on 31 October 1926. He appeared several times in Brighton and, on at least one occasion, performed a spectacular stunt from the West Pier. Many years later a young Ronald Cunningham - who would become The Great Omani - came across a second-hand copy of The Secrets of Houdini which inspired him to follow in the master’s footsteps - even to the extent of repeating the same stunt from the West Pier on the fiftieth anniversary of Houdini’s death.

Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, Houdini rose from vaudeville beginnings to become the world’s most famous escape artist, thrilling crowds with feats of endurance and ingenuity. In December 1904 he topped the bill at the Brighton Hippodrome, and local tradition records that as part of his visit he staged a shackled leap into the Channel from the West Pier, a publicity stunt that packed the promenade with spectators. He remained underwater for close to two minutes before surfacing free of chains.

The only source I can find for this event is a memoir written by Omani. In the memoir, he says he once met a retired theatre electrician, Bert Croyle, who claimed to have worked with Houdini and seen the West Pier stunt. I’ll let Omani tell the tale (from The Crowd Roars, QueenSpark Books, 1998).

Chapter: A salute to Houdini

Once it was my privilege to meet an elderly gentleman in his late seventies, by the name of Bert Croyle. In his early days he had worked in London as head electrician in many of the big variety theatres. He had worked with many famous artists and vaudeville stars of yesterday. Me knew the Ching Ling Soo, who met an untimely death on stage when presenting the ‘catching a ballet in the mouth’ trick. He also knew and had worked with the legendary Great Houdini. He told me that Houdini was a very pleasant and polite man to work with, though conceited and at times very temperamental. But then what great artist isn’t temperamental? 

During his tour of England, it appears Houdini had visited Brighton and had appeared top of the bill at the Brighton Hippodrome. Sadly, like many other theatres, the Hippodrome is now a Bingo Hall. Only the ghosts of yesterday tread the boards to the phantom music of bygone days. One day, Bert Croyle and I were sitting down sipping a glass of wine when he suddenly said. ‘You know. I actually saw Houdini perform his famous death jump from West Pier. This was a publicity stunt to advertise his show at the Brighton Hippodrome. He was handcuffed, chained and padlocked and jumped from the pier into the sea and escaped underwater in about two minutes. The pier was packed. What a showman he was that night. As always with Houdini, the theatre was sold out. I asked Bert how long ago it was that Houdini performed on the West Pier. ‘About fifty years ago,’ he replied. ‘Right,’ I said, you’ve just given me an idea for my next stunt. I will perform Houdini’s jump from where he performed it on the West Pier, with handcuffs and chains, as he performed it fifty years ago. I will present it as a salute to the memory of the world’s all time greatest escapologist.’ 

This was a very good story and I had agreed to sell it to a well known London agency called Features International as an exclusive. The morning before the stunt was due to take place, Bert Croyle and I had an interview with one of the BBC radio stations and we discussed the forthcoming stunt. One question the interviewer asked Bert was ‘Do you think that Omani is as good as Houdini? He has done some amazing things.’ Bert hesitated, turned to me and asked what I thought. ‘Simple,’ I said, ‘Houdini was the greatest of all time. Long after our names are forgotten he will still be a legend.’ ‘You may be right,’ said Bert, ‘but Omani is the best we have got today.’ 

Several years had passed since I had performed on the West Pier. It had changed owners and now belonged to the Métropole Hotel, Brighton. The morning of the stunt arrived and Frank Durham, a director of Features International, and his camera-girl arrived to pick me up at my house. With my suitcase packed with manacles, chains and a pair of bathing trunks, I got into his car and we headed for the West Pier.

On arrival we were in for a shock. A battery of about a dozen cameramen and reporters were waiting for us. A gathering of the media such as one might expect had the rumour got around that Dolly Parton was going to appear topless!’

See also The Great Omani. Picture credits: Wikipedia, Brighton Hippodrome, and ChatGPT.

Drops and jolts

Galaxia at Brighton Palace Pier, now over 20 years old, opened in May 2004. This is a Jump & Smile style ride manufactured by the Italian firm Sartori Rides to its Techno Jump design, able to accommodate up to 42 riders per cycle. Over the years, Galaxia has become one of Brighton pier’s landmark attractions, with its rainbow-lit arms rising above the deck and blue cars spinning visitors through sudden drops and jolts while offering sea views.

Enthusiast sites and visitor blogs have described the ride as a mid-range thrill compared with the more extreme boosters on the pier, noting it as a good choice for those less keen on heights. Some riders, however, have commented on the over-shoulder harnesses being uncomfortable and the motion feeling rough compared with smoother coasters. On one fan forum it was memorably summed up as a ‘crappy coaster . . . but what a stunning location’.

In its two decades of service the ride has remained a consistent part of the pier’s fairground offer, promoted by the operators with the promise of ‘lifts, drops and spins you around at speed, so strap in, hold on and take in the views as you whizz round’. Despite the challenges of constant exposure to salt air, high winds and heavy seasonal use, Galaxia has retained its place among the pier’s most popular thrill rides, demonstrating both the durability of the Techno Jump design and its role in sustaining Brighton’s long tradition of seafront entertainment.

Other examples of Sartori’s Techno Jump model can be found at several parks and fairs worldwide, each trading under its own name. Fantasy Island in Ingoldmells, Lincolnshire, has operated a version since 2004, while Tivoli World in Benalmádena, Spain, installed one in 2005. A travelling unit owned by the Piccaluga family appeared on Clacton Pier between 2004 and 2016 before returning to the Italian fair circuit, and a larger 14-arm portable model has toured in Mexico under the name Alegre Fantasia. The same ride type is also produced by other manufacturers under titles such as Smashing Jump or Hang-Jump, but the Brighton Galaxia remains the UK’s most prominent permanent Sartori installation.

Find the plaques on the pier

Next time you walk out along Brighton Palace Pier, don’t just look up at the rides or out to the sea. Look down. On the edge of the boards beneath your feet runs a discreet line of small brass and bronze plates. They are easy to miss, almost hidden from view, much aged and weathered, but together they form a civic and personal trail stretching the length of the pier.

Most of the plaques are private dedications. For a fee, the pier company would fix them to the decking, allowing families to commemorate loved ones, celebrate weddings, or mark birthdays and anniversaries. This scheme began in the early 2000s as part of the pier’s commercial offer, marketed through the ‘Deck-Squares’ programme. Unlike the large monuments or benches seen elsewhere on the seafront, these tributes are modest and low-lying, forming a quiet memorial gallery where the pier’s fabric becomes the canvas. Scores of them already line the walkway; given the pier’s great length - more than 1,700 feet - the potential runs into the thousands.

In recent years a second strand has joined them. Since 2021 the pier has also carried plaques for winners of the Argus Community Star & Care Awards, the long-running scheme organised by Brighton’s daily newspaper to honour volunteers, carers and community heroes. Categories have included Good Nurse, Mental Health Award, Volunteer of the Year and Local Hero. Usually winners are celebrated at a hotel gala with trophies and publicity, but in partnership with the pier company their names have also been etched into brass and screwed into the decking alongside the private dedications. However, this year, the awards for 2025 have been postponed, with the organisers noting they will advise for 2026.

The effect is curious and rather moving. A memorial to a much-loved grandmother might sit a few feet away from a dedication to a young volunteer recognised for charity work, or a nurse honoured for service in the pandemic. Family affection and civic recognition are absorbed into the same structure, pressed into the pier’s timbers, sharing the same salty air and the same tides below. Together, these plates turn Brighton’s Palace Pier into an accidental archive: part seaside attraction, part public gallery of memory. They are easy to ignore, but once you notice them, you find yourself scanning each one, piecing together fragments of lives and achievements.

Here are my top nine plaques (see also photo montage).

‘In memory of my dear sister Pat who manned the candy floss kiosk throughout the 1953 season’

‘John (Leonard) Scrace 1944 - 2022 Son of Brighton Football Legend (Whitehawk FC) xxx’

‘For our dearest Johnny John Johnny Who always loved the 2p machines and dreamt of winning big. Love you always, Samila, Mish, Miled and family xxx’

‘ADAM JUSTIN BOULTER 11/01/1970 – 03/08/2023 “Au revoir, les Félicieuses.” ’

‘Joss Baker Happy 70th Birthday Brighton Palace Pier, 13.07.25 A magical day of love, laughter and joy shared with family and friends’

‘Jemma and Steve Got engaged on this spot 17th August 2013’

‘In memory of Norman and Jean Foord who met at a dance on the Palace Pier in 1948. Married a year later and settled in Brighton, sharing 65 happy years together.’

‘Celebrating the Life of Raymond Barnard who maintained the pier with love and care’

‘In memory of our mum Elizabeth Oliver who loved Brighton’s casinos 11.01.28 - 28.01.21’

A bad day for the Palace Pier

On this day (19 October) in 1973, the seaward head of Palace Pier was catastrophically damaged during a violent gale. A seventy-tonne barge, being used to dismantle the old landing stage, broke free amid strong westerly winds and heavy seas. Dragging its moorings, the vessel was hurled against the pier and repeatedly struck the theatre pavilion at the pier head, causing devastating structural damage - see Wikipedia and Heritage Gateway.

At the time of the incident the pier head’s construction consisted of cast-iron screw-piles supporting a lattice of steel girders and rolled-steel joists, over which wooden deck planking was laid. The theatre pavilion sat on this structure, offering seating for around 1,500 to 1,800 patrons, and was reached via a broad deck extension over the sea. The barge impact was concentrated on the theatre and its supporting ironwork, causing failure of key structural members and partial collapse of the deck immediately seaward of the pavilion. However, the helter skelter, the ‘crazy maze’, a first aid post, a telephone box, and a bar cellar were all wrecked, and 25 of the pier’s piles were smashed.

The collision unleashed debris of heavy steel girders, cast-iron columns and wooden deck planks. Some deck sections became detached and sank, while large members dangled or fell onto the beach below (see below). The damage cost was estimated in contemporaneous reports at around £100,000 (in 1973 value) for structural repairs.

Emergency response involved sealing off the pier head to the public immediately. Maintenance crews and demolition contractors worked in hazardous, wave-swept conditions to stabilise the damaged end. Temporary shores and supports were installed beneath the damaged deck. The stranded barge was subsequently re-moored and removed only after the gale abated. The landing stage, long unused, was demolished in 1975, no longer viable after the impact.

In the aftermath the theatre pavilion was never reopened; the functional use of that section shifted away from theatre and concert use towards amusement arcade and ride-based layout. The event represents a technical turning point: structural loss of the theatre and support framing accelerated the pier’s transformation in use and reinforced the vulnerability of marine-based structures to drift-load impacts in gale conditions.

The images above have been taken from a striking video freely available on YouTube - The Storm of 1973 That Ravaged Brighton Pier by Tom Goes Nomad. Here is one viewer’s (@phaasch) comment on the video: ‘Wonderful feature, with some brilliant photographs. I remember all this so well. I was 13 at the time. The day after the storm, the beach all the way to Black Rock was a mass of wreckage, mostly pitch pine decking, silver painted onion domes, and bits of Moorish arches. It was a pitiful sight amongst the grey and the spray. But it was rebuilt, and I remember going into the theatre auditorium just once, and being knocked out by its beauty. The seats were dark blue plush, the decorations gilt and white.

But the worst thing was the coming back. One winter’s afternoon in 1986 I drove down from London with a girlfriend. I wanted to show her the town where I grew up. As we came along Marine Parade, the Pier came into view, and the theatre had gone. Vanished. No one ever said where to, just gone. I know we later sat on the beach in the dying yellow light of December, and I felt part of my childhood slip away. The rest of Brighton followed, bit by bit, over the coming years. Its an alien place, now.’

Implicitly precarious

Graham Swift’s Here We Are - published in the UK five years ago today - is steeped in Brighton, with Brighton’s Palace Pier both setting and symbol in the summer of 1959, the heyday of seaside variety entertainment. Swift evokes the scene with precision: the stage ‘on a flimsy structure built over swirling water’, the pier boards beneath performers’ feet, the tang of salt air drifting into the theatre, and the nightly dispersal of audiences back onto the beach and prom. For him, the seaside is an ‘implicitly precarious’ place. 

The story circles around three performers: Jack Robinson, a gifted compère; Ronnie Deane, who takes the stage name ‘The Great Pablo’; and his assistant Evie White. The pier theatre is their world, a place of illusions, transformations, and betrayals, all played out above the restless sea. Ronnie, once a wartime evacuee lodged with a Brighton family, has made his identity anew as a magician. Evie, by day a shop worker in town, by night slips into sequins and vanishes nightly into Pablo’s illusions. Jack holds it all together with wit and warmth. But as the season that summer reaches its climax, Ronnie vanishes not just from the stage but from their lives. Swift then shifts the perspective to decades later, when Evie looks back on the Brighton summer that shaped everything. The pier, the gaudy lights, the endless stretch of pebbles, become bound up with memory, loss and the final trick that could never be undone.

Brighton is not only a backdrop here but a character in itself. Its beach is a place of impermanence, its pier a fragile platform where each night’s show disappears as soon as it is conjured. The book’s themes of illusion, disappearance and reinvention mirror the seaside town’s own rhythms, with its tides of visitors, its lights that glitter and fade, and its stages that once seemed to promise the world.

Swift, born in London in 1949, has always been a novelist of memory and what might be thought of as the ungraspable past. He read English at Cambridge and came to prominence with Waterland in 1983, a novel that blended history and personal inheritance, later adapted into film. His Last Orders won the Booker Prize in 1996, and across a dozen novels he has returned again and again to the mysteries of time, identity and loss.

Here is Swift in The Guardian writing about his book in 2021: ‘It seems I’m attracted to the seaside. It features in several of my books. A large part of my latest novel, Here We Are, is set not just in Brighton, but in a theatre on Brighton Pier. But then we are all, surely, drawn to the seaside. It’s a deeply compelling - and paradoxical - place. We go there for enjoyment, yet at the same time it is an elemental zone where land and water meet and thus, with or without the presence of cliffs, it is implicitly precarious. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.

Interestingly, the book’s cover - taken from a famous American natural history book, The Birds of America by John James Audubon - was given a bespoke billboard installation by the Buildhollywood agency. It features hundreds of individual feathers hand applied and said to create ‘a bold, textured display to match the dramatics of the novel’.

The merriest place to love

 

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

This is the opening verse in Clement Scott’s poem Brighton Pier which, in fact, is about the Chain Pier. Born on this day in 1841 he was one of the best-known theatre critics and journalists of late-Victorian London. For two decades he wrote reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and his notices could make or break a play. He also wrote travel sketches, popular verses, and several sentimental lyrics that caught the public mood in the age of seaside holidays and parlour song. His reputation in his own time was mixed: admired for his fluent style and influence, but criticised for the sometimes moralising tone of his criticism.

Scott married Isabel Busson du Maurier, the sister of George du Maurier, and the couple had four children. She died in 1890, and he remarried Constance Margaret Brandon, an English journalist and actress, in San Francisco. After an ill-considered 1898 interview in Great Thoughts, Scott was forced to retire as a theatre critic and he moved to Biarritz where he wrote The Drama of Yesterday and Today. He then worked for a couple of years at the end of the century for the New York Herald, later returning to London. In 1900, he founded The Free Lance, a journal for writers who worked by the job, which he edited. He died in 1904, and is barely remembered today, but see Wikipedia for more biographical information.

The poem Brighton Pier was among his lighter works. It was first published in Lays of a Londoner (Davide Bogue, 1882) and is freely available to read online at Internet Archive (a ‘lay’ being a short narrative or lyric poem). Like much of Scott’s verse it was designed to be read aloud or set to music, sitting close to the tradition of the popular ballad. Today it survives less as a work of high poetry than as a cultural document: a window into how Brighton was imagined in the late nineteenth century, when its pier, promenade, and beach had become central to England’s holiday culture. (Painting of the pier is by John Fraser and used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. The portrait is sourced from Wikipedia)

Here is Clement Scott’s full poem.

Brighton Pier

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

Wandering waves on the shingle dash;
 The sky’s too blue for a thoughtless tear;
Danger is nothing but pessimist trash,
And the morning’s made for a healthy splash:
 Come for a header from Brighton Pier!

Filled with life, see the children race -
 Motherly hearts they quake with fear -
Meeting the breezes face to face!
Whether we’re steady, or ‘go the pace,’
 Let us be young upon Brighton Pier!

Here she comes with her love-lit eyes,
 Hearts will throb when a darling’s near;
Would it be well to avoid her - wise?
Every fool in the wide world tries,
 But love must win upon Brighton Pier!

Lazily lost in a dream we sit -
 Maidens’ eyes are a waveless mere -
There’s many a vow when seagulls flit,
And many a sigh when lamps are lit,
 And many a kiss, upon Brighton Pier.

Dear old friends of the days long fled,
 Why did you vanish and leave me here?
Girls are marrying, boys are wed,
Youth is living, but I seem dead,
 Kicking my heels upon Brighton Pier!

Remembering the Old Lady

Half a century ago today, Brighton’s West Pier, affectionately known as the Old Lady, closed to the public for ever - and quite possibly she has become more famous and loved since then. Opened in October 1866, the 1,115-foot iron promenade designed by Eugenius Birch was built on screw-piled columns and laced with a light lattice so seas could run through it rather than break it. Early visitors paid at paired toll houses and strolled past octagonal kiosks and serpent-entwined gas lamp standards whose motif echoed the Royal Pavilion’s interiors. 

By the mid-1870s a central bandstand helped turn air-taking into entertainment, and in the 1880s weather screens and a substantial pier-head pavilion arrived. Steamers berthed on the south side from the 1890s, and on one peak summer’s day in 1898 nine vessels were alongside at once. Eugenius’s son Peregrine Birch oversaw an 1893 pier-head enlargement and pavilion, and Clayton & Black’s grand concert hall of 1916 completed a half-century of building. 

Attendance surged after the First World War with more than two million paying visitors recorded in 1919, a high-water mark for the resort economy. The pier also carried a bathing station at the north-east corner of the head, a detail often missed in later photographs. In April 1900 tragedy struck close inshore when a naval boat swamped near the pier and seven bluejackets from HMS Desperate were drowned; the men are buried locally.

The West Pier was the first pleasure pier to be protected at the highest level: listed in 1969 and upgraded to Grade I in 1982. It doubled as a film set, notably for Oh! What a Lovely War! in 1968. Ownership changes and post-war decline brought tight finances; a local company failed in the mid-1970s as repair orders loomed. The city declined to buy the asset and on 30 September 1975 the pier closed completely to the public. The company went into liquidation and the structure vested in the Crown before the newly formed West Pier Trust later acquired it for a peppercorn £100, beginning decades of advocacy and plans.

Exposure then accelerated the damage. A section fell in 1984 and the Great Storm of 1987 shook more loose. For safety the shore link was removed in 1991, isolating the seaward buildings. National Lottery support of £14m in 1998 raised hopes of full restoration with a commercial partner, but storms in late 2002 brought partial collapses, and two separate fires in March and May 2003 devastated both pavilion and concert hall. Further winter losses followed in 2013-14. Limited demolition around the root cleared the way for the i360 project in 2010, while the offshore ironwork gradually separated into the familiar twin rust-red islands.

Even as a ruin the pier gathered new life. In winter months vast starling murmurations began to wheel between the Palace Pier and the West Pier’s skeleton before carpeting the lower chords at dusk, turning the wreck into a wildlife stage. The Trust shifted to conservation-education: rescuing an original octagonal kiosk in 1996, seeking funds to restore it as a seafront learning centre, mounting exhibitions from historic archives, and occasionally auctioning recovered fragments to support its work. The ruin remains on Historic England’s At Risk register, with official advice long concluding that full restoration of the original structure is now beyond practical means.

Fifty years to the day since the gates were finally shut, the West Pier’s story still reads as a précis of Britain’s seaside age: engineering bravura, civic showmanship, mass leisure, precarious economics, and an afterlife as cultural memory and accidental sculpture. The serpent lamps are gone, the concert hall is sea-room for cormorants, but the outline still sketches Brighton’s horizon and the city’s abiding argument with the sea.

Here is a very brief list of some of the shows and acts that appeared over her 109 years open to the public.

1870s-1920s

Marie Lloyd, one of the most famous music-hall stars of her day; touring orchestras and conductors such as Sir Henry Wood; summer seasons of operetta, Gilbert & Sullivan productions, pantomimes; notable aquatic acts like daredevil divers and novelty acts including James Doughty and his performing dogs

1930s-1950s

Popular light entertainment, seaside variety and dance bands. Big names in British comedy such as George Robey and Stanley Holloway

1960s-1970s

Pink Floyd in 1972, The Who in 1964, Jimi Hendrix in 1966, The Rolling Stones in the early 1960s, Genesis, Deep Purple, and The Kinks.

Selected sources and links; West Pier Trust, My Brighton and Hove, Wikipedia. Images courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.