Brighton Palace Pier

Listen to the boards under your feet. Each step makes a hollow, wooden knock, and through the narrow gaps between the planks you can catch flashes of green-grey water moving far below. The air smells of salt, hot sugar and vinegar on chips. Somewhere behind you, a gull calls. Somewhere ahead, an arcade machine plays its electronic tune. This is Brighton Palace Pier, and you are standing on a Victorian iron structure that reaches out over the English Channel.

The pier was built in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Work began in the early 1890s, and it opened to the public in 1899. Its design is credited to the engineer Richard Saint George Moore. The idea was simple and very Victorian. People came to the seaside for health and pleasure, and a pier let them walk out over the sea itself — breathing what doctors of the day called healthy sea air, without getting their shoes wet.

Here is the first surprise. This was not Brighton's first pier on this stretch of shore. Before it, there was the Chain Pier, a suspension structure from the early nineteenth century, built partly as a landing stage for boats. In 1896, a violent storm destroyed the Chain Pier. Wreckage from the old pier was thrown along the coast, and it damaged the new pier, which was still being built at the time. In a way, one pier ended and the next one began in the same storm.

Why did Brighton need piers at all? The answer goes back to a royal visitor. In the late eighteenth century, the Prince of Wales, later King George the Fourth, made Brighton his favourite retreat. His Royal Pavilion, with its domes and minarets, still stands a short walk inland. Then, in 1841, the railway arrived from London. Suddenly a day by the sea was possible for ordinary working families, and the town grew to serve them.

Now look along the pier itself. The structure runs roughly half a kilometre out to sea, supported on a forest of iron columns driven into the seabed. Above the deck, notice the decorative ironwork — the curved brackets, the railings, the small kiosks with their domed roofs. Victorian builders liked to make useful things beautiful. Many of these details echo the oriental style of the Royal Pavilion, a deliberate link to the town's most famous building.

The pier has always been about entertainment. In its early decades, the far end held a theatre, where visitors watched concerts and variety shows above the waves. That theatre was removed in the 1980s, and rides took its place. Today, the end of the pier has fairground attractions — a helter-skelter, spinning rides, and a small roller coaster. The rides change over the years, but the idea stays the same: a funfair standing on the sea.

Halfway along, you will pass the big arcade. Step inside and the sound changes completely. Coins clatter, machines chime, lights flash in red and gold. For more than a century, British seaside piers have offered this mix of noise and small chances to win. It is worth pausing at the entrance just to listen. For many British families, this sound is a strong memory from childhood summers, and it still pulls in grandparents with their grandchildren.

Then there is the food. Fish and chips in paper, doughnuts fried while you wait, and sticks of Brighton rock. Rock is a hard, sugary sweet shaped like a stick, with the name of the town running right through the middle in coloured letters. It is a small piece of craft — the letters are built into the sugar by hand before the stick is rolled and stretched. Break one in half, and the word is still there.

A practical warning comes from the sky. The herring gulls here are bold, large and very quick. They watch the people holding food, and they have learned exactly when a hand is open. Many visitors lose a chip — or a whole ice cream — to a diving gull. Locals usually eat with their back to a wall, or under cover. It is part of the experience, but it helps to be ready.

Now turn and look west along the coast. Out in the water, you may see a dark skeleton of twisted iron. That is what remains of the West Pier, an older and more elegant pier that opened in the 1860s. It closed in the 1970s, then storms and fires in the early 2000s reduced it to this ruin. Beside it on the shore rises a tall, thin observation tower with a glass viewing pod that moves up and down.

Here is the second surprise. On autumn and winter evenings, huge flocks of starlings gather over the sea just before dark. Thousands of birds move together in shifting clouds, turning and folding in the sky. This display is called a murmuration. Then they drop down to roost for the night among the iron beams underneath the piers, including this one. If you are here at dusk in the colder months, look up.

The pier has survived a great deal. Storms have damaged it, ships have struck it, and during the Second World War many piers along the south coast were partly dismantled so they could not serve as landing points for an invasion. The name has changed too — for some years it was marketed simply as Brighton Pier, before the older name, Palace Pier, returned. It is a listed building, which means it is protected as part of Britain's national heritage.

Before you leave, walk to the railing and look down through the ironwork at the water. Then look back at the town — the white and cream terraces along the seafront, the pebble beach, the people sitting on the stones. Listen again to the boards under your feet as you walk back toward the shore. Every footstep on this deck joins more than a century of footsteps, all heading out to sea, then turning home.