Herne Bay Piers & Spoons
Sunday 24 May 2026 · 09:02 · Herne Bay, Kent
Five of us met at the bandstand on the seafront at nine o'clock on what turned out to be one of those May mornings that arrives already fully formed as summer: clear blue sky from horizon to horizon, 18°C at the start and climbing, a light easterly barely detectable on the face. Charlotte, Caroline, Simon and his wife Dawn joined me for a walk that none of us had quite framed in advance as a grand tour of Herne Bay's piers, but which became one by the end. There are three of them — or three things that count as piers, depending on how generously you define the term — and we managed to reach the end of all of them before breakfast. No dogs today, which the group noted with some regret.
We started at the harbour arm, which is officially Neptune's Arm, a concrete breakwater and flood defence built in the 1990s to protect the most vulnerable stretch of the seafront. It does not carry the weight of history that the town's other piers do, but it offers the best vantage point over the bay — and it was from here, looking back along the seafront to the west, that the hero photograph was taken. A small fishing boat was passing below the frame just as I raised the camera, cutting across in front of the pier with the funfair helter-skelter and the row of seafront terraces behind it. Herne Bay Pier, the 1899 iron structure that at 3,787 feet was once the second-longest pier in England, has been reduced by storm and neglect to a landward stub and a marooned landing stage sitting more than a kilometre out to sea, the two sections separated by the gap left when two spans were deliberately blown up by the army in 1940 to prevent them being used as a landing point by enemy forces. From the harbour arm, both pieces are visible, and the scale of what was lost is easier to read than from the shore.
The harbour itself was busy with preparations for the day's fishing trips as we walked back along the arm. Two boats were being readied at their moorings, engines running, their skippers working through whatever sequence of tasks precedes heading out on a clear Sunday morning in the Thames Estuary.
The clock tower behind the boats is one of Herne Bay's more quietly significant landmarks. Built between 1836 and 1837 — the foundation stone laid in October 1836, the tower opened a year later — and funded by a wealthy London widow, it is believed to be one of the earliest freestanding purpose-built clock towers in Britain. It stands 77 feet tall in Portland stone, on the Central Parade just east of the pier, and was later designated a memorial to those who fell in the Second Boer War. It was planned almost simultaneously with the town's first pier, which had opened in 1832, the two structures together representing the ambitions of the London investors who were building Herne Bay as a seaside resort during the early Victorian period. Three piers have come and gone — or largely gone — since then; the clock tower is still there.
After the harbour, we followed the promenade westward along the full length of the seafront towards Hampton. The route hugs the coast road for most of this stretch, passing the Hampton Inn — a pub whose history is bound up with the oyster fishery that built the pier we were heading for — before the road curves slightly and the remains of Hampton Pier come into view. The Herne Bay, Hampton and Reculver Oyster Fishery Company built the original wooden and concrete pier here in 1865, opening it on the 15th September 1866 with the Lord Mayor of London in attendance, the structure designed to allow their fishing smacks to moor and shelter from the tidal current. The oyster fishery eventually failed, the pier was left to deteriorate, and the great storm of November 1897 — the same storm that tested the new iron pier at Herne Bay during its construction — badly damaged the already neglected structure. Part of it was demolished in 1898, more in 1901, and what remained succumbed gradually to the sea and coastal erosion over the following decades.
Simon has lived in Herne Bay all his life, and walking this stretch of the seafront with him was to hear the landscape described from memory. He talked about the old fishermen's houses at Hampton on Sea that had disappeared, the community that once worked around the pier, and the way the shoreline here has shifted and retreated. Standing at the tip of what remains — a short concrete stub projecting into the water, still intact enough to stand on, the old cast-iron railings still in place — the waves were breaking over the remnants of the submerged foundations running further out to sea, visible under the shallow water as a broken line of masonry heading towards nothing.
Charlotte stood at the end for a moment looking out, the ENE wind just strong enough to lift her hair, the horizon perfectly clear. On a day like this you can see the offshore wind turbines far out in the estuary, their towers just visible above the water. The sea was a flat, settled green, the kind of colour it takes on in full sun on a calm day in the southern North Sea. We had walked about three kilometres at this point and the return along the beach was beginning to look appealing.
The walk back eastward was along the sand and shingle rather than the road, which covered the same ground but at a different level and pace. The beach huts along this stretch of the Herne Bay seafront are well-maintained and individually painted, ranging from plain primary colours to more elaborate designs, and we spent a few minutes pausing at the more elaborate examples. The one that stopped us — and the camera — had been painted with a large crab rendered in an urban art style, red claws and body against a blue and yellow ground, signed at the bottom left with the tag of a local street artist. The Beach Huts are a feature of this part of the Kent coast that can look fairly ordinary from a distance and rather good up close; the painted ones earn their keep as subjects on a sunny morning.
We walked to the end of Herne Bay Pier from the shore to complete what had, by this point, acquired the character of a challenge: all three piers, all three tips. The landward section of the 1899 pier is the part that survived the 1978 storm, and it still carries a small funfair at its seaward end — the helter-skelter and the merry-go-round visible in the hero photograph. The tram that once ran the full length of the pier for a penny a ride is long gone, and the middle section where the spans were blown up in 1940 remains unrepaired, the pier head sitting out to sea like a small separate island. Standing at the end of the landward section, you look across the gap towards it and try to reconstruct the original structure in your imagination — 3,787 feet of Victorian ironwork, paddle steamers pulling in at the far end until 1963, women from the town making camouflage netting in the pavilion during the war. What remains is still worth walking.
The final item of business was breakfast, which by eleven o'clock had become a firmly shared priority. The Saxon Shore, the Wetherspoons on the seafront, was the agreed destination — convenient, unpretentious, and open at an hour when other options are not. We found a table, ordered cold drinks first, and then a round of small breakfasts, muffins and pancakes that arrived looking considerably better than the modest description suggests. After six kilometres in bright sunshine with most of the morning still ahead of us, the food was as welcome as anything we had encountered during the walk itself.
6.10 km · 30 m elevation · 1:34:48 moving time · 8,328 steps
Thanks to Simon, Dawn, Caroline and Charlotte for joining the walk today.
