Old West Pier, Brighton
29 January 2005 · 07:32 · Brighton Beach, East Sussex
Sunrise on a January morning on Brighton beach is not an obviously comfortable undertaking, but the light at that hour in winter — when it comes — is worth the cold. The sky that morning moved through a range of mauves and rose-pinks that the photograph, even processed to this degree, barely does justice to. The pier sat in it like a sentence that has been crossed out but not erased: still legible, still present, but no longer making the claim it was built to make.
The West Pier was designed by Eugenius Birch and opened in 1866, the second of Brighton's two piers and for much of its life the more distinguished one. Birch had already built Margate Jetty and would go on to design eleven more piers along the English coast, but the West Pier was considered his finest work. The structure used cast-iron columns screwed directly into the seabed — a technique that allowed the sea to pass through the substructure rather than batter against it — and the promenade deck above evolved over the following decades from a simple open walkway into a complex of pavilion, concert hall and bandstand that represented Victorian seaside architecture at something close to its peak. In 1982 it became the first pier in Britain to be awarded Grade I listed status.
It had been closed to the public since 1975. Storms in December 2002 brought down a walkway and then the concert hall; two fires, both thought to be arson, in March and May 2003 destroyed the pavilion and consumed what little remained of the superstructure. In June 2004 high winds collapsed the middle section entirely. The West Pier Trust had spent years pursuing a Heritage Lottery Fund grant for restoration, and the skeletal structure that stands in this photograph was still, technically, a building with a future. On 28 January 2005 — the day before I stood on this beach — the Heritage Lottery Fund met and formally withdrew its funding. The restoration would not be going ahead. What remained was what would remain.
The moon is visible in the upper right of the frame, the sky still dark enough at seven thirty to hold it. The sea at a quarter-second exposure becomes a flat plane, the wet sand below the tideline reflecting the pink sky as if the horizon has been removed altogether. To the right of the main structure, a smaller section of collapsed ironwork sits in the shallows — the debris of the June 2004 storm. Vanessa and the boys were still asleep at our friends' house somewhere behind the seafront. I had the beach to myself.
Canon EOS 1D Mark II · Canon EF 16–35mm f/2.8L · 31mm (40mm equiv.) · f/20 · 1/4s · ISO 200 · tripod
The EOS 1D Mark II was Canon's professional sports and news camera of 2004–07, built around an 8.2-megapixel APS-H sensor and a magnesium-alloy body rated to -20°C. The 16–35L at 31mm and f/20 gives enormous depth of field — everything from the wet sand at the foreground to the moon in the sky is in focus — and the quarter-second exposure at ISO 200 smooths the Channel into the near-flat mirror that defines the lower half of the frame.
