by Jon Bounds
PIER REVIEW
Copyright © Jon Bounds and Danny Smith, 2016
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CONTENTS
Authors' Note
Route Map
Chapter One: All Quiet on the Weston Front
Chapter Two: The Magnificent Devon
Chapter Three: Bournemouth Strikes Again
Chapter Four: Wight Here, Wight Now
Chapter Five: Jekyll and Hythe
Chapter Six: Brighton Rocks
Chapter Seven: Big Deal
Chapter Eight: Last Clacton Hero
Chapter Nine: The Beautiful Southwold
Chapter Ten: Skegness is More
Chapter Eleven: Men in Blackpool
Chapter Twelve: Southport in a Storm
Chapter Thirteen: Wales of the Unexpected
Chapter Fourteen: Brumming on Empty
Acknowledgements
AUTHOR'S NOTE
We've always loved the seaside – and the tantalising glimpses of a better life you get when you're only there for a couple of days or weeks.
Like most good things, this started with us drunk and laughing at a silly pun. Neither of us had cared much about piers before, but the more we thought about them, piers became an integral part of the memories we wanted to explore. Each beach would be a cultural Madagascar evolving its own unique pier species. And we would get to eat a lot of chips.
So we press-ganged an acquaintance into doing the driving. We told him he would get a free, albeit working, holiday and then we tried to figure out what it would cost us. We hadn't even got the petrol money, but luckily someone had recently rebranded 'begging' as 'crowdfunding'; a plan was born. We promised updates, postcards and all sorts of rewards to those who slipped us a few quid for the camping, kiss-me-quick hats and penny arcades. We had to promise to write a book too.
We even had plans to make up sticks of rock with the words of Danny's mum when he told her what we were doing: 'You're wasting your life.'
We are, still, but don't let that spoil our postcard from the Great British seaside.
Hi-de-Hi!
Jon and Danny
ROUTE MAP
1. Weston-super-Mare, Grand
2. Weston-super-Mare, Birnbeck
3. Clevedon
4. Burnham-on-Sea
5. Falmouth, Prince of Wales
6. Paignton
7. Torquay, Princess
8. Teignmouth
9. Weymouth, Commercial & Pleasure
10. Weymouth, Bandstand
11. Swanage
12. Bournemouth
13. Boscombe
14. Yarmouth, Isle of Wight
15. Totland Bay, Isle of Wight
16. Ryde, Isle of Wight
17. Sandown, Isle of Wight
18. Hythe
19. Southampton, Royal
20. Southsea, Clarence
21. Southsea, South Parade
22. Bognor Regis
23. Worthing
24. Brighton, Palace
25. Eastbourne
26. Hastings
27. Deal
28. Gravesend, Town
29. Herne Bay
30. Southend-on-Sea
31. Clacton-on-Sea
32. Walton-on-the-Naze
33. Harwich, Ha'penny
34. Felixstowe
35. Southwold
36. Lowestoft, South
37. Lowestoft, Claremont
38. Great Yarmouth, Britannia
39. Great Yarmouth, Wellington
40. Cromer
41. Skegness
42. Cleethorpes
43. Saltburn
44. Blackpool, Central
45. Blackpool, North
46. Blackpool, South
47. St Annes
48. Southport
49. Colwyn Bay, Victoria
50. Llandudno
51. Bangor, Garth
52. Beaumaris
53. Aberystwyth, Royal
54. Mumbles
55. Penarth
CHAPTER ONE
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTON FRONT
'WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP'
'WAKE UP'
'WAKE UP'
'WAKE'
'BLOODY'
'UP'
I've been texting 'WAKE UP' for an hour. I have, by now, packed. I've also put the fire on because it's September and I get the feeling that this might be the last time, maybe until next summer, that I will be warm. The television is giving me an Amber Wind Warning and I am in the process of deciding whether to find out what one of those actually is when Jon calls. He sounds delicate, like he is putting a brave face on. I've got to go back to his house to help pack the car. He tells me he'll be a few minutes, so I figure I've got an hour.
* * *
Okay, I'm up.
* * *
Back at Jon's and he still hasn't packed, so he's doing it now. This involves him grumpily banging round his house in surly confusion while me and his girlfriend answer obvious questions.
'Will I need a towel?' shouts Jon from upstairs. Apparently there are no questions too stupid, but there are naive, hangover-induced ones which can flummox you with their simplicity.
'Do you want to use mine?'
'Will the campsites have them?' comes the answer.
'Would you use a communal towel left in a public shower room even if they existed?'
You can hear him thinking for a beat.
'So do I need one?' says Jon.
'YES,' both me and his girlfriend shout in near unison. I decide to make myself busy and pack the car, something that will be my job for the next two weeks. I'm good at packing cars: I expect it's from years of playing Tetris.
* * *
I've not driven half a mile when I get a voicemail from my other half to tell me I've forgotten my iPod. Too late, we're on the road. This reminds me that despite thinking hard about which towel to bring I didn't pick one up.
Midge, our designated driver, doesn't feel comfortable enough driving my car on the motorway straight away, so it's me who will drive to our first pier. My car, as the cheapest travel option, will take on the 2,000-mile trip. It's a ten-ish-year-old Renault Clio which hasn't exactly been badly maintained but I know nothing of cars, so leave it to its yearly service.
Midge is waiting outside his house when we get there, economically packed. We get his kit into the car easily and head straight to the nearest petrol station. This is the real start to our journey. We break into the float for the trip with 50 quids' worth of unleaded. We've budgeted about £250 for
fuel, based on the very roughest of estimates.
Immediately we hit a problem: none of us knows where the M5 is. Or, I know one way to it, but we're already on the road and I'm pretty sure it's in the other direction. The satnav we're to rely on so much during this adventure is useless for such short-term decision-making so I take charge and head into town, hoping to see a sign.
* * *
Ganesha is 'Lord of New Beginnings, Remover of Obstacles, and a Patron of Letters, Writing and The Arts' and it's only fitting, when the journey begins, to pay tribute on a makeshift shrine at a petrol station in Sheldon. As Ganesha is fond of offerings of red sweets, I put down some cherry throat sweets and Big Red chewing gum. I say a quick prayer while Midge, who we picked up with a small rucksack ten minutes earlier, looks on with confused disgust. My belief system is either a complex mess or devastatingly simple depending on my mood or willingness to explain.
'What's that for?' he asks.
I explain about Ganesha and how he's the perfect totem for the beginning of the journey.
'But you're not Hindu,' Midge points out.
'I don't have to be: I'm just using it to focus our intentions and, hopefully, use our will to affect our reality. The simplest definition of magic there is,' I explain.
'That's bollocks,' says Midge.
'Oh, it's that too.'
* * *
Ritualistically, and with the affectation I've come to expect, Danny is fiddling with an image of the Hindu god of travellers. We'll need luck, but I'm not sure there are any gods we can appease at this stage. For what is the god, or who is the saint, of the pointless?
* * *
Weston-super-Mare is the only place to start the journey. The whole way down the motorway my memory is jogged by certain vistas and road angles, including the moment the motorway splits and winds around a sheer drop to the right. I remember it because without fail this would be the point where my mother would freak out because she's scared of heights, and my dad would plaintively explain that short of taking a 20-mile diversion this was the only way they could go. Looking back I'm sure there was the hint of a smile on my dad's face.
* * *
Weston-super-Mare is the spiritual home of the Birmingham worker. It's often – disparagingly, one would assume – called 'Birmingham-on-Sea'. It is the nearest seaside resort to our hometown and was the place we felt compelled to visit first.
Every pointless escapade must have rules – in fact, rules are even more important when the objective isn't. Danny's idea of visiting every pier in the country, which he told me about one late night in our local, didn't have any more structure than that. We resolved to do it, without doing anything rash like doing anything about it.
Around a year later the plan was resurrected. The more we thought about it, the more piers cropped up in culture: we'd seen them in adverts and pop videos, heard of fires and anniversaries on the news. Many were nearly 200 years old and felt hugely connected to our own past.
This time we went as far as searching for piers on the Internet, and discovered the National Piers Society, who publish a list of 'surviving piers'. That list became our target and our godhead, once we'd rationalised it down to something we thought roughly manageable. The process went like this: there are only two piers in Scotland, they're miles away, so let's not do Scotland. Okay, England and Wales then. Does the Isle of Man count? Well, it has its own parliament so maybe not. The Isle of Wight counts, though. That left 55 'surviving' (a word we didn't care enough about to fully appreciate its definition) 'piers' (ditto), which were all seemingly within reach – but only by car if we were going to do it in one go.
This led us to search for a driver. If Danny wasn't driving – and he can't – I wasn't driving either, which led us to being rebuffed by most of the people we could usually nudge into supporting us, which in turn led me to tossing my keys to a man whose real name I'd only learned because I needed to put it on the car insurance and with whom I'd probably never spent more than a few hours in my life. Danny didn't and still doesn't know Midge's real name, but anyone who trusts us gains our trust in return.
* * *
Midge is always there. Any meet-up, party, hootenanny, social, mixer or get-together, Midge'll turn up. Crucially, Midge is unemployed and has got nothing better to do. I consider him one of Birmingham's spirit loci, a permanent feature in the landscape. He is a small and wiry man who is almost impossible to age except for his references to 'before your time'. We get him good and drunk and ask him in front of a crowd if he'll be up for it.
* * *
Midge's involvement also adds a rule. We've got to get him back to sign on. Two weeks is our absolute limit.
* * *
The traffic is minimal but I would be hard pushed to name the amount of time it takes to get from Birmingham to Westonsuper-Mare because I am far too excited. It's long enough for Jon to shake his hangover anyway.
When I was ten I was put in the car with some friends of my mum. They were driving down to Weston for the day and I was going so I could keep their eldest son company because we 'got on'. We didn't get on. It's just that I was the only person in class that didn't pick on him despite his habit of sticking his fingers up his bum and making people smell them. I later found out he became a police officer. We drove for two hours, which in kid time is ten squillion billion hours, and when we got there the pier was closed. Everything was closed. We sat in the car for a bit, had a walk on the beach, ignored the smell coming from Trevor's fingers, and drove the ten squillion billion hours home. I mention all this because when Jon parks in the car park, and we get to the front, I get the same feeling because, again, pretty much the entire front is closed. Everything except the pier. I look at Jon – if you squint, Jon looks like a cross between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paddington Bear.
'The tide's out,' I say, scanning the vista.
'The tide's always out in Weston,' Jon says darkly.
* * *
I pull into a shopping-centre car park in Weston-super-Mare, get out of the driver's seat and, as theatrically as I can manage after two hours' driving with a hangover, toss the keys to Midge with 'that's me done, anyone for a pint?' In truth I do expect to drive, or at least share the driving, as we go – it would be unfair not to – but I'm in serious need of a drink and this is a way of announcing that intention without seeming desperate. From the car park, I don't know where the pier is, none of us do. I have been to Weston before, quite a few times, but don't recall ever having seen the seafront.
The shopping-centre exit deposits us on a patch of grass, ringed by shrubs and benches in the best regenerative style, with no clear route to our first pier. Grand Pier has been regenerated too, but not to the extent of putting signs up on this side of the grass. Regeneration always has a habit of wanting to keep you in its landscaped bosom. The developer–council partnerships don't extend to partnerships with the rest of a town, especially if it's been paid for from a different pot of money.
We wander around the town, taking in what look like more seafront-y streets based on the types of shops and the names of pubs. The surroundings become more beaten and ripe for generation, re- or otherwise, and we strike local colour. Opposite a near-brutalist college building is a piece of what must be civic-sanctioned graffiti. In modern stencil style it depicts what I eventually twig to be famous sons of Weston. John Cleese – although the front-on orthographic projection of his silly walk gives his face a Terry Jones quality I'm sure he wouldn't like – is easy to place. Jeffrey Archer is a little more difficult. Even the most 'localistic' of citizens must have thought it odd to celebrate the Lord High Perjurer but, no, he's there, smugly peering over the harbour wall. The others I can't place, but these two beacons of the middle class are auspicious icons for the start of the trip: one funny but with age not as nice as I'd thought; the other nice but with age not as honest as… well, just not honest.
* * *
Originally opened in 1904, Grand Pier is the newest pier on the list a
nd has been open less than a year after the second devastating fire in its 107-year history. The first fire happened in 1930 and cost the subsequent owners £60,000. The second fire came as recently as 2008 after what officials concluded was probably an electrical fault. This fire happened just after a million-pound refurb and a further £39m was then needed to turn it into the glistening white structure that now juts out from the curve of Weston's beach. There's a covered walkway in the middle of the promenade with a gently undulating, patterned roof that was probably described as 'an echo of the sea's dynamic waveform' by a very expensive architect. Halfway up is a hut that sells beer in plastic pint glasses to refresh the dads whose three-hour driving stint shouldn't have to wait the full length of the pier to be rewarded.