Lancashire’s Lost Piers

By Margaret Brecknell

Above: West End Pier Morecambe c. 1900

No trip to the seaside during the Victorian era was complete without a stroll down the pier and the chance to enjoy the entertainment on offer.

Today’s visitors to the northwest coast still like to tread the boards at Blackpool, Southport and St Annes. Sadly, however, several of the region’s other once grand seaside piers no longer exist.

Here are those which have been lost to posterity.

MORECAMBE’S CENTRAL & WEST END PIERS

In November 1867 a meeting was held at the King’s Arms Hotel in Morecambe, at which it was agreed to make plans for a pier to ensure that the resort would remain “on a footing with other watering places”.

Morecambe’s first pier was opened to the public in March 1869. Measuring some 912ft (278m) in length, the Central Pier, as it later came to be known, boasted a large pier-head, which made it an ideal pick-up point for the pleasure steamers that operated in Morecambe Bay. Such was the new pier’s popularity with holidaymakers that within a couple of years the decision was taken to extend it.

In April 1896 the first section of a new pier located at the West End of Morecambe’s Promenade

was officially opened by local MP, Colonel Foster of Hornby Castle. The work was completed by the following year and in 1899 the pier became one of the first places in Morecambe to be installed with electric lighting. The West End Pier is reported to have cost the then not inconsiderable sum of around £23,000 to build, with its impressive 2000-seater pavilion costing nearly £9,000 alone.

The new pavilion was soon being put to good use. A local Lancaster newspaper reported on August Bank Holiday Monday 1898 that “Despite the torrents of rain that fell, thousands braved the elements and passed through the turnstiles to be present at the excellent entertainment provided in the pavilion”. The performers included Fratelli Riccobono, who appeared “with a troupe of performing horses and bulldogs” and “the premier lady gymnast”, Victoria Dagmar.

Not to be outdone, a new pavilion was also built at the Central Pier during the 1890s, which was considered so impressive that it became known as the “Taj Mahal of the North”. On that same Bank Holiday Monday in 1898 variety performers at the grand new venue included Lieutenant Albini, who, assisted by two female assistants, gave “a wonderful performance of the vanishing lady type”, and the three Delevantis, who were “boneless wonders, in their clever and graceful contortions”. The star of the show was said to be Mademoiselle De Dio, the serpentine and fire dancer, who “seen in her voluminous drapery, with the kaleidoscopic lights thrown upon her, made a captivating picture”.

Unfortunately both these fine pavilions were lost in catastrophic blazes during the first half of the 20th century. The West End Pier, which lost its pavilion in 1917, was doubly unlucky in that it was also badly hit by storm damage on three separate occasions, which meant that by 1927 the pier had been reduced to just half of its original size at around 900ft (274m) in length. All was not lost, however, as it remained a popular open-air venue for dancing and roller skating for many years to come.

At the time that the Central Pier’s pavilion burnt to the ground in July 1933, the resort itself was enjoying something of a renaissance after a difficult period when visitor numbers had declined. The iconic Midland Hotel, designed by architect Oliver Hill in the then fashionable “Streamline Moderne” style of Art Deco, had opened earlier the same month and Morecambe was once again becoming a fashionable place to visit. Ambitious plans were made to construct a replacement pavilion and ballroom in the modern Art Deco style. When the new buildings on Central Pier were opened in 1936, they were considered a triumph. It was fortunate that the planners had the foresight to construct them using largely fireresistant materials, as only a month after the grand opening a fire broke out in the new pavilion. On this occasion disaster was averted.

Sadly, in the years following World War II Morecambe’s popularity as a tourist venue rapidly declined, along with the fortunes of its two once fashionable pleasure piers. In November 1977 the West End Pier was wrecked by gales and declared unsafe. With repair costs estimated at around £500,000, the decision was taken to demolish it. The Central Pier survived a little longer, but after years of neglect appeared to be in terminal decline when in 1986 it partly collapsed and had to be closed to the public. Its fate was sealed when the ballroom caught fire in 1991 and the pier was demolished the following year.

LYTHAM PIER

The pier at its close neighbour, St Annes, still attracts visitors today, but the upmarket resort of Lytham once boasted a pleasure pier of its own.

Lytham’s pier was opened by Lady Cecily Clifton on Easter Monday 1865 in front of an estimated crowd of around 5,000 people. It was the first pleasure attraction in the town and not all of Lytham’s residents were in favour of the new development, which had been proposed following the success of similar ventures at other seaside resorts such as Southport and Blackpool. Eugenius Birch, who designed Lytham Pier, had also been responsible for the construction of Blackpool’s North Pier in 1862/3.

In its early days the facilities on the pier amounted to little more than a waiting room at the pier-head for the convenience of passengers using the pleasure steamers which called there. However, following an extensive reconstruction project a grand new pavilion was opened in June 1892. The rapid growth in popularity of Lytham’s close neighbour, St Annes, which had only been established some 20 years previously, may well have been the motivation behind this move to improve Lytham’s own visitor attractions.

Above: Lytham Pier Pavilion

In October 1903 disaster struck when two large barges, which had come loose from their moorings during a fierce storm, crashed through the pier and effectively sliced it in two. The barges, used for sand dredging, were owned by Preston Corporation. Subsequently, the pier owners successfully sued the Corporation for negligence and were awarded damages to cover repair costs of around £1,400.

Popular attractions on Lytham Pier in the early years of the 20th century included George Kingston’s Minstrels and Dorothea Vincent’s Cremona Ladies Orchestra. The performances of the professional divers, who each summer dived off the pier-head at high tide and staged spectacular swimming displays, also thrilled the crowds.

Like the two once impressive structures which graced Morecambe’s piers, the pavilion at Lytham was destroyed by fire in January 1928. By this time the pavilion no longer hosted the popular variety acts of the pre-World War I years, but instead was primarily in use as a cinema. The pier was re-opened in time for the summer season and plans for a new pavilion were submitted by local architect, Arnold England, but they never came to fruition.

In hindsight, this marked the beginning of the end of Lytham Pier. A year before the start of World War II the pier was closed to the general public except for anglers. In October 1949 it was purchased at auction for £6,250 by a St Annes based developer called Harry Kamiya, who proposed to make improvements which would “bring it in line with any at Blackpool”.

Sadly, Kamiya died two years later and the planned redevelopment never materialised. By the late 1950s the structure had become such an eyesore that the decision was taken by the Council to remove it and Lytham Pier was demolished in March 1960.

FLEETWOOD PIER

Fleetwood’s Victoria Pier opened its doors to the public for the first time in 1910, making it the last new pier to be built in the UK.

Plans for a pier at Fleetwood had first been proposed as long ago as 1892 and then again in 1899, but on both occasions had been rejected on the grounds that the new structure would be hazardous to shipping. Eventually a new scheme for a slightly shorter pier of some 700 feet in length was approved in 1906. By the time the pier was completed in 1910, financial constraints meant that, in fact, the finished structure amounted to no more than 492 feet (150m) in length.

A pavilion was soon added at the pier’s entrance, its opening ceremony being timed to coincide with the coronation of the new monarch, King George V, on 22nd June 1911.

The pier was revamped on several occasions over the years such as in 1930 when following a change in ownership the Fleetwood Chronicle reported that “the pier is being redecorated and will shortly be available for open-air dancing or other forms of enjoyment. A remarkably fine automatic telescope is one of the latest novelties to be introduced at the pier head”.

In July 1937 the same newspaper carried a feature on another major reconstruction project at the pier, reporting that “In the space of the last 12 months the pier, which was already unrecognisable as the commonplace affair that the company took over a few years ago, has been metamorphasised, and the entrance is now one of the most notable features not only of Fleetwood Promenade, but of the Fylde coast”.

Unusually for the time the pier did not charge an admittance fee, added to which it was the only pier on the Fylde coast that offered a full programme of entertainment throughout the winter season. In 1938, when the UK tourism industry as a whole was facing a crisis, not least because of the prospect of another war looming in Europe, Fleetwood Pier Company recorded an increase in annual profits of over £1,000, a particularly impressive feat bearing in mind 1937 had also been a bumper year.

Disaster struck in August 1952 when the pavilion was destroyed in what has been described as one of the largest fires that Fleetwood has ever seen. The blaze, which started in the cinema, was said to have been visible twenty miles away. The pier suffered catastrophic damage and did not fully reopen until 1958.

Unlike the piers at Morecambe and Lytham, investment in Fleetwood Pier continued even as the number of holidaymakers visiting the nation’s seaside resorts began its inexorable decline. As late as 1972 the pier received a £70,000 facelift. Popular attractions on the pier at the time included Jollies Bar, a cafeteria, an amusement arcade and a large bingo hall, as well as a vintage handwound What The Butler Saw machine.

The pier eventually closed in 2000 after its then owners, Fleetwood Amusements Ltd, went into liquidation. It was reopened in late 2003 under new management, but later was compelled to close again for safety reasons. As, in 2008 a fierce debate raged over yet another new owner’s planning application to convert the structure into an apartment complex, fire broke out in the early hours of 8th September. The pier was severely damaged and later demolished because of safety concerns.

These four Lancashire piers are not the only ones in the North-West to have been lost. New Brighton, on the Wirral, also once boasted its own Eugenius Birch designed structure. As in these unprecedented times the region’s seaside resorts seem set to enjoy a bumper summer season, spare a thought for all those once popular visitor attractions which have been lost to posterity.