The End Of The Pier

Piers, generally, are meant to be fun. Buildings devoted entirely to pleasure are rare in architecture. Consequently piers tend to abandon the decorum and restraint of other buildings, lapsing happily into gaudy bad taste and excess. They are often a riot of decoration, ornamentation and whimsy.

Their pointlessness is part of the enjoyment. They aren’t bridges or boats, taking us somewhere or doing something useful. They lead, literally speaking, knowhere. But the journey is full of flashing lights and music and the promise of illicit thrills, like a good night out.

Deal Pier is different. It doesn’t look like a good night out, more like a bad morning after. Built in the 1950’s after the previous Victorian structure was demolished after being hit by a boat, it is a triumph of dry municipal integrity. It looks like a piece of the M1 that has washed up on the shores of East Kent. Inelegant concrete columns march pragmatically out to sea, leading to three tiers of timber slatted decking, although the lowest one remains terminally underwater due to a miscalculation of sea levels.

The entrance makes an attempt at cheeriness with a nautical sculpture and some restrained if slightly camp bits of decoration. Two shops sit either side of the entrance summoning up the general all round lack of cheap thrills on offer: a fishing tackle shop and a kiosk selling Toby Jug Collectibles. Once onto the pier a series of pre-cast concrete bays offer slightly desultory shelter. They look like so many suburban bus stops on a route to knowhere. Men in waterproof suits line the edges monitoring impressive batteries of expensive fishing rods and vast multi-tiered boxes of equipment, generally failing to catch anything.

At the end of the pier there used to be a café, a fabulously dispiriting place clad in nautical blue tiles and with a mock tudor interior. This café has just been demolished and a new one is being built, designed by Niall Maclaughlin. It looks a bit more fun than the old one it has to be said.

For all that I like Deal pier. There is something poignant about its commitment to fulfilling such an exuberant brief in such an earnestly joyless way. It seems to sum up a certain austere 1950’s commitment to doing the right thing. Fun on a ration book you might say.

There is a scene at the end of the film The Remains of The Day, set around the same time, where the characters played by Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson meet up, years after the moment when they might have started a relationship or found some happiness together. They take a walk along a windswept pier and sit in one of the shelters along its length to reminisce. It’s easy to laugh at this uptight, typically nostalgic bit of British filmaking, but actually it’s a scene of almost unbearable minor key misery.

The pier is the perfect setting for the scene because it both summons up how far removed the characters are from any sense of spontaneity or fun, and yet is somehow slightly desolate in itself. Piers claim to offer thrills and excitement but they are also flimsy, wind battered structures standing in choppy grey waters. They are triumphs of hope over reality, a futile gesture of extending ‘all the fun’ of the seaside out as far as it can go.

Bizarrely, Deal pier is exactly the same length as The Titanic, a fact commemorated by a notice nearby, which is appropriate given its slightly disastrous history. Today’s version is the third iteration to be built. All the others fell down. It is, apparently, the only functioning leisure pier in Kent. Mind you, its function has always been fairly tangential. It is an enjoyably pointless piece of infrastructure made more poignant by its adoption of a functionalist language; an oxymoronic example of no-nonsense whimsy.

The Arcades Project

Via here, a strange and intriguingly obsessive piece of nostalgia recreating the sounds of 1980's video game arcades. The length of each recording seems to be in real time, mirroring the black hole of time actually spent in the arcade. In fact, the author has recorded playing each game in full, then overlaid them and added the sounds of the coins going into the slots and other precisely observed ambient effects.

Small but significant shifts in age and game development are picked up between the 1981 and 1983 recordings. The screechy planet splintering sounds of Asteroids giving way to the sing song bleeps of Donkey Kong for example. The whole thing is kinda like those recordings of rare birds made by twitchers, or a digitally obsessed Nicholson Baker, and strangely poignant for a certain period of time wasting in life.

New Town Boy

Last week I went to Harlow. Harlow is set to double in size over the next few years, expanding further and further out into the Essex and Hertforshire countryside. While I was there I was thinking of Simon Jenkins' recent dispiriting article in the Guardian railing against the government's plans for new Eco Towns. Jenkins article was not just depressingly locked into a worldview that always equtes 'new' with 'worse' but factually suspect. His contention that the housing shortage could be dealt with exclusively through development of brownfield sites within existing cities, is a hoary old chestnut of an idea effectively dismantled by James Heartfield in this book, amongst others. It is also predicated on the assumption that people will be content with only one housing choice which is a one bedroom micro flat over a dual carriageway.

Harlow is interesting because it represents an optimistic period when there was a sense with the New Towns that someone was actually planning a better future. Its expansion however will inevitably be described as 'concreting over the countryside'. This claim is routinely made about absolutely any new building despite the fact that only something like between 8 and 10% of the UK's landmass is currently built on. Cities are now mysteriously assumed to be static entities that have existed in their present state forever. Their physical extent is always assumed to be at a maximum and that any further development will result in mindless 'sprawl'.

Harlow itself is kinda nice. Designed in the early 1950's and featuring the UK's first residential tower it represents a Scandinavian influenced light-Modernism similar in spirit to the Royal Festival Hall and equally reviled by the Brutalist generation that came after it. It is very much a jumbo cord, holidays in St Ives sort of modernism with bits of slightly camp decoration allowed to creep in around the edges and lots of improving public art. But now, in the wake of what came after it, is seems bracingly modern again, with a scale and expansiveness alien to most English architecture. It also feels slightly lost, its optimistic qualities of civic expression inevitably enveloped by a misty nostalgia, its elegant signage and domestic scaled public art slightly lost in the new shopping precinct. Still, you can sense something of the optimism that infused its conception, a diluted still palpable piece of futurism landing in the Essex countryside.