PIER REVIEW
dRMM’s Hastings Pier was hailed as a game-changer when it won the Stirling Prize in 2017 but within 12 months it had a new owner with very different plans for the attraction.
Hayley Chivers visits the pier with three people who have had a close involvement with it. Photography by Emily Gayer
. Yet a little part of me, a deeply buried optimistic part, was revivified that day.
dRMM won the prize, according to the jury, not for its zeal, innovation or sense of humour, although these were evident in spades. It won because it ‘evolved the idea of what architecture is’.
In a heroic double act, the architects, as agents and advocates, conjured a building that
(whisper it) didn’t want to be a building at all. Detractors remarked that there was barely anything there, they were having us on, where did the £14 milllion go, why were we celebrating the lack of something? And like a good architecture student, I whispered back: because they proved there’s another way.
Yet almost as soon as the Stirling jury had, perhaps unwisely, declared it a ‘masterpiece of regeneration’, the charity that ran the structure went into administration and the People’s Pier was put up for sale.
Rejecting a £477,000 crowdfunded bid, with accompanying five-year business plan, Hastings Council sold off its lottery-funded asset to Eastbourne hotelier Abid Gulzar, owner of the recently burnt-out Eastbourne Pier, for the princely sum of £60,000. Less than two years later, an arcade license was granted and gold hippos installed. I can’t have been the only one whose stomach churned at the creeping necrosis.
Five years on, I’m returning to Hastings Pier – affectionately nicknamed the Plank by locals – to reconsider its status as a Promethean cautionary tale. How is it weathering, both literally and figuratively, as an exemplar of mid-austerity de minimis placemaking? And what lessons does it teach us about the extent to which architects can be change-makers?
Joining my revisit are three men who have history with Hastings Pier: Oli Cunningham, ex-project architect at dRMM; Peter Wheeler, project engineer to the client and selfprofessed ‘big fan of piers’; and James Tovey, who has been running events on deck since
the project’s completion but is now bowing out following increases in rent. We have just unlocked the rusted padlock on the pier gate when a small voice, dog in tow, asks if they can come in with us. Are we the new leaseholders? Do we know when the pier will be open again? She is the first of many Hastings residents who, throughout the day, approach us with anything from curiosity to mild-mannered outrage, asking why their pier is shut, again. The palpable tension between pier and town, resident and freeholder, maker and user, has clearly marred the joy of an engaging and popular public space.
Wheeler is undeterred, striding purposefully into a headwind that scoops the breath out of my lungs, stopping abruptly at an innocuous point on the boardwalk, where new structure meets old. He drops to his knees, arms splayed wide and peeks between the slats to the hybrid structure below. He lifts a board to reveal a Geocache, a curio embedded in the deck of the pier and weighted down with one of the iron bolts from the salvaged structure for others to find. Wheeler says there are ‘many more’ hidden around the deck, adding that he loves to see the pier occupied in this way. Today, the pier is closed and empty. The last event in the summer series wound down a month ago and Tovey, a veteran festival organiser, is clearing away for the winter, saying the owner has raised the cost of the leasehold beyond workable limits .
There’s an indulgent, Victorian eeriness to standing over the sea in silence. Neither I nor
There’s an indulgent, Victorian eeriness to standing over the sea, in silence. Neither I, nor the deck, are moving, yet there’s a surging, Wurlitzer reeling that makes you stagger
the deck are moving, yet there’s a surging, Wurlitzer reeling that makes me stagger. It occurs to me as we cross the immaculate but unsheltered Plank, that proposing an enormous space ‘for everyone’ brings us dangerously close to Emperor’s New Clothes. Of course, the more comprehensive Phase 2 of the project never materialised, economics of seaside life being what they are. In search of the sweet spot between ‘for anyone’ and ‘for no one’, the new owner’s closed-gate policy clearly favours the latter. And there’s just nowhere to put all the stuff you need to keep a pier going.
The visitor centre bobs in the middle of this expanse, lending the pier an atmosphere of a stage awaiting a performance. It’s unusual for a public building, albeit a privatised one, to resist the urge to push the internal, programmable area to the max. Cunningham points out that this has polemical as well as practical origins. ‘It was almost every week that I came to site and we’d have the conversation “right we need to save some money”,’ he says. ‘So we looked at it and said: what’s the minimum you need? Which is how this idea of walking to the end of the pier at night, in the dark, came about.’
Spooky. I ponder aloud that this is a sensory deprivation pier, an anti-amusement pier, where you can escape the constant overstimulation of modern life. Cunningham considers this before pointing out that the second phase of the project contained a huge timber shed on rails, a permanent hot air balloon at the end, maybe a petting zoo. It all got ‘a bit studenty’, which sounds like the kind of ambition we’d expect from dRMM
– something closer to the ornate, slightly deranged Victorian idea of walking on water. That was back when the visitor centre was going to be mirror-clad too.
‘It would have been quite extraordinary,’ says Cunningham. ‘The clever idea was that it reflected the elements; it reflected the weather and its changes.’ Immediately, I imagine people with their ice creams, walking into it, seagulls flying into it and the longterm impact of sea spray.
‘Yeah, and we had a conversation with the planners about the sunlight hitting it at a certain angle and dazzling people driving along the waterfront or walking on the shore,’ Cunningham reminisces.
Alternatives included stainless steel (‘would have looked like a public toilet’), coloured cladding (‘bit naff’) and the chosen solution, timber, of which there was an excess ‘coming up from the below’. Pre-weathered by the sea and a bit singed from the major fire in 2010, this material may have been chosen for reasons of economy and practicality but it delivers something remarkably poetic. In the end, we agree, the building does reflect its environment; it’s getting more satisfying to look at as the years progress.
As you approach from land, the visitor centre itself is quite confronting – a tectonic cousin to Villa Malaparte on the island of Capri. Elephant steps square up to you; blank bleachers, like open arms, incite the visitor to action. I feel a little self-conscious. Neither Cunningham nor I can resist tracing the veins of the salvaged cladding. It’s ageing beautifully, fully silvered out with emerging contrasts between the concave parts, which
I ponder aloud that this is a sensory deprivation pier, an anti-amusement pier, where you can escape the constant overstimulation of modern life
trap water and offer shelter to lichen, and the convex junctions that are salt encrusted and defiant in the wind.
We turn the corner to the seaward face of the building, emerging into a slap from a southwesterly that’s had time to build momentum across the Channel. Cunningham spins on his heel, eyeballing the oversized timber post that abuts the end of the cladding. ‘Um, this corner detail is not what I drew,’ he says as I nod sympathetically. Turns out the original detail involved filleting each pair of slats together to return the zig-zagging effect around the corner – a task that would surely reduce even the most seasoned detailer to tears. We both agree the robust version here is the only sane answer. I’m quite taken with the seat beneath the full-height zig-zag glazing too, which faces out to sea. Another happy accident there too, Cunningham says. ‘There was always some zig-zag glazing on the drawings, but no one really knew why.’ I venture that if you drew it on plan, the window would look like folding doors. Maybe that was the original idea? ‘Oh, you couldn’t do that, the whole building would just catch the wind and blow away,’ he says. Cunningham did discover that some of the ‘really scarily uneven’ slab upstands meant the windows couldn’t drop to deck level. ‘I remember detailing the window, and realising “hang on, that ledge is about seat height, that’s quite cool”,’ he says. And it is quite cool. It’s the perfect place to sit and eat your ice cream. The overhang even holds off the worst of the wind and rain, no drip staining in sight. I expected an anti-climax, to get all the way out here and wish there was, well, more. But when you pause and look out, cradled by the glazing, sun on your face, wind serenading you as it whistles through the railings, all that
I expected an anti-climax, to get all the way out here and wish there was, well, more. But when you pause and look out, sun on your face, wind serenading you, all that free space ahead of you is a joyAbove: Cunningham and Chivers inside the visitor centre
The pier requires £70,000 every year to sustain the structural repairs alone. The current owner has reportedly spent only a fraction of that since taking it over in 2018
free space ahead of you is a joy. As you move to the top deck, you can look back to shore.
Cunningham is eyeing up the portable cabins clustered round the entrance gates, jaunty murals drawing attention to their status as an afterthought. There are also pastel coloured beach huts lining the Grade I-listed pavilion at the entrance to the pier, an inevitable concession to the economics of seaside entertainment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most temporary things are now permanent.
Wheeler is keen to point out that the pier requires £70,000 every year to sustain the structural repairs alone. The current owner has reportedly spent only a fraction of that since taking it over in 2018.
Foreshadowing the inevitable, the end of the pier reveals stages of structural decrepitude left in the shingle, remnants of earlier waves of optimism. A single defiant seagull stares back at me from its perch on a salt-eaten timber column, swaying with the tide. Cunningham says the pier restoration policy was: ‘we stop where the money runs out’, and it’s curious to now stand at that exact point. While the pier is comforting in its robust nimbleness over shifting tides, now more than ever it seems to ask bigger questions about what we save and what we demolish. Was it – and is it still – worth fighting for?
Tovey, who has had a ‘brilliant but exhausting’ five-year run as the latest curator and caretaker is sanguine, having run successful pier raves through the 90s.
He’s stepping away, not without sadness, but with the confidence of a man who knows the pier will always be here. Cunningham, who also accepts there are greater forces at play, believes the project asks searching questions about the role of the architect.
‘We saw ourselves as trying to enable things to happen,’ he says, ‘to make things possible … Then at some point it’s not yours, you can’t compete with the bigger momentum, you just have to embrace it.’ Maybe so. But, with the sun glinting off the hotel balconies opposite and landbound visitors scowling into the wind, I’m left wondering how important the physical artefact even is. Without the animation of people, this behemoth of public placemaking is at risk of languishing in its own decline. It’s lonely out here, waiting for joy to return at an undetermined point next year. As yet, there are no ticketed events on the roster. This project demonstrated the value of beautiful, generous space, designed to age with its community. Laudable though that is, it’s the support below the surface, the invisible, tireless infrastructure, that really defines its success. The architect can catalyse, invigorate, work tirelessly to problem solve. They can even buy the flags and flag poles as Alex de Rijke and Wheeler so generously did here in Hastings. But they can’t hold back the tide.
Hayley Chivers is a senior architect at Buckley Gray Yeoman, a Design Council expert and founder of the Vers Collective
Above: Cunningham and Chivers walk along the pier’s deck, facing on to Hastings’ coastline. Below: At the gated entrance to the pier