Last night a major fire devastated Southend’s world famous pier. It is one of the landmarks of my home town that helps to hold the place together and certainly keeps the tourists flooding in, blue rinse in tow. It doesn’t have (can’t get?) insurance, yet this is the fourth time since its construction that fire has broken out on the supposed non-smoking structure. It is estimated that it will cost millions of pounds to repair.
Most recently it was the bowling alley that was detroyed in 1995 where I enjoyed many birthday parties with schoolmates (it was never rebuilt) and nine years earlier, a boat trying to take the shortcut straight through the middle caused major damage. In 1976 another major fire destroyed most of the Victorian pier head, with repairs to the damage only being completed in 2002. The first fire of 1959 lead to the construction of the bowling alley to replace the original gutted Pavilion.
The pier’s feature - being the longest pleasure pier in the world - was also its downfall when attempting to deal with the blaze. Its 1.3 mile length was required in order to reach commercial and leisure vessels coming up/down the Thames Estuary at all tides. Anyone who has been on seafront will know how far out the mud stretches at low tide, and this was exactly the situation late last night when fire crews attempted to get their equipment to the pier head. Hovercrafts and other specialist equipment had to be called in.
A good BBC video clip can be found in this article, along with a great quote from a witness to the 1995 fire:
I also saw the fire back in 1995, and remember seeing bowling balls falling into the sea in clouds of steam.
Maybe those great balls of fire are still down there, buried in that pesky mud?
