They’re the essence of Britishness. Tell me, who doesn’t love a pier?” Too true, and Tim Phillips should know better than most. As chairman of the National Piers Society he has been championing the delights of helter skelters, the end-of-the-pier show, and a brisk, breezy stroll on the board-walk for as long as he can remember. And now, at last, his moment has arrived. Why? Because, folks, the Great British Pier is finally back.

“I’m absolutely delighted, positively bullish!” he toots. “There hasn’t been a moment like this in 20 years. Longer!” For decades, the seaside pier has been synonymous with decay, the symbol of seaside decline, and the view from its end the ultimate metaphor for success gone sour. “You could get really quite demoralised reading all the stories in the newspapers; the latest pier to go,” recalls Phillips. “The decline seemed inexorable.” The society’s website lists those that have fallen in the dark ages of package holidays and, these days, cheap flights to Carcassonne – RIP, Folkestone’s Victoria, Lee-on-Solent, Redcar, Hunstanton, the Cowes Royal. Thirty-six of Britain’s piers have disappeared, leaving 55 still standing, though far, far fewer in good health. The society’s latest newsletter reports on the loss of a 60ft stretch from Bognor Pier, its original 1,000ft length reduced now to a 350ft stump.

The lowest ebb, though, came on March 28, 2003, when Brighton’s magnificent wedding cake, the West Pier by the Victorian seaside supremo Eugenius Birch, then Britain’s only Grade I listed specimen, and for years on its uppers, was destroyed, possibly by arson. “We were shocked, shocked,” Phillips says. “I think the nation was shocked. Some soul-searching went on.” The police investigation into the incident was recently wound down, thanks to a lack of forensic evidence and witnesses, though the city’s rumour mill grinds on with baseless gossip about rival pier companies suspected of involvement. But still, the loss of the West Pier seemed to encapsulate the sorry decline of Britain’s piers. “If the West, of all piers, could go, just like that,” says Phillips, “heaven help the rest of them.”

But what a turnaround. In the past year, Britain is suddenly awash with plans to restore or build its piers anew. Boscombe Pier in Bournemouth has been successfully restored, following in the footsteps of Southwold, which, in February, won Best Seaside Attraction in Coast magazine, the bible for Britain’s new seaside gentrifiers, for its artfully revamped, tastefully repackaged “boutique pier” complete with artisan craft shops, caffs flogging locally grown apple juice, and soon, posh holiday lets. Even the continentals are catching on. The most astonishing new plan is in Italy, at Rimini, where Norman Foster has designed a 1,000ft modishly curvaceous pier as part of his plans to regenerate the resort. This is the pier truly reborn for the eco-friendly age, complete with photovoltaic panels and rain-water collection systems.

Piers of course, being suspended halfway between salty, stormy sea and gusty wind, are not cheap structures to maintain, so if their revival is going to be successful anywhere it’s in gentrified places such as Southwold, Bournemouth and Rimini, where the middle-class seaside revival is in full swing, partly fuelled by exactly the kind of nostalgia piers evoke. Yet even where cash is more limited, piers are forming key parts of publicly funded seaside regeneration plans. At the end of faded Deal’s postwar pier – which recently won the National Piers Society’s Pier of the Year award – work is beginning on an elegant new building designed by the rising star Niall McLaughlin.

Elsewhere, there are ambitious plans for complete new piers, the first to be built in this country since Deal’s in 1947. Atomik Architecture is behind two projects – at Ingoldmells, near Skegness, and Morecambe – having won the British Urban Regeneration Association’s “pier of the 21st century” competition last year. They came up with various scenarios, including an “extreme sports pier” and a “spa pier”, which were picked up in Ingoldmells by the developer Coastal Land, and in Morecambe, by Ian Hughes of UK Pier Revival, where it forms part of a £60 million marina proposal. “Without losing the basic appeal of a pier,” Hughes says, “being out there on the water, you’ve got to get the right new ingredients.” At Morecambe this means a new shopping mall, a hotel and entertainment complex, an ecology park and adventure centre, and at Ingoldmells solar panels, a wind turbine, and a sea-water cooling system instead of air conditioning.

Most renowned of all, though, is the restoration of the eccentric Birnbeck Pier in Weston-super-Mare, the world’s only pier to connect the mainland to an island. The ambitious developers Urban Splash – already taking on seaside decline in Morecambe, with their restored and reopened Midland Hotel – are working with the young architects Levitate to rethink the whole idea of a pier after a fierce design competition last year.

“It’s an exceptionally sensitive site,” says Rob Gregory, director at Levitate’s West of England office, “but incredibly beautiful, with the hills behind, and Weston’s enormous tidal range. When you’re on it you feel so apart from it all. So the key is balance between what’s there already – the ecology, the listed buildings – and what you add to it, so we came up with was a plan more about what the pier might contain, than final designs. The key, really, is in the business plan.”

Indeed. As soon as the original function of piers – as landing stages for steamers bringing holidaymakers to the seaside – faded, and their secondary one – parting them from cash via entertainment – came to the fore, the key to their success was always that, a killer business plan. Get the right attractions, and the right design, and you have a gold-mine. Get it wrong and you’ve a very, very expensive white elephant. Even in their heyday, rival pier companies were at daggers drawn, their fortunes hung on a thread. When Birnbeck Pier was threatened by the arrival of Weston-super-Mare’s swanky new Grand Pier in 1903, it had to up its game with new attractions, such as a Bioscope Theatre – an early form of cinema – a roller skating rink, and a fabulous-looking waterchute ride that dunked you into the Bristol Channel. But it fell on hard times during the Great Depression and, like many others, never recovered after the Second World War.

And yet, with Britain’s leisure economy – at least until recently – so buoyant, it has remained a mystery why some business brain couldn’t come up with a plan to reinvent the pier. The problem, though, has never been a want of enthusiasts, nor a want of architects eager to build new piers. The work of today’s avant-garde, the blousy baroque of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid would be perfectly suited to the delightful whimsy of the British pier. No, the problem is money, and plugging the pier into the long-term economy of the seaside as a whole. Which is why the involvement of a developer as prestigious as Urban Splash is vital for really shifting the fortunes of the seaside pier. They have the cash ballast, but also a genuine affection for architecture; combining the two in projects where the architecture becomes part of the attraction, and also manages to lever public funds, has been their skill.

With the economy so rocky again, though, one fears for the most ambitious of the pier schemes, for complete new piers. Could it be that just as the fortunes of Britain’s seasides are about to turn, the rug will be pulled from under them? Mike Oades, from Atomik Architecture, remains optimistic. “I grew up on the East Coast in the Eighties, so I grew up among seaside decline. I know its effects. Like many people, I suppose, piers got under my skin. You get a different view of the world from there, an escape on the water. Everyone loves a pier. So you’ve got a guaranteed audience right from the start. What more does a developer want?”

For details of the National Piers Society see www.piers.co.uk

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