THE Mayor of Weston-super-Mare, Cllr John Crockford-Hawley, has written a column for the Mercury after the announcement of a £10m lifeline Birnbeck Pier's restoration project.
Here is what he wrote for the Weston Mercury.
Weston-super-Mare boasts three piers: The superbly maintained and profitable Grand Pier with Revo, and poor old Birnbeck which is a national treasure but a local embarrassment.
It is one of only six Grade 2* Listed piers in England and is the solitary UK example of a pier linked to an island.
But all is not lost, indeed is far from lost and this week marks a truly exciting start to the pier’s long hoped for restoration.
Work on stabilising Birkett Road cliff face, restoring the Pier Master’s House and adding a sea facing café has just commenced.
It’s hoped that next summer the pier’s restoration will have begun and by the summer of 2027 a new lifeboat house and visitor centre will have arisen on the island.
There is hope, expectation, expertise, charity and a huge dollop of cash from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, RNLI, UK Government (formerly known as Levelling Up Fund), National Heritage Memorial Fund, Historic England and Birnbeck Regeneration Trust to enable success.
As with all big heritage projects there’ll be problems, inevitable frustration and a constant need to create income generation once the big grants have been spent.
Why did things go so wrong? We’re all to blame.
Weston benefitted from a short post-war tourism revival, but Franco had invented the Costas so off we traipsed to sun, sand, sangria, and modern hotels with TVs and ‘en-suite’ facilities.
The Severn Bridge, rising car ownership, Sunday pub opening in Wales, spiralling cost of paddle steamer maintenance and a growing distaste for old-fashioned seaside holidays with officious landladies and boiled cabbage hastened decline.
Birnbeck’s last ship cast-off in 1979.
Storm, fire, vandalism, pointlessness and public danger led to closure fifteen years later. Even the lifeboat had to abandon its freehold station.
In July 2023 North Somerset Council tip-toed to the rescue and with £400,000 from the RNLI acquired the pier.
Hard work by the late Charles McCann, other campaigners and volunteers began to pay dividends.
On 28 October 1864 the Lord of the Manor’s four-year-old son, master Cecil Smyth-Pigott sploshed a trowel of cement on the foundation stone and on 6 June 1867 the pier opened for business.
A public holiday was declared and a celebratory dinner in the Town Hall with mass catering for a further 600 in the then Market House and buns for children ended a triumphal day.
Monday’s 160th birthday party didn’t quite match that degree of gastronomic gusto but there was a cake, and I did my mayoral duty - said a few words and held aloft the silver trowel (usually on display in Weston Museum) though with a strange sense of closeness to it: a researcher had just discovered that young Smyth-Pigott and I are distant cousins. Small world.
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