Fleetwood Pier: From Cradle to Cremation

We all saw its demise on the news. Well, the British readers of this board saw its demise on the news at any rate. Was it vandals? Was it an un-insurance scam so that it’s current owner could get round the building laws in the historic end of Fleetwood and erect his previously declined luxury apartments? Was it kids arson around? Was it one of the numerous pigeons that used to roost in the struts underneath spontaneously combusting?
Whatever it was that caused the fire, Fleetwood Pier is now no more. So here’s our obituary to it, with accompanying photographs. There it is look, all fresh and grey faced.
Yes, believe it or not, that’s the entrance to Fleetwood Pier back in the good old days when there wasn’t quite so much of it. (Although, obviously there’s even less of it now…but you know what I mean.) Not much more than a couple of seafront shelters with ambition really.
Despite the fact that the pier was Edwardian, originally it was known as ‘Victoria Pier’. It was built by Gradwell’s of Barrow in 1910, measured five hundred feet in length, and had an additional two hundred feet worth of wooden jetty stuck on the end of it for steamers to berth against.
Those were the halcyon days of men in boaters, women in bustles and cod-heads with jobs.
Let’s have another photograph, this time showing the structure maturing into the pot bellied adolescent that had all the historians who’d conveniently overlooked its modern rebuild in floods of tears recently. Now anybody reading this who’s visited the pier in recent years might be thinking, “Did it really look like that? For some reason my recollection of it was as a boarded up white plastic box on rusted stilts, all very cubist and unpleasant and stuff.” Well, yes it really was that grand…originally.
However, true to the nature of Fylde Coast piers, on August 25th 1952 a fire started in the cinema and, helped by a strong westerly wind, rapidly spread to the rest of the structure. Eight fire engines were called to the scene but couldn’t control the blaze.
Unfortunately, unlike the more recent inferno, nobody was on hand to capture the event on film. The following day, however, the local children (also true to form) went rummaging amongst the charred and smouldering ruins for ‘strings of coins welded together by the intense heat’.
But we’re wandering from the point. Didn’t it look grand before it was gutted? The architect of the original pier was Mr Lumb of Blackpool. Following the blaze of 1952 (the flames of which were impressive enough to be seen twenty miles away, apparently) the pier remained in a state of abandonment until 1958, when, once again, it reopened its doors to the public.
Then, in 1967, the pier was overhauled into the structure we’d recognise today…or rather yesterday…all of which explains the footage of the Edwardian snug used by the BBC that jarred so much with people’s memories.
For all that, however, and the fact that it had been closed and almost derelict for at least two years, it was still a shame to see it go. In the early hours of…whenever it was…a few weeks ago…can’t remember the actual date now…whatever the case, in the early hours, once again the pier caught fire.
By mid afternoon it was almost completely destroyed, as Michelle’s photograph below demonstrates. That’s one overdone pizza bar.
Forty-eight hours later and the bulldozers moved in for the final chucker.
Fleetwood Pier. 1910 to 2008. Her ashes are now scattered by force ten gales to the four corners of Morecambe Bay.