The Tragic Fall of the Pier That Taught a Generation to Holiday: West Pier, Brighton

The West Pier in Brighton was the prototype for how ordinary Britons learned to spend leisure by the sea, built by the engineer who effectively invented the seaside pier. It is the only pier in Britain ever granted the nation's highest architectural protection, and the only one ever left to collapse into the sea. This film traces its ninety-year rise and forty-year death, the two unsolved fires of 2003, and the strange way the tower built on its ruins to fund its rebirth then collapsed into the same kind of financial ruin, on the same stretch of beach.