Brighton and Clevedon: Judged by their piers

We only have two Grade I-listed piers and John Betjeman singled out both for special praise. But while the one at Brighton faces an uncertain future, Clevedon's has been restored to its Victorian splendour. Jay Merrick asks why

Brighton's storm-tossed West Pier is still, almost three years after Lottery funded "security", nothing more than a cause célèbre in search of a coherent future. After more than two decades of closure and disrepair, the pearl of the British coastline's proms is not so much Grade I-listed as listing like a scuttled German battlecruiser going down slowly in Scapa Flow.

English Heritage has underwritten the pier's second coming, a rebirth that could make it even more popular than the city's architecturally effusive Royal Pavilion. But why isn't the makeover fully under way? Because the matching private finance depends on commercial redevelopment of the landward root of the pier, and no developer will take on the expensive and severely strictured upkeep of the posh seaward end unless they can rake in the readies at the other.

So far, several schemes – one involving an architectural competition, another a consortium led by the ex-pugilist Chris Eubank – have dissolved. Only a month ago, the latest was pulled, after the government's Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) called for significant amendments to the landward scheme by the Pier Trust's preferred developer, the Manchester-based St Modwen.

The pier's recent problems began in 1996 with the first of two slabs of Lottery cash designed to stop the undoubtedly wonderful structural confection from collapsing. In 1998, English Heritage earmarked a further £14.2 million from the Lottery fund to return the superstructure to its original, and fully functioning, elegance. Since then, another £2.5 million has been spent on design development. But decisiveness is a rare commodity when you're dealing with such an unwieldly composition of architectural history and cash-cowism.

Look far to the west, though, and a completely different story can be told. It features the only other pier – apart from the West Pier – to be Grade I-listed and that John Betjeman singled out for special praise: Clevedon pier, he declared, "is the most beautiful in England". It's the flip-side of the West Pier, architecturally: long, supremely simple of structure and spare of outline; very modest in its leisure facilities; cheaply made.

And yet, in its way, it is every bit as sublime as the West Pier. How is it that the eye can be drawn again and again to something so straightforward, so apparently unmysterious? The answer is beauty of line, scale, a sense of lightness.

Clevedon, on the Severn estuary below Portishead, and almost opposite Newport in Wales, has an atmosphere found in only a few other seaside towns. It's an urban memento whose atmosphere still carries the faintest suggestion of a Victorian display case about it. One can think of only a few other places that pull the same time-machine trick – Sidmouth and Lynmouth, in Devon, are two. Clevedon's 1,000ft-long architectural gem, designed by John William Grover and Richard Ward to withstand a tidal range of nearly 50 feet and a rapid current, exists because Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust Ltd refused to let the structure perish. Like Brighton's West Pier, it fell into dangerous disrepair in the 1970s, following a partial collapse. Within two years, a local preservation trust was formed. By 1979, the estimated cost of repair had risen from £75,000 to £379,000.

"It was," wrote the local historian Nigel Coombes, "a truly ghastly picture." And it was a picture in sad contrast to the pier's beginnings. Lady Margaret Ann Elton, whose family played a decisive role in the pier's creation, described its opening in March 1898: "On Monday the sun shone on all Clevedon. There was a general holiday and floral arches sprouted up all over town. Altogether, 2,000 people came by the Bristol and Exeter line.

"Finally assembled, a great procession left the terminus. It consisted of 12 policemen, 54 members of the Clevedon Artillery and Band, 94 Nailsea Engineers and their Band, the directors of Clevedon and Weston Pier Companies, the 28 members of the Committee of Demonstration, inhabitants and visitors, the Bristol Artillery Band, 90 Oddfellows, the Axbridge Drum and Fife Boys, and 500 schoolchildren. At precisely 1.30pm, the children began to sing Psalm 148. They were later each given a threepenny bit and a bun, while several hundred adults celebrated in the Market Hall, tucking into a "capital cold collation" laid on by one of the pier's directors. The Clevedon Mercury said: "It is the commencement of better times for our fair Clevedon."

For the next 20 years, the pier, and the elegant steamers that tied up at it, provided a fast route to and from Wales. Even the opening of the Severn railway tunnel in 1886 failed to dent its appeal to tourists, and later, between the World Wars, it flourished; even three years before its collapse, it was possible to take pleasure steamer voyages.

But how many day-outers and holiday lodgers knew just how extraordinary the structure was in engineering and architectural terms? Clevedon Pier is a perfect example of form-equals-function, and practically Modernist in its severe simplicity. The design was based on Barlow rails, a patented hollow iron rail section used by I. K. Brunel for wide-gauge railway track. Despite their almost alarming slimness, they formed the pier's trestles and arches. But it was this skinniness – and therefore minimal resistance to current, wind and wave – that was crucial.

It was this innovation, and the history that gave birth to it, that the Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust fought so hard to save for 20 years. The local authority applied to demolish it in 1979, but Michael Heseltine blocked the move after a public inquiry, leaving the trust to take over in 1981. "The trust campaigned for years," said its chairman, Niall Phillips, "until brave grant decisions by English Heritage and the Heritage Memorial Fund, along with a reluctant contribution from the local authority, allowed works on the main promenade to commence."

It took £4 million to save the pier, which reopened in 1988. And the fight to keep it open to the public continues: the trust has to raise more than £70,000 a year, almost half of it to cover insurance premiums. That's a tremendous undertaking for what is, ultimately, little more than a band of thoroughly determined volunteers. But just look at the result: history lives, and beautifully.

Such tenacity means that, today, one can stroll on to the pier and, as the visitor's guide to Clevedon observed a century ago, "derive all the salutary advantages of the pure sea air without any risk of the nausea so often induced by being tossed upon its wavy surface." And as Betjeman hurrah'd: "Long live Clevedon as a complete town, which it would not be if it ever lost its pier."

It is no different in Brighton. The West Pier, too, will be saved. But how purely? That depends on Cabe and, in September, the sensibilities of Brighton and Hove City Council. One hopes St Modwen's altered design for the landward end isn't just more architectural fast-food. The West Pier can claim a beautiful past. It deserves an equally beautiful, and intelligently modern, future as well.

www.westpier.co.uk, www.piers.co.uk