Richard Schofield Photography

Edging ever closer to its 150th birthday, Eugenius Birch’s Victorian engineering masterpiece Eastbourne Pier has seen a lot of changes since Lord Cavendish oversaw the screwing of the structure’s first leg into the sea bed on April 18, 1866. Edwardian sensibilities, the imminent threat of a German invasion, a pyromaniac former theatre employee and the inevitable creeping claws of capitalism have all left their marks on the pier over the centuries. A 305 metre melting pot of day-trippers, pensioners, foreign students, saucy seaside lovers, fisher folk and a whole host of other incongruent and colourful characters, Eastbourne Pier, one of the resort’s more peculiar assets, is, shamefully, almost entirely ignored by the local tourism department. This small book of virtual postcards aims to redress the balance at least a little.

Shot entirely on a low resolution Nokia E61i mobile phone over a period of eight short visits to the pier on sunny afternoons during June and July, 2008, the idea behind the photographs was to capture normal moments in a not-so normal way, a process aided and abetted by the mobile phone’s extraordinary ability to allow a furtive photographer to blend into a crowd and become almost invisible. The back of each card features a mishmash of pier-related history, facts, figures and other information, gathered together using a number of research techniques including sifting through musty old clippings in the basement of the Eastbourne Heritage Centre and chatting with the pier’s manifold visitors.