Qualla: Herne Bay Pier

Herne Bay Pier: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Look out from Herne Bay's shore at low tide and you see one of the strangest sights on the English coast: an octagonal Victorian pavilion sitting all by itself, half a mile out in the Thames Estuary, with nothing connecting it to land. That isolation is the result of a single violent night - 11 January 1978 - when a North Sea storm surge tore away most of the iron jetty that had once linked pierhead to shore. The army's wartime decision to blow gaps in the structure in 1940, to prevent enemy landings, had weakened the pier in ways that took thirty-eight years to come due. What remained was three things: a pier stub still attached at the landward end, the abandoned pierhead pavilion marooned offshore, and the memory of when this was the third pier built here, and the longest of its kind in the world.

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Image: Nigel Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Herne Bay Pier: Thomas Telford's Assistant

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edmund Evans (1826–1905), Public domain. According to The Illustrated London News, Herne Bay had fewer than a dozen inhabitants at the start of the 19th century. A military encampment changed that. Visitors from passing London-to-Margate steamers began to make shore excursions in small boats called hoys, and decided the...

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Image: Edmund Evans (1826–1905) | Public domain

Herne Bay Pier: Shipworm and Iron

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The wooden piles were never copper-sheathed, which meant shipworm went to work on them almost immediately. By 1850 many had been replaced with iron or treated by Mr Payne's anti-shipworm process. The railway reached Herne Bay in 1861 and the holiday traffic boomed. A new iron pie...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Herne Bay Pier: Bailey Bridges and Frozen Sea

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. During the Second World War the army wrapped the pier in barbed wire. Local women manufactured camouflage netting in the pavilion. In June 1940, fearing German landings, the army blew up two sections between the pavilion and pierhead; Bailey bridges spanned the gaps from the mid-...

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Image: CC BY-SA 2.0

Herne Bay Pier: Ken Russell's Backdrop

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cultural footprints survive even where the pier itself does not. The director Ken Russell shot the opening sequence of his first feature film, French Dressing (1963), on Herne Bay Pier; the Bailey bridge is visible at the 43-second mark. Russell returned in 2008 to mourn the miss...

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Image: Nigel Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0