DAY 27 #PHOTOGRAPHERCHALLENGE

Day 27. This fog seemingly appeared from nowhere one evening in April last year, enveloping the end of the pier. A lone bird flies across the sunset sky, seemingly unperturbed by the bank of sea mist that was steadily rolling towards it, whose ethereal beauty gave way to a feeling of serene mystery as it enveloped everything in its path.

But there was a time this view could have been very much different. Let’s head back to 1914 when disaster struck the pier (for the first part of the story, see Day . During a storm in December that year a merchant steamer, the SS Christiana, slipped its moorings and smashed straight through the pier creating a 150ft gap. The Royal Anglesey Engineers constructed a temporary walkway, but with WW1 underway repairs were delayed and the work was not completed until 1921 when further structural issues were found.

The popularity of the pier began to decline through the 20s and 30s, with people drawn more towards the city centre for the variety of cheap entertainment on offer, and there were other travel arrangements available by now too, with buses travelling across to Anglesey and the use of larger passenger vessels made Bangor an impractical option for landing. WW2 began and part of the decking was removed from the pier to prevent its use by enemy invaders and by the end of the war the pier was in quite a poor state. Some even thought that it should be demolished but thankfully the council made improvements and encouraged people to use the pier more. In a bid to increase the use of the pier for entertainment, the sides of the bandstand were boarded to provide protection from the elements, and things began to look up. But this is not the end of the story, the future of the pier was far from secure. More to follow in a future post!

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