During the summer of 1999, former pirate radio station Radio Caroline moored their radio ship Ross Revenge at the pierhead for about a month and conducted a 28-day legal broadcast under a Restricted Service Licence to the Southend-on-Sea and southeast Essex area. Whilst moored, a power-cut left the pier without power for two days. Radio Caroline helped generate electricity for the pier via a spare generator aboard their ship, enabling shops and attractions to function until the mains supply could be restored. A subsequent lightning strike disabled their rear tower and took out the transmitter. [47] 21st century [ edit ] The new shoreward end of Southend Pier Bounds, Jon; Smith, Danny (2016). Pier Review: A Road Trip in Search of the Great British Seaside. ISBN 9-781-78372-751-3.

Holmes, Damian (16 September 2009). "Southend Pier Head design contest winner unveiled". World Landscape Architect . Retrieved 3 September 2011. I must say this book was misleading. I was expecting much more from this description. The publisher description may seem simple but in fact, this book was very simple. Rayment, David (2019). A-Z of Southend: Places-People-History. Amberley Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-1-44568-648-6. In March, it was reported that a man had described three unidentified flying objects (UFOs) he saw in the sky above Boscombe Pier as “metallic, silver and spinning”.Gladwell, Andrew (2019). The Heyday of Thames Pleasure Steamers. Amberley Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-1-44568-070-5. a b "Southend Lifeboat – About Us – Our Station". Royal National Lifeboat Institution . Retrieved 19 August 2010. Our average response time is usually 10 minutes and that includes a quarter-of-a-mile sprint across the pier to the boathouse.

At 9.30pm the sale was announced. The pier’s staff, who had been anxiously awaiting the outcome all day, were still gathered there when the new owner arrived. They received no words of encouragement or support, says the former supervisor Steve Wilkins. Gulzar apparently asked them why they weren’t smiling and why they looked so scruffy. Many resigned soon after. Wilkins lasted three days before resigning. On his first day, he says, Gulzar “completely ignored” him.

Olnetopia

On the other hand, as he also says, their very improbability “is what makes them so brilliant.” That piers are there at all is a triumph of fantasy over fact, one that Victorian entrepreneurs, in the heyday of British seaside resorts, were happy to exploit. They were sustained on the pennies of day-trippers and tourists; when the resorts declined so did the revenues necessary to withstand the assaults of the sea. Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That I first came across Robert Graves in my earliest youth, as the translator and re-teller of the Greek myths that I learned at my mother’s knee. I had always been captivated by his prose, elegant and yet easy and lucid. I wasn’t really aware, however, that he was a poet of some standing, nor that he had served on the trenches in the Great War. Goodbye To All That is his autobiography, written in his early thirties after he had fled to Majorca, swearing to leave England for good (hence the title). And it’s no wonder he wanted to get away from it all. Born in 1895, Graves was sent to a series of dismal preparatory schools before being thrown at Charterhouse, a well-known public school for boys where his time seems to have been uniformly miserable. He went straight from Charterhouse to the Western Front, which he seems to have preferred to his schooldays. Most of the book concerns his war service, which he re-tells in great detail and indeed the book is now regarded as an important source of information about trench life. After the war he married, but his marriage was unhappy and after a concatenation of personal and business disasters he fled Britain’s shores to write everything down. Goodbye To All That made his name and was a literary and financial success. Given the often depressing nature of Graves’ experiences you’d think that reading this book might be a chore, but far from it. The tone is breezy and bright, and full of (often very dark) humour. I gobbled it up over a weekend and enjoyed it immensely. Many thanks, as always, to Bookouture for my auto-approval status on Netgalley and to Kim Nash for inviting to be a part of the blog tour for this wonderful book. Murphy, Mark (22 September 2009). "Southend Pier – Pier Head Design Competition" ( DOC). Southend-on-Sea Borough Council . Retrieved 3 September 2011. It's 1930's Brighton, times are hard, war is looming. I particularly loved the references to Brighton, I have lived near there most of my life so I could visualise all the places mentioned, knew the distance they walked from one place to another, recognise the street names, cafes and cinemas etc, this truly bought the book to life for me.