Who doesn’t love a seaside pier — is there anything else so gloriously, eccentrically British?

What other country would think about building a pleasure palace, fun fair and doughnut-and-whelk-stall combo stuck on metal columns out at sea where it can be lashed by a force 9 gale?

Back at their birth, in the early 19th century, piers did at least have a practical point — jetties for steamers bringing holidaymakers en masse from the cities to these new-fangled inventions, seaside resorts.

Between getting off the steamer and alighting on the prom, on the pier there was occasion for all manner of excitements — strolling, taking the air, admiring the views, and, for the wilier pier owner, all manner, too, of opportunities for parting holidaymakers from their cash, from music halls to helter skelters.

And when steamers were replaced by railways, this, the fanciful, secondary purpose of piers — leisure — became their raison dêtre. From then on, pier impresarios never looked back. During the heyday of the British seaside, until the 1950s, almost a hundred were built, and at their postwar zenith, in 1949, more than five million people trod their boards.

For decades, though, the seaside pier has been more synonymous with decay than boomtime. The website of the National Piers Society lists those that have fallen in the dark ages of package holidays and, these days, cheap flights to Carcassonne — RIP, Folkestone’s Victoria, Lee-onSolent, Redcar, Hunstanton, the Cowes Royal, and on and on.

Thirty-six of Britain’s piers have disappeared, leaving 55 still standing, though far, far fewer in good health. The last to go was Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier, in a fire last summer, though a rescue package is on the cards. But the lowest ebb in their history came on March 28, 2003, when Brighton’s magnificent wedding cake, the West Pier, then Britain’s only Grade I listed specimen, designed by the king of pier architecture, Eugenius Birch, and for years on its uppers, was destroyed, quite possibly by arson.

Like those performers doomed to appear at the end of the pier, though, rumours of a comeback have also been circulating for a couple of years. The last surviving pier in Yorkshire, Saltburn’s, was restored with lottery money in 2001. Boscombe Pier in Bournemouth has been successfully restored, following in the footsteps of Southwold’s pier, which, last year, won Best Seaside Attraction in Coast magazine for its artfully revamped, tastefully repackaged “boutique pier” complete with artisan craft shops, cafés selling locally grown apple juice, and holiday lets.

The latest comeback is the biggest of them all — the 1.3 mile-long pier at Southend-on-Sea, the longest in the world. Last month Southend’s council launched a £5 million competition to rebuild its pier-end, destroyed by fire in 2005. Most ambitious of all, though, are plans by the developer Urban Splash for the eccentric Birnbeck Pier in Weston-super-Mare, the world’s only pier to connect the mainland to an island. An architect, Levitate, was appointed last year, although the credit crunch has put things on hold for a while.

If their revival is going to be successful anywhere, it’s perhaps in gentrified places such as Southwold and Bournemouth, where the middle-class seaside revival is in full swing, fuelled partly by exactly the kind of nostalgia piers evoke, and where pier owners can maximise income. Yet even where cash is thinner on the ground piers are forming key parts of publicly funded seaside regeneration plans. In Deal, Kent, at the end of the last new pier to be built in Britain, in 1947, a new pavilion designed by the rising architectural star Niall McLaughlin has just opened, with a wood beam and glass tent so elegant and light that it has just won an RIBA award.

Whether all these signs of life add up to a full-blown revival is unlikely. These days, save for a vain hope that someone will bring back seaside steam ferries, piers have no point other than diversion. They’re follies. You go to a pier because you want to be diverted. No other reason. You want to walk up to the end, take the air, clear your head, eat instant donuts, play a penny slot machine. The economy, though, is in no mood for such expensive nostalgia and frivolity. More piers, I’m sure, will be lost. Let’s make sure it’s not the best ones any more, such as Brighton’s. Just a few miles down the coast, its equal — Eastbourne’s, also designed by Eugenius Birch — is for sale at £5 million. Any entrepreneur out there fancy the challenge?

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