Brighton has had three piers, and the Palace Pier outlasted them both. The Royal Suspension Chain Pier opened in 1823 and the West Pier followed in 1866. By the 1880s, the Chain Pier was falling apart, and its demolition was a condition of the new pier's construction. When the Brighton Marine Palace and Pier Company broke ground on 7 November 1891, the builders fully expected the old Chain Pier to be taken down methodically. Instead, a storm destroyed it in 1896, scattering debris that damaged both the West Pier and Volk's Electric Railway nearby. The new pier, designed by R. St George Moore to resemble the Continental kursaals -- entertainment halls found at European spas -- opened in 1899 at a cost of 27,000 pounds, including 3,000 lights. Repainting it still takes three months every year.

For its first seventy years, the pier was primarily a performance venue. Reading rooms became a theatre by 1911, and postwar summer seasons featured comedians like Tommy Trinder and Dick Emery. In 1973, a 70-ton barge broke loose during a storm and smashed into the pier head, badly damaging the theatre. The building limped on for another decade before being demolished in 1986 after a buyout, and the pier's character shifted decisively from seaside entertainment to amusement park. Roller coasters, a helter skelter, and a haunted house ride replaced the footlights. The Spice Girls played an early live show here in 1996, but the pier's theatrical tradition was effectively over. Today, the pier is a raucous strip of fairground rides, fish-and-chip shops, and arcade machines jutting out over a sea that can be violently grey or improbably turquoise, sometimes on the same afternoon.

Few structures in England have embedded themselves in popular culture quite like this one. Graham Greene's Brighton Rock placed gangsters on its boards. The 1979 film of Quadrophenia staged its iconic mod-rocker battle scenes in the streets nearby, with the pier as the emotional landmark that pulls the story seaward. David Mitchell set passages of The Bone Clocks here in 2014, and Graham Swift's 2020 novel Here We Are conjured postwar variety performers under its lights. In 2015, Martyn Ware of the Human League recorded its soundscape for the National Trust and British Library -- the crash of waves against Victorian ironwork, the electronic chatter of slot machines, the screams from the Booster ride that once catapulted riders 130 feet upside down before closing for refurbishment in 2023.

The pier has survived IRA bicycle bombs in 1994, a fire in 2003 that destroyed the ghost train, and a safety scandal in 2004 when a ride operated with part of its track missing. In 2024, for the first time in its history, it introduced an admission charge -- a pound initially, later raised to two -- exempt only for local residents. In January 2026, the owners put the pier up for sale, citing falling revenue and rising costs. Brighton's only surviving pier now faces the same question that the Chain Pier and the West Pier could not answer: how a Victorian pleasure structure sustains itself in a century that has largely moved on from the seaside holiday. Its skeletal neighbour, the West Pier, collapsed into the sea in 2003, a rusted warning visible from the Palace Pier's railings of what happens when the answer comes too late.