The pier opened in 1871 as a working landing stage rather than an amusement. It was 160 yards long, four yards wide, built of wood, and it served the Woolwich Steam Packet Company, whose paddle-steamers ferried goods and day-trippers from the Thames to the Essex coast. Without the pier, the resort had no transport link; with it, Clacton became reachable for the cost of a steamer ticket. Promenading - that distinctly Victorian ritual of dressed-up walking up and down a flat surface above the sea - quickly attached itself to the pier as a leisure pursuit. By 1893, demand had grown so much that the pier was lengthened to 1,180 feet, a pavilion and a waiting room added, the deck broadened. What had been a jetty was now an entertainment complex on stilts.

Earnest Kingsman bought the pier in 1922 and developed it into the kind of seaside attraction Edwardians and inter-war Britons came to expect: shows, dances, an open-air swimming pool, a small fairground. The Kingsman family ran it for nearly half a century. By 1971 his son Barney Kingsman was struggling against the post-war decline that hit British seaside towns hard once the cheap package flight to Spain became normal. Visitor numbers had dropped; revenues had thinned; the pier was sold to Michael Goss, whose family already owned a majority share of Walton Pier just up the coast. Goss ran Clacton Pier as a successful amusement centre. He grew frustrated, he said, with the lack of council support and eventually decided to sell up and retire.

From 1971 to 1985, on the spot where the open-air swimming pool had once been, the pier hosted what was advertised as a 'dolphinarium' - a pool with dolphins, and for periods of that run, killer whales as well. The animals performed shows for paying audiences. Today the practice strikes most people as cruel; in the 1970s it was a routine seaside attraction, a feature of piers and seaside aquaria across Britain. Photographs from the period show crowds packed shoulder to shoulder around the pool, children leaning over the rail, a Pacific Northwest orca breaching in the green water above the English Channel. The dolphinarium closed in 1985 as both the financial pressure on small operators and public attitudes about captive cetaceans began to shift. The pool was filled in and built over.

Like every wooden British pier, Clacton's has been repeatedly chewed up by fire and weather. In 1973 a fire caused significant damage, particularly to the roller coaster. In 1978 a severe storm weakened the structure further. In August 1981 a consortium of local businessmen - Francis and Denis McGinty, John Treadwell, and David Howe - bought the pier from Goss with ambitious redevelopment plans: a bar and disco, the return of the dolphins, new rides. Some of it worked. The Whirlwind roller coaster, a circus, an ice rink and a roller rink all went in. Some of it did not. The pier company struggled financially through the late 1980s, came close to insolvency more than once, and finally went into receivership around 1993. It stayed in receivership for about a year.

In 1994 a Clacton family called the Harrisons bought the pier and started a long, patient modernisation. They built rides at the entrance rather than at the seaward end, which is unusual for British piers - it means the fun begins as soon as you step onto the boards. In March 2009 the Clacton Pier Company took over and installed a new focal point: a 50-foot helter-skelter originally built in 1949 for a travelling show, which had recently appeared in a 2008-2009 Marks & Spencer television advert. On 28 October 2013 the St Jude Storm tore through the British Isles and collapsed the helter-skelter, depositing it onto the deck. The structure was rebuilt. In 2020 the National Piers Society named Clacton Pier its Pier of the Year, an honour that recognised the careful, patient work that successive owners had put into a building most other coastal towns lost decades ago. Today the pier runs ten-pin bowling, arcades, a 4D dinosaur exhibit, mini-golf, soft play and food outlets along its 1,180-foot length. The steamers stopped coming long ago. The day-trippers, by car and train now, still arrive.