The idea of an Eastbourne pier was first floated at the end of 1863, championed by the town's principal landowner, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire - the man whose family had turned the small fishing village into a planned Victorian resort. The original proposal was for a thousand-foot pier costing £12,000, set at the bottom of Devonshire Place. Politics and finance dragged the scheme around the seafront until it ended up where you see it now, at the junction of Grand and Marine Parades, neatly separating the high-class hotels to the west from the more modest family hotels and boarding houses to the east. The Eastbourne Pier Company was registered in April 1865, work began on 18 April 1866, and the pier was opened by Lord Edward Cavendish on 13 June 1870. The engineering trick that allowed it to survive: the iron stilts holding it up do not sit fixed to the seabed. They rest in cast-iron cups, and the whole structure is designed to move slightly in heavy weather. A pier that flexes is a pier that does not snap.

By the 1880s and 90s the pier had become what Victorian piers were meant to be - a small entertainment town floating above the surf. A domed 400-seat pavilion appeared at the seaward end in 1888. In 1899-1901 it was replaced with a 1,000-seater theatre, a bar, an office suite and, at the very tip, a camera obscura tower. The obscura's lens-and-mirror system projected a live, moving image of the surrounding coast onto a viewing table in a darkened room - a Victorian piece of optical magic still much-loved today. Two saloon buildings were added midway along the pier. Through the music-hall era the theatre hosted Harry Houdini, who slipped his chains on stage here in 1903; the cross-dressing music hall star Vesta Tilley; comedian Little Tich; and through later decades Charlie Chaplin, Gracie Fields, Bruce Forsyth and Frankie Vaughan. The camera obscura, which had fallen out of use by the 1960s, was restored in 2003 with a new access stair, and Eastbourne is now one of the very few British seaside towns where you can still watch the world projected through a Victorian lens onto a Victorian table.

Eastbourne sat under the South Coast invasion-defence zone in the Second World War, and in December 1942 an exploding mine caused considerable damage to the pier and the nearby seafront hotels. The mine had drifted ashore and been spotted by local police, who - mistakenly believing it had been fitted with a safety device - had tied it to the pier's iron stanchions to keep it from drifting. They had not understood what they were tying. The following year, in 1943, a detachment of Royal Canadian Engineers stationed at Eastbourne rigged camouflage netting over the pier's underside to conceal small Allied vessels - assault landing craft and the like - sheltered beneath it for invasion preparation. On 3 February 1943 two of these Canadian engineers, in an extraordinary act of cold-water bravery, dived from the pier to rescue a comrade who had fallen from a cableway crossing a 30-foot gap in the partly-bomb-damaged structure. One was awarded the George Medal, the other the British Empire Medal.

The pier's most recent test came at 3pm on 30 July 2014. Smoke began rising from the central domed building. The fire spread fast through the timber panelling of the games arcade. East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service deployed up to 80 officers and fought the blaze through the night, eventually saving two-thirds of the structure - the outer pavilion at the seaward end and the landward sections to either side of the burned central dome. The arcade was a shell. Sussex Police initially called it non-suspicious; later, they concluded arson was likely. Worse came in the days that followed: a 44-year-old workman, Stephen Penrice, fell through the destroyed deck on 18 August and died from his injuries hours later. The fire happened two weeks before Eastbourne's biggest tourist event of the year, the Airbourne air show, and the town - which has lived off its seafront tourism since the 1860s - watched the recovery effort with a closeness that surprised even residents. The owners, Six Piers Limited, had put the pier on the market in 2009 for £5.5 million and had not found a buyer. In October 2015 a local hotelier, Abid Gulzar, bought it for an undisclosed sum believed to be under that asking price. He repaired the damage, repainted the domes gold, and reopened it to the public.

The pier today is roughly 300 metres long, Grade II* listed (upgraded in May 2009 from Grade II), and still working its original Victorian trick of putting people out over water. The Birdman competition - in which entrants leaped from a platform at the end into the sea wearing homemade flying contraptions, with prizes for whoever flew furthest - was a fixture for more than a decade and has its own affectionate place in local memory. Eastbourne Town FC's supporters' club calls itself, with pier-town inevitability, 'Pier Pressure'. The pier has appeared in Agatha Christie's *Poirot* (twice - once as Brighton, once as itself), in the 2001 film *Last Orders*, and in 2008 in *Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging*. From the South Downs Way ridge to the west the whole pier appears foreshortened, stretching out into the Channel like a long thin model on a green-and-blue plan. From the front it looks exactly the way a Victorian engineer wanted it to: solid, ornate, slightly proud of itself, and still standing in cups on the sea floor.