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I recently spent the best part of a weekend, back down in ‘astings. As I’ve wandered about over the years, I’ve amassed a credible shortlist of candidates, but this history-rich, cash-poor, coastal resort will always have the best claim for being my home town.

It’s had a rough ride over the years. The BBC online magazine recently ran an umbrella feature on the decline and supposed renaissance of the English seaside holiday. In one of these pieces, they revealed that recently, a government select comittee re-examining statistics from the last decade was suprised to find some of the most disadvantaged areas of the U.K. are outside of the urban centres, in the former coastal resorts. A ‘ring of deprivation all around the coast’. It was no surprise to me.

Living there throughout the 80s, I remember some grim times, routine visits to the job centre to peer at the same handful of sparsely placed little cards , infrequently rotated. Scraping together the money to keep a roof over your head and food to eat, with scant prospects and ambitions limited to either things to do on the coming weekend, or ultimately leaving the town somehow, never to return.

This is not to say that times were unequivocally harsh and miserablist. Balanced against this sour picture there are positive memories of some of the usual teenage joys of hormones, beer, cars and guitars, 8-bit computers and tabletop gaming, and other nerdly trappings. As a background setting, Hastings is peerless in its own way; blessed with character, steeped in a personality that ranges from 1066-and-all-that through the genteel Victorian sea-side craze and the post-war bucket and spade holidays, all of this imprinted wherever you look. There’s also a lot to be said for living through the glory days of the coin-op video game in a seaside town crammed with amusement arcades, if you like that sort of thing. And I do.

So my feelings about the place have always been ambivalent. The locals love to talk about a curse that dooms all of those born there to perpetually return. Unfortunately for me, I was born there, and laughably enough I do still feel compelled to return periodically. And here I am again, thirty-five years later.

To my eyes, the old pile has definitely taken a turn for the better. There’s been talk about regeneration grants, from Europe, and new injections of assistance from government schemes, and of course we’re now looking at the product of a few years of national economic upswing, after a long spell of those bleaker times. For once, I seem to have found a pleasant hotel to stay in. After a comfortable night’s sleep, I sallied forth, “Forever Changes” playing on the iPod, intending both to revel in some nostalgia, and get the measure of the changes, and a feel for the twenty-first century Hastings.

I made my way down through Burton’s marvellous St Leonards, now delapidated, once a splendid blooming of the middle class Victorian fad for the coast. Most of the crumbling mansions are now carved up into ’studio apartments’, or have been converted into residential care homes. Here too though, there were tangible signs of regeneration. Lanes that were once contiguous rows of empty, boarded or charity shops now seemed to be busy general stores, and bric-a-brac markets. The public gardens well maintained and colourfully planted, and the seafront properties mostly tidied and painted.

Moving down onto the seafront you step through time, from the height of Victorian pomp, to pre-war modernism, with the ill-placed, looming, shiplike Marine Court, once the tallest residential building in the U.K., and the peculiar, concrete covered-promenade decorated with pieces of reclaimed, coloured glass, locally known as ‘Bottle alley’ that runs the entirety of the sea-front, from St Leonards-on-sea to Hastings proper, linking Warrior Square gardens to Hastings Pier.

I love English pleasure piers. Much like the ’seaside resort’, piers are a Victorian invention, and they combine some of their favourite fads in one slightly bizarre, folly; cast-iron engineering along with proximity to to sea air. Most of the sensible literature tries to explain away the pier as a straightforward solution to the enormous tidal range of the British coast. A genteel promenade right alongside the briny, any time of day or season. I prefer to think of them as the purest distilation of Victorian enthusiasm and hubris. A product of the same mindset as Isambard Brunel’s unfeasibly tall top hat. A wondrous long iron bridge! That leads to nowhere! And on the end we shall place a music-hall and several gin-palaces!

Hastings pier is a good all rounder. It owns no records for length, height, age or feature. It’s nicely proportioned, cast iron and wood, with a good mixture of external promenades, and internal structures, observation and fishing decks. Amusements, shops and eateries, arcades, the usual seaside fare. It’s also now closed to the public, as it’s collapsing under its own weight into the sea.

Piers are essentially self-destructive. That exuberant pointlessness, the folly that gives me such joy to contemplate, is also centered about this fact; a large, turbulent body of salted water with shifting, sandy foundations is a tricky place to build a permanent structure. Especially made out of iron which will corrode, and wood which will rot. A bridge thus constructed might survive, but bridges are useful, and can justify the cost of their upkeep. Not so the pier. In the twenty-first century, a sea-bridge to nowhere is insufficiently spectacular in itself to be similarly cost-effective. And so we’ve been slowly losing our pleasure piers as they slip away into decline. Many of them were closed down or truncated in the second World War, mined and bisected under fear of invasion. They’re an accident-prone lot, succumbing not only to freak weather, but collisions with boats, and prone to burning down in fires, which seems a curious thing until you remember all the timber and decking.

Hastings pier has always seemed more resiliant than many. As shabby as the rest of its environs for as long as I’ve known it, run-down but seemingly always sturdy and well anchored right in the heart of what can be quite spectacularly turbulent and stormy coasts. The last time I’d been down for a flying visit, it had recently re-opened, and was celebrating its transfer into private hands, sold by the council for a new lease of life as a commercial enterprise. It can’t have gone very well, as only a few years later, it’s all boarded off and shutdown as structurally unsafe. There’s a definite sag to the last third of its length that you can detect with the naked eye.

I doubt that this will be the immediate end of it. There’ll be the usual charity concern, or local pressure groups. Perhaps a council buy-back, perhaps another optimistic enterprise will snap it up derelict and attempt to make it a going concern. Maybe some lottery money will be secured, perhaps listed status. Or maybe it will just fall victim to some violent seasonal weather, and stand for decades more as a collapsing derelict ghost, much like the West Brighton pier. It’s is hard to think of any useful future for these old things, they’re dead ends in more than just the literal sense.

Lucky for me I never won big on the lottery or made any of those dotcom millions. If I had, I’d probably have bought the lovely, stupid thing myself.