Blackpool’s three piers came safely through more than a century of storms, fires, ships crashing into them and war, but are now threatened by climate change and the violent storm surges of recent winters. Last year they made it on to a list of the world’s most endangered historic sites, but their continuing survival will be helped by a grant from the World Monuments Fund to be announced this week.

Though expensive to maintain, piers are still much loved by the public. A free family day on Saturday at Blackpool’s North pier attracted an estimated 6,000 people.

“A free coconut shy, who could resist it?” said Carl Carrington, built heritage and conservation manager of Blackpool council. “They closed for a week, so everything was freshly painted on Saturday, and people were just blown away by how gorgeous it looked.”

The three piers are owned by the same private group, and generally not eligible for public funding. However, their importance to the economy of a town still heavily dependent on tourism is such that the council nominated them to the fund, and is working with the owners to secure their future. The grant will help fund the action plan, bringing together all the interested parties – but the full costs are daunting, with urgent repairs to the North pier alone estimated at £12m. The piers will share $1m (£750,000) with seven other international sites, but the council believes it will be the key to unlocking further funding.

“The North pier is right on the doorstep of the town hall, so sitting back and watching it fall into the sea was not an option,” Carrington said. “Our piers are a core part of the history of the Victorian holiday, but if we don’t act now we could lose them all.”

The piers will remain in private ownership, but with advice and cooperation with the council, which has already taken on Blackpool Tower and the Winter Gardens.

The town’s first pier was the North pier in 1863, built as close as possible to the railway station, which had opened 17 years earlier. It targeted an elite market, and charged a shilling for admission, so as to discourage poorer visitors. Its original theatre was destroyed in a fire, but it still has its 1930s art deco theatre auditorium, one of only five remaining pier theatres in the UK. It is now in the worst condition, but it is the oldest survivor by Eugenius Birch, regarded as the greatest pier designer, and the only one of the three listed by Historic England.

The success of the North pier encouraged the expansion of the resort, so a new railway station followed – by 1911, at the peak of the town’s prosperity, it was believed to be the busiest in the world. A second pier was built in 1868, with free admission, a dance hall, a roller-skating rink and fairground rides. The Victoria pier followed in 1893, along with a third station.



From the 1960s, cheap air travel meant English people could venture overseas in unprecedented numbers, and Blackpool lost three-quarters of its cinemas and theatres, one of its train stations, and became a day tripper and weekend resort rather than the place where thousands took their only fortnight holiday.



Last year the piers found a place on the US-based World Monuments Fund list of the world’s most precious but threatened places. The list is notably eclectic, with places of barely local fame ranked alongside world-renowned sites. This year’s grants include funds for Amatrice, the Italian hill village torn apart by devastating earthquakes in 2016; an imperial theatre in an 18th-century mansion in Beijing; the kitchen garden of the Palace of Versailles near Paris; and a gymnasium at Takamatsu in Japan, built in the 1960s but closed in 2014 when the roof began leaking.