A LIST of sites and buildings at most risk of decay or neglect in Britain has been updated to include a fire- ravaged pier.

English Heritage’s at-risk register now includes Eastbourne Pier, which was partly destroyed by a devastating fire in the summer that led to roughly a third of the structure engulfed in flames.

For a site to be eligible for inclusion on the at-risk register, it must be a nationally designated site.

The register includes Grade I and II* listed buildings, all listed places of worship, scheduled monuments, registered parks and gardens, registered battlefields and protected wreck sites assessed as being at risk.

English Heritage is giving expert advice on the Eastbourne Pier rebuild and said it was pleased the structure’s eastern walkway has reopened.

Celebrations in the town last month marked the pier’s partial reopening, less than two months after the blaze.

Visitors are now able to enter the two-thirds of the pier which were not destroyed, including the shops, cafe, fishing platform and nightclub.

Elsewhere in the town, the first submarine commissioned by the Royal Navy, which sank six-miles off the Eastbourne coast while en route to the scrapyard, has been removed from the at-risk register.

Built by the Holland Torpedo Boat Company in Barrow-in- Furness, Cumbria, in 1903, Holland No. 5 is the only surviving example of its class of submarine on the seabed anywhere in the world. It sank in 1912.

In 2008, thieves stole the submarine’s torpedo tube hatch when unauthorised divers visited the wreck, which is described by the Nautical Archaeology Society (NAS) as a “remarkable piece of naval heritage”.

The theft was discovered during a licensed dive by the NAS in June 2010.

Despite this, it has now been removed from English Heritage’s at-risk register because the threat of unauthorised access by unlicensed divers has been significantly reduced by the “vigilance of the licensed diving community”, along with regular inspections of her condition by the NAS.