NO OTHER country has as many pleasure piers as Britain and some of the best examples are in Sussex.

The West Pier in Brighton is a Grade I listed building, still beautiful even though it has become a wreck.

Its sad decline is a stark reminder that piers are vulnerable to fire despite being built over water and that constant maintenance is required to prevent collapse.

The current row over the future of Hastings Pier only emphasises the need for owners to have deep pockets.

Britain’s first pleasure pier was in Brighton and demonstrated that structures used for mooring ships could also be objects of beauty.

The Chain Pier in Brighton was good for strolls and almost everyone who visited Brighton went there, including the King, William IV.

But it also pointed the way to future problems. A severe storm in its early days caused much damage and another which wrecked it in 1896 also hit the West Pier and the embryonic Palace Pier.

There were more than 100 piers in Britain at their peak but half of them have since gone. They included the handsome pier at St Leonards which for many years rivalled Hastings Pier a mile to its east.

Some of the surviving piers are thriving, The Palace Pier is the most popular free tourist attraction outside London.

The pier at Cromer in Norfolk puts on a traditional summer show every year of a type that used to be staged in nearly every resort.

Southend Pier in Essex stretches more than a mile into the Thames estuary and is the longest. Blackpool has three piers, putting it well ahead of its great rival Brighton. Some piers such as the one in Shanklin, Isle of Wight, have been damaged beyond repair and not replaced. Where new structures have been built, such as at neighbouring Sandown, they are often extremely ugly.

A look at the surviving piers shows how fragile many of them are. Bognor Pier in West Sussex is little more than a sad stump.

Totland Pier, another on the Isle of Wight, is so tiny that it hardly deserves to be recognised as a pier.

Southend Pier is almost featureless despite being so long.

Even the Palace Pier has lost much of its charm thanks to unsightly additions for gaming machines and rides.

Hastings Pier was also disfigured by tatty buildings before the fire that reduced it to a smouldering wreck.

It was designed by Eugenius Birch, the most successful pier builder of the Victorian era, who placed 14 up and down the country. But if the West Pier in Brighton was his masterpiece, Hastings comes fairly well down the list.

This did not stop the people of Hastings from regarding it with great affection and they formed a charity to buy it. The Heritage Lottery Fund granted £12.4 million to rebuild it and it reopened to the public in 2016. This time the problem was not too much clutter but a lack of attractions. The charity went into administration.

When administrators sold it, Friends of Hastings Pier hoped to retain public ownership. But they decided instead to sell it to Sheikh Abid Gulzar who already has the pier in Eastbourne, another Birch design.

Many people in Hastings including the council leader are angry with the sale and say the Sheikh should not be allowed to profit from public money.

But I can see why the decision was taken. The bare boards of the pier may have won it the Royal Institute of British Architects’ prize for the best new building in Britain but they did not prevent the pier charity from going bust.

The Sheikh has been a controversial figure in Eastbourne where he has angered some locals through his love of the colour gold for parts of the pier. They consider this to detract from its beauty. But on the other hand he has made sure that it is flourishing after it was also severely damaged by fire. The Sheikh has invested large sums of cash into Eastbourne Pier but may find Hastings a far more daunting proposition. The resort is all too obviously suffering acutely from deprivation.

He will need all his undoubted charm and humour to get attractions on the pier that people will want to visit. It will not be easy. The people of Hastings may have to swallow their pride and go along with the Sheikh as he tries his best to make the pier viable.

He says he wants to make Hastings Pier the talk of the town and there is no reason to doubt his commitment.

Hastings Pier has proved it has the support of the people. But it must also be run in a businesslike fashion to avoid the fate of many other piers.