It never ceases to amaze me that Brighton’s West Pier is still being discussed in your columns.

It is hard not to go overboard when describing what it looked like in its heyday, since it was surely one of the most spectacular and beautiful of all similar structures.

An Argus headline (February 8) poses the question: “Is it time to let West Pier become piece of the past?” The answer is most definitely yes. Those glorious days have gone and the West Pier has gone too. It is mess of rusting and rotting metal, incapable of being rebuilt. It was a fine icon of its time but why do some feel it ought to be rebuilt or replaced with a replica?

Compared with many ancient cities in this country, Brighton has had a relatively short but glorious past; but it also has a future. That is one reason why I support the i360 – it is futuristic, imaginative, and indicates that the city we love is moving towards the future.

In that respect I support Mr Glyn Jones and his West Pier Trust in its support for this forward-looking project.

Not unexpectedly, the disaster of the pier’s gradual disintegration and the coup de grace of the arson attack in 2003 figured prominently in the correspondence columns of The Argus: How was it allowed to come to this? Shouldn’t we reconstruct it to its former glory? What was patently obvious – or should have been – was that, as the pier then stood, any thought of rebuilding it was utterly out of the question. What was left was structurally unsound.

The West Pier remains an irredeemable wreck of twisted steel and an eyesore, and any prospect of restoring it to its former glory is a preposterous fantasy.

I recall in those days – now 11 years ago – that Aros Architects drew up plans for a futuristic and radical pier which, in my own words at the time, could have been “a herald and a symbol of the city’s future”. I love this city in which I was born for its great and idiosyncratic past. I want its future to be as grand.

It is my personal hope that the i360 will do for Brighton and Hove what I had hoped Aros’s project would have done: shouted from the rooftops that this city has a future as well as a past.

Michael Johnson, Kevin Gardens, Brighton