The Pier

My first experience of the Isle of Wight was Ryde Pier. After a lengthy train journey and some confusion over the train stations of Portsmouth I finally managed to catch the catamaran that crosses the 5 mile stretch of water known as the Solent. It was June. I travelled on the open top deck of the vessel and Ryde looked like a postcard. Houses came tumbling down the hill, several church spires rose above the houses and the sun was shining. Walking down the half mile pier it seemed more like a holiday than a job interview. Brent Geese bobbed in the water, cormorants perched on the pilings running alongside the main structure and even a couple of swans drifted past. Now it was November. The tide was out so the majority of the water present was falling out of the sky – walking down the pier I was accompanied by a light but chilly breeze. Ryde was a grey mass and the Church spires were hidden by low cloud. The trip by foot down the pier always brings a mixed emotion when the train goes by. Jealousy at those peering faces sitting smugly throughout their two minute yet always warm journey and low level pride at not being so lazy. The trains on the island are old London Underground stock – the result of an engineering mishap in 1966 that lowered the height of a key tunnel by ten inches thus rendering it impassable to normal stock. The pier was first built in 1814 prior to which visitors to Ryde were carried ashore by local fishermen wading out through the shallows to hopefully ensure a dry landing. Such was the trade that the local lord of the manor had muscled in by the mid seventeenth century, establishing fixed rates for the passage and introducing a cart system for the wealthier guests. Ryde itself (from the Old English rith – place at the small stream) was at this point two separate settlements at the top and bottom of the steep hill. This would all change at the end of the eighteenth century as Ryde became a fashionable regency destination, Union Street was built linking the settlements and became clear that if it was to grow then brawny fisherman lugging dandies and their mistresses through the waves was not going to be good enough. And so in 1812 the Ryde Pier Company was formed, under the restriction that no foreign visitors could be landed, and construction began. Restriction notwithstanding, and given the south Wight’s cross-channel smuggling based economy, the pier opened the island up to the wider world. Perhaps the most distinguished visitor to travel the pier was Queen Victoria, arriving by private yacht in 1843, by which time the pier was reaching its full half mile length. Unlike today with it’s ubiquitous Costa, the pier would have offered the Queen a full cornucopia of entertainments including a bandstand, refreshments pavillion and large numbers of sheep (so many indeed that they required their own cleaner to keep the pier amenable to promenaders). Such was the volume of traffic that company had also hired a policeman by the mid-1830s to regulate the flow – something achieved today by electronic barriers and a touch card system. A working fishing village, with countryside villas stretching up the hill beyond would have welcomed the Queen and her influence on the town is still visible today. Queen’s Road heads towards Newport, Cowes and Osbourne House, the Queen Victoria Shopping Arcade contains a variety of specialty shops and a bust of the Queen herself looks down upon the local Co-op – unfortunately covered in the ever present seagull poo and surrounded by those members of the town that prefer their cider al fresco. The plaque next to Victoria’s bust, commemorating Theodore Racine Searle, a local homeless man who passed in 1987 after 28 years in Ryde, is a modern echo of the changes that were already reaching Ryde by the time of Victoria’s visit. Modernisation and industrialisation would provide the pier with first a tramway and then electrification in 1881 and yet free labour from the Newport workhouse would build the causeway at the pierhead in 1829.  Reaching the pierhead today Ryde’s split personality emerges not just from the rain but from the buildings along the seafront. Initially an indistinct stretch of seaside vendors and fast food outlets three buildings stand out – refreshments offered by the mock Tudor King Lud hint at relief from the cold and a pre-pier past, to right the Royal Victoria Yacht Club suggest a holiday hey-day of royal and aristocratic celebrities and off to the left the ever audible hoverport shows Ryde at it’s modern best. What Karl Marx thought when he arrived at the pier for a holiday break in 1874 is not recorded, but his patronage of various local ale houses is recorded and is enough of an excuse for an early break in the itinerary.