As with most objects in Britain that inspire outpourings of slightly irrational affection, we owe our seaside piers largely to the Victorians. With their innate genius for ornamentation, they transformed the humble landing stages of the early 19th century (built for well-heeled travellers voyaging around the newly fashionable resorts) into long thin promenades on which the middle classes could sniff the ocean breezes without being forced to mingle with hoi polloi.

Stiff admission fees kept the riff-raff off the piers in those early days. And at first the entertainment was as lofty as the social mix. Elgar presided over performances of his own music in the grand concert hall on the West Pier of Brighton. Sir Malcolm Sargent cut his teeth conducting the band on Llandudno Pier. West End thespians graced the summer shows.

And thanks to the ingenuity of brilliant engineers such as Eugenius Birch, the “Brunel of the British seaside”, the end-of-pier theatres — improbably suspended a few feet above the waves — were often as elaborately designed and lavishly equipped as the London Palladium.

But all that changed in the late Victorian and Edwardian era with the arrival of the penny arcades, the “what the butler saw” machines (the Victorian equivalent of today’s internet pornography), the Mystic Megs in their kitsch “oriental” kiosks, the raucous funfairs, the candy floss and the saucy postcards. Suddenly, piers developed a reputation for uncouth misbehaviour, if not outright licentiousness. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to work out why. If the sea stands for everything that mankind cannot control, then the pier — as potent a phallic symbol as any skyscraper — was a daring protrusion into that dangerous, boundless realm. It invited those who stepped on to it to cast off the usual constraints of polite society.

Perhaps this aura of breezy liberation is the reason why piers still occupy such a prominent niche in the British psyche, as well as in such classic British movies as Oh! What a Lovely War, Brighton Rock and Wish You Were Here (in which the shape of the pier alters from scene to scene, because the film was shot in both Bognor Regis and Worthing).

And nostalgia also explains why we go to such desperate lengths to preserve these tottering wooden structures that are peculiarly vulnerable to the ravages of fire (this is the second time that the Grand at Weston-super-Mare has burnt down), gales and the constant corrosion of salt water.

Barely half of the 100 greatest Victorian and Edwardian piers still exist. But doughty enthusiasts fight ferociously to preserve the ones that are still in working order or to breathe new life into those, such as the Grade I listed wreck of the West Pier at Brighton, that are now little more than tragic mangles.

The trouble is that rebuilding an ornate Victorian pier is a bit like visiting a London dentist: you can expect to add a million quid to the bill for each year of untreated decay. To bring the West Pier back to its former glory would now probably cost £40 million. The bill to rebuild the Grand could well be of the same magnitude. The sadness is that it had only recently reopened after handsome refurbishment by its new owners.

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