A blue-tailed bee-eater chases down its prey along the banks of the Kaveri River on the outskirts of the city of Mysore, India in the last decade of June 2025. (Photo by Nitin Jain/Solent News)

A young girl pulls on her braids during the Red Head Days festival in Tilburg, Netherlands, Saturday, August 30, 2025. (Photo by Virginia Mayo/AP Photo)

Workers reinforce the electric pylons at a flooded area as Typhoon Nepartak approaches in Xuancheng, Anhui Province, China, July 9, 2016. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

Syrian fighters from the Turkish-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) fire a missile against regime positions on May 13, 2019 in the rebel-held northern part of Syria's Hama province. Clashes on the edge of a jihadist bastion in northwestern Syria have killed at least 42 fighters in 24 hours, a monitor said today, after regime bombardment on the region devastated health services. (Photo by Omar Haj Kadour/AFP Photo)

The shadow of a cross is pictured as Catholic faithful arrive to attend a reenactment of the “Via Crucis” (way of the Cross) during Holy Week in Abobote, an area of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on April 18, 2025. (Photo by Luc Gnago/Reuters)

A woman photographs a Norwegian spruce Christmas tree from Oslo after it was lit at Trafalgar Square in central London, December 4, 2014. (Photo by Toby Melville/Reuters)

A 180 degrees rotated photograph shows the shadows of Polina (L), a six-year-old Belarusian first grade school girl, and her father, cast on the street while on their way to Polina's first day of school, which marks the traditional start of the academic year, in Minsk, Belarus, 02 September 2019. The start of a new academic year in Belarus, officially called Day of Knowledge, is a festive day for all school and university students in the country. (Photo by Tatyana Zenkovich/EPA/EFE)

While the lido was described as bringing “modernism to the masses” on the British coast it was just the latest example of a trend that had been developing since Victorian times – transforming seaside towns into resorts for leisure and entertainment. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the fashion was for local authorities to build great piers stretching from the promenade out into the sea. The Eastbourne Pier, pictured here in May 1931, was erected between 1866 and 1870 to an ingenious design by Eugenius Birch, which saw the structure sitting on special cups allowing the supporting struts to “move” in bad weather. Arranged on the pier's 1,000-foot length were kiosks, a theatre, a ballroom and a camera obscura. 1931. (Photo by Aerofilms Collection via “A History of Britain From Above”)