A participant takes part in donkey racing, during the 21st edition of annual Lamu Cultural Festival, in Lamu, Kenya, Saturday December 2, 2023. (Photo by AP Photo/Stringer)

A 6-month old female giant panda cub, an offspring of Xing Xing, formerly known as Fu Wa and Liang Liang, formerly known as Feng Yi, plays at the Giant Panda Conservation Center at the National Zoo in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Thursday, February 18, 2016. (Photo by Joshua Paul/AP Photo)

People look at a black bear at the Chengdu zoo amid the coronavirus outbreak on March 26, 2020 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province of China. (Photo by Wang Lei/China News Service via Getty Images)

A family wearing traditional Japanese clothing posed for a photograph during spring season in one of the garden in Kiyomizu dera, Kyoto prefecture, Japan on March 30, 2018. (Photo by Richard Atrero de Guzman/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Martina Maggio, Alice D'Amato, Lara Mori, Asia D'Amato, and Vanessa Ferrari of Team Italy pose in front of the rings during Women's Qualification on day two of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at Ariake Gymnastics Centre on July 25, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters)

The American singer Jessie Murph shows off her footwear at Variety magazine event in Los Angeles, California on August 8, 2024. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Photo)

Heather Wilson and Tom Hendry, rangers on the Farne Islands, weigh a puffin using a jug as part of the annual seabird census on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Times photographer James Glossop)

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”)