Clevedon is located on the coast between Weston-super-Mare and Bristol. It’s the sort of place you might overlook, opting for a more balmy beach location, rather than a rugged one. It’s only an hour from me in Yeovil and I’d never visited until one cold December weekend. If you visit Clevedon you will find romance at it’s most timeless in the form of Clevedon Pier.

If you visit in the summer months you can also swim in the Marine Lake (or take a wetsuit in the winter!) But this post is all about the pier; the pier which English poet Sir John Betjeman called ‘The most beautiful pier in England’.

The industrial revolution bought with it the legacy of Britians seaside piers. Clevedon’s railway line bought with it the exciting possibility of South Wales by steamer from the pier at Clevedon.

A poorly constructed first attempt had been destroyed by high winds and heavy seas in November 1837. A new proposal for a pier was revisited 29 years later in November 1866, following a meeting in the public hall in Clevedon. The Clevedon Pier company was formed and in summer 1867 work commenced.

Clevedon’s pier was designed to be 840 feet long and the construction work was entrusted to Hamilton’s Windsor Iron Works of Liverpool. It has an open work structure, providing minimum resistance to the wind and waves.

370 tons of wrought iron work was required. Slender and strong supports were made from discarded parts of Brunel’s South Wales Railway. Gales halted the work, but the structure held.

The design changed from the original and now included a Toll house (by the same local builder who built the band stand along the beach) with accommodation for the pier master (this is where you buy tickets for access today, although I am not sure the grand sounding job of pier master still exists). The pier cost £10,000 and took sixty men to complete. In 1869 there was a grand opening, with 500 passengers arriving on train from Bristol alone.

For more on this story please see the official pier website. The most charming thing about the pier is the plaques. They remind you of everything that is good about humanity. Heartfelt messages between people. Sometimes funny, sometimes earnest. Remembering loved ones, or remembering a moment in time, a joyful occasion. You can lose yourself in walking up and down the pier and reading these.

There are two places on the pier to eat, a restaurant and a cafe. There’s a small art gallery and shop upstairs in the Toll house (I guess where the pier master once lived).

This place, once symbolising new adventures and possibilities and now a monument to romance and resistance against the stormiest of sea gales, is somewhere special because I went there with someone special to me.