The People's Pier: The popular culture of pleasure piers and cultural regeneration through community heritage

'The People's Pier' is an AHRC funded research project that investigated community piers as an emerging form of community hubs. This project explored how the cultural history and contemporary condition of British pleasure piers inform and produce a particular model of community ownership and management of the 'people's pier' as an asset for the local community, using two primary case studies; The Hastings Pier Charity and The Clevedon Pier and Heritage Foundation. The primary aim of the project is to develop an understanding of how seaside pleasure pier culture converges with, engenders and sometimes resists, 21st century community led approaches to the economic regeneration of British seaside resorts. AHRC ref: AH/M009300/1