West Pier Ocean Restaurant, front cover of 1949 party booking leaflet
Following the end of the Second World War, the West Pier reopened on Thursday 18th April 1946. Although on the outside the pier looked much as it did before the war, the business of the pier was transformed.
In the centre of the pier, the Concert Hall functioned as a new café seating 500 people with, by 1949, a light orchestra playing three times daily. The pier head building was divided into two with a new floor inserted horizontally across the former auditorium. The ground floor of the old theatre building became the Games Pavilion with an array of amusements designed to separate the pier’s visitors from their small change. The first floor housed the huge Ocean Restaurant, accommodated in a large and bright space with the original ornate ironwork hidden behind Festival of Britain style interior decoration.
The cover of this 1949 party booking leaflet, printed in September 1948, promises ‘sea-air - sunshine – smiles’. It blatantly uses one version of a staple British seaside character, ‘the seaside girl’ to entice readers. On this occasion it is one of the pier head bathers posing on a diving board.
Seating 600 diners, the restaurant offered ‘Meals over the sea!’ and was aimed at the organised group party market. Six meals were offered: hot and cold lunches and high teas, a plain tea and a dinner. The hot high tea served between 4pm and 6pm consisted of tea, bread and butter, and fish and chips followed by cakes or ‘vanilla ice’. The menu for the more expensive dinner, available between 7pm and 8.30pm, included hors d’oeuvres or soup, grilled sole or roast joint or poultry (‘as available’ – a necessary disclaimer given the privations of the late 1940s), vegetables in season, fresh fruit salad and cream. Beers, wines and spirits ‘at popular prices’ could ‘be served with luncheon and dinner’.
The Ocean Restaurant continued to target the group party market into the 1960s. The menu remained remarkably stable although, unlike in 1949, both jam and cheese were included in the choices available. The 1962 party organisers’ leaflet included the memorable slogan ‘lunch and tea – over the sea’.
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