This photograph (© Brighton West Pier Trust) shows the construction, most probably in 1915, of the West Pier Concert Hall. The building, with a capacity of 1,400 seats, opened in 1916.
The architects were Clayton & Black, a local firm of architects and surveyors. M. Noel Ridley (1860-1937) was the engineer responsible for the essential structural work of widening and strengthening the central section of the pier where the building was to be located. Ridley also designed the ‘light and graceful’ steel girders and roof trusses necessary to ensure the interior of the hall was unbroken by supporting pillars and columns. The interior roof trusses were said to resemble ‘the delicate fan lines of a late Gothic roof’. Despite the size of the new concert hall, the broad and sheltered new deck allowed promenaders to walk around both sides of the building’s exterior.
Although it seems remarkable that a pleasure palace should be built, and opened, while the horrors of the First World War were taking place across the Channel, the first conflict was not as disruptive to the pier and seaside business as the second. The contract for the Concert Hall had been entered into in 1914 and the work was carried out at pre-war prices.
Ridley, a largely forgotten pier engineer, had trained under Eugenius Birch while the great pier designer was working on Plymouth Hoe Promenade Pier in the early 1880s. He continued to be professionally active into the 1930s.
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