Don't save the pier - leave it a magnificent ruin

The image of the West Pier at Brighton collapsing into a stormy winter sea was so dramatic and moving that, naturally, you could find it on the front page of almost every newspaper yesterday. As a grand spectacle, it could hardly be improved upon, and many of the images showed a large crowd of onlookers gazing at the terrific sight. It looked like a gigantic sea-spider in its last death-throes, being slowly sucked back underneath the waves.

The image of the West Pier at Brighton collapsing into a stormy winter sea was so dramatic and moving that, naturally, you could find it on the front page of almost every newspaper yesterday. As a grand spectacle, it could hardly be improved upon, and many of the images showed a large crowd of onlookers gazing at the terrific sight. It looked like a gigantic sea-spider in its last death-throes, being slowly sucked back underneath the waves.

It was a compelling, mysterious image. If you read on, however, it seemed clear that no one had really considered the power of the image, and the stories had a slightly hypocritical air. If the picture editors had no doubt that the image of destruction and ruin was an irresistibly romantic one, the journalists all leapt to the question of how the thing was to be done up and rebuilt. There seemed no debate to be had at all; the collapse of the West Pier was obviously "a setback" to the plans for regeneration.

Personally, I think there's a great deal too much tarting up and knocking through these days, and the heart slightly sinks at the prospect of those "plans for regeneration" of the pier. What will they amount to in the end? Yet another leisure centre, I expect. The structure will be made safe, the Edwardian rococo of the ballroom will be regilded and replastered, and there will be a gift shop at the very end selling shortbread in tartan tins.

I've been transfixed by Christopher Woodward's wonderful book, In Ruins, in which he argues for the immense aesthetic pleasures of untouched, decaying ruins, and very strongly against the preservation and commodification of decaying artefacts. Sometimes, he says, things should just be left to rot, like the abandoned Italian town of Ninfa. Nothing is grander or more affecting than that.

Absolutely right. A pier was always the most perfectly useless object imaginable. Inexplicably inspiring as they are, they don't actually do anything very productive when in perfect condition. Nothing is lost, and rather a lot gained, when one collapses so dramatically into the sea; it is a tremendous, melancholy sight. I bet, at this very moment, people all over the south of England are getting into their cars to go to Brighton just to have a look at the catastrophe.

Ruins are an almost unmentionable pleasure; a decadent and rather deplorable enthusiasm. But everyone shares the pleasure. To take another example, whenever the question of Battersea Power Station arises, everyone automatically deplores the fact that it has been roofless for 20 years. Personally, I adore the irreparable decay, and look forward to it going even further, with the great carcass swathed in bindweed and vines; a spectacular ruin in the middle of London is much more exciting than the prospect of the hundred-screen cinema and residential accommodation in the plans for its reconstruction.

So why on earth are we even considering restoring the pier? You don't have to. Why not just leave it as it is? Of course, we will be told that it's unsafe; but everything is unsafe. Far more people will be killed crossing the front at Brighton than by falling masonry from an abandoned pier. Other people will object that it is environmentally unsound to let the thing just fall into the sea, but frankly, the sea is perfectly capable of taking another wreck.

I don't see that the objections have any real force when compared to the magnificent, poetic spectacle of a disastrous ruin on a grand scale. This one – a stupendous, blackened rococo wedding cake collapsing into a stormy sea – is worth any number of Lottery-funded regeneration projects.

For centuries, we have loved and been moved by spectacles of decay. A very large anthology of poetic meditations on ruins could be compiled, and the Western mind has been haunted for centuries by the proof they offer that the grandest works of man are reclaimed, in the end, by the sea and by the earth. Gibbon was driven to embark on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the remains of the Forum in Rome. But what, now, would inspire a contemporary Gibbon? Everything is restored, preserved, and attached to a well-stocked gift shop. A true abandoned ruin is a real rarity.

So, in this one instance, let's save ourselves some money, live a little dangerously, and just leave it, as it is, to fall apart with slow dignity. While it was whole and sturdy, it is probably fair to say that it never inspired a great photograph, a great poem, or a great painting. In its death-throes, it presents so grand a spectacle that someone, surely, will be inspired to record it in some way. Before the public authorities rush to patch it up and stick it back together, they should honestly consider why, for the first time since it was built, the pier found itself on the front pages of the newspapers, and why people are flocking to contemplate the great ruin.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk