THE month of May is of deep and lasting significance for those of us who love our Southend Pier, care deeply about it and so much want the future to be kinder to, and much better for, our pier.

It was way back inMay 1829 that passing of the Pier Act, with Royal assent, was the opening of what has been a remarkable story – of highs and lows – for our pier. In July that year, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Thompson, laid the foundation stone.

It was in May 2012 that the – well, controversial, to put it politely – £3 million “culture centre” was shipped downriver from Tilbury and lowered onto the pier’s seaward end.

The present Duke of Kent came formally to open this latest addition to our pier. It was way back in summer 1929 the then Duke of Kent, Prince George, was here to declare open the final seaward extension to the iron pier that had replaced its wooden forebear in summer 1887.

Crowds packed the new upper deck as well as surrounding the platform from which the Duke addressed them. It confirmed the immense public appreciation of the pier, its astonishing popularity – and, right then, established its status as the world’s longest pleasure pier.

There will be readers who, like this writer, remember with considerable pleasure and gratitude, the long-ago years when pleasure steamers came and went from the pier to other resorts and, in time, to France.

We remember, too, the toast rack trains, the team of officers who ran the pier as though it was some great ocean-going liner, the magnificent, Edwardian shore-end Pavilion which, in time, became a skating rink and in his last years before a devastating fire, a tenpin bowling alley.

We remember pierhead shows and restaurants and an amusement arcade when peacetime returned to our lives and the pier’s vital role through war years was recorded and triumphantly spread far and wide through author A.P. Herbert’s wonderful book, a copy of which the writer of this article greatly treasures.

The pier – our pier, our world-renowned pier – has survived attacks, violent storms, the truly dreadful fire of summer 1976, when pictures were flashed around the world.