Winter Solstice Sunset over West Pier © 2011 Mufidah Kassalias

We're almost at the shortest day of the year in England, the 2011 winter solstice being 5.30 am on Thursday 22nd, and not the 21st as I had expected. Somehow I've lived this long under the assumption that the summer and winter solstices were always on the 21st of June and December respectively, but, it turns out, the solstices are moveable feasts, falling between the 20th and 23rd of the month.

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West Pier, Brighton © 2011 Mufidah Kassalias

Following yesterday’s post about Eastbourne Pier in which I mentioned the fires in 2003 that destroyed West Pier in Brighton, I thought a good follow-on post would be this image of the remains of West Pier. I took the photo on Christmas Day last year, after Sean and I decided on the spur of the moment to drive into Brighton for the afternoon. We walked along the beach for a while and then (another spontaneous decision) popped into Sushi Garden for an alternative Christmas dinner, concluding in the moment that we could cook our intended festive-inspired meal the following day. Post-udon noodles and genmaicha tea we walked back down to the beach to watch the sunset, at which point I took the above photograph (about 10 or 15 minutes before the sun fell below the horizon).

The four posts rising out of the sea in the foreground are what remain of the cast iron columns that formed the supporting structure of the pier, and the large skeletal structure is the internal frame of the concert hall that once graced the end of the pier. I’m not sure of the origins of the smaller piece of debris on the right. The concentrated dots of birds in the sky are mostly starlings, which every evening perform a magnificent, graceful dance before swooping into the pier to nest for the night.

In choosing this image I hummed and hawed between the original colour version (which itself was quite monochrome) and the sepia version, which I decided on in the end as I feel it echoes something of the pier in its heyday.