My ‘Brighton & Hove AM/PM’ photography project began in late September 2019. With no real plan for the project’s direction it grew steadily into a series of images, documenting one season drifting into the next.

I have lived close to the beach in Hove for just over four years and share an equally divided passion for both the sea and for the mountains. The rolling South Downs act as my ‘mountain range’. The sea is in complete contrast to the city of Brighton & Hove. The land buzzes with its manufactured sounds, sights and smells and the sea laps against it as it has done for centuries. However, unlike many other UK cities, it is possible to quickly escape the sensory overload with just a few paddle strokes in a southerly direction in a kayak.

The exploration side of the project began with my interest in the west pier. Opened in 1866, it was the first pier to be Grade I listed in Britain and a concert hall was added in 1916, which was extremely popular. A relic of times gone by, the west pier was formally closed in 1975 due to upkeep costs and fell into disrepair. Fire finally removed any hope of restoration in 2003. It has been gradually collapsing into the sea ever since. It now continues to watch over my Brighton neighbours do on, in or beside the water. The coast itself is an ever-changing seascape and so too are its visitors. Autumnal surfers, kite surfers, paddle boarders and wild swimmers out in at times questionable conditions.

As a diver, I often descend on and explore shipwrecks. I believe that my fascination with the Brighton west pier somehow derives from this interest. The west pier for me is almost the opposite of a shipwreck – perhaps a land wreck? All that’s left of it are its rusting, spiked remains draped in commercial fishing net, rope and a rough skin of barnacles at the water line. Slipping into the sea from the kayak here is momentarily eerie, though the feeling is quickly replaced by curiosity once my face is in the water, visibility permitting.

It’s a hazardous place to be. Underwater, mangled fragments lunge toward the surface, only breaking the water at low tide. Above, the pier is collapsing, with one winter storm after another slowly swallowing it down. Sea birds nest here too. Paddling through the pier’s remains in the kayak, the spooked birds take off, as fish often do when startled by my regulator exhaust bubbles during an exploratory dive on a shipwreck. I approached the intimidating structure tentatively on my first visit and was surprised to find such silence there, even with the city still in quite close proximity to it. Shooting from the kayak, with just a light breeze blowing across the water makes photography a frustrating exercise. The wind turns the my bow away from the pier, shunting the stern into wind, meaning that my subject always ended up behind me. This challenge led to the acquisition of dive housing for my camera, so on my second visit, I could get into the water to take my shots while tying the kayak off. I then began to explore beneath the pier – the water clarity was often quite good, and a habitat for fish amid the wreckage was revealed just below the surface.