On Brighton sea front, just by the burnt-out wreck of the West Pier, there’s a photography exhibition. It’s actually ON the front: each picture, in its frame, is attached to the railings of the esplanade as you look out to sea. It’s called TIME AND TIDE, a slightly lame name for a really evocative idea, consisting of a long line of wide-lens photos of every one of the remaining 54 piers in resorts round the coast of England. Each photo is about 6 inches high by four feet long: each a 180′ panoramic shot taken on a sunny day with clouds and semi-empty but not unpeopled beaches, of the pier in question, looking back from waves-edge into the sea-facing section of the town. The pictures are lovely – with the sense of lens-distortion they look like scenes from one of those dreams you always want to remember better than you actually can – and so’s the project and the setting: there was a biting wind as evening fell today, but we stayed poring over them until it was too dark to look at them any longer. There was a wordy blurb with them, complete with credits, but none of us had a notebook to take down the name of the photographer, or where else it might be shown, or for how long, and there doesn’t seem to be a website. It’s a brisk walk from the main, still functional and bustling pier, but it’s definitely worth it.