Walk to the end of New Brighton Pier on most days and you will find someone fishing over the railing, rain or shine. At 300 metres it is the longest ocean pier in Australasia, built in reinforced concrete back in 1997 after locals spent close to three decades raising the money to replace the timber pier that had stood on the same spot before it.
That first pier opened in 1894, ran out to 210 metres, and lasted until 1965, when the council pulled it down in under five hours because the timber had rotted through. The current pier has needed its own repairs since: the 2011 Christchurch earthquake left cracks and settling that took until 2018 to put right, a job that ran 16 months and cost 8.5 million dollars.
It is free to walk, day or night, with no gate and no ticket booth. Parking is easy along Marine Parade or in the New Brighton Mall car park just back from the beach. Fishing off the end is a local habit, red-billed gulls treat the railings as their own, and because the pier faces straight out to the Pacific, it is one of the better spots in the city to catch the sun coming up over the water.
A tsunami gauge sits partway along, quietly doing its job since 2021. Turn up on Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, and you will get fireworks over the water as part of the city’s main display.
Photos: Benchill, Michal Klajban (x2), Bernard Spragg.NZ, via Wikimedia Commons.
