i360 Ticket Booth

When the West Pier’s Victorian toll booths were designed by Eugenius Birch in 1866, they were far grander than any other pier’s entrance, square Italianate structures that charged tuppence for seaside strolls. One booth spent decades as the Rock Shop before being dismantled in 2012. Now painstakingly restored alongside a new twin, these pink-hued relics sell tickets not for walking on water, but for ascending 162 meters into the sky aboard the world’s most slender tower, conceived as a “vertical pier” to replace the horizontal one lost to fire in 2003.

The math is almost two tidy: a pier destroyed by two separate arson fires in the same spring, replaced by a tower guarded by the same two booths that once collected two pence from Victorians in top hats. Everything about the operation has changed except the entrance, which still charges admission and still expects you to look up before you go anywhere.