Gamble on a near-ruin pays off after 15 years

Looking for an unusual investment? Why not buy a dilapidated seaside pier? Sound crazy? One man did, and at last his investment looks like a winner. Chris Arnot meets a property pioneer who took on the elements and won

When a big chunk of Brighton's beleaguered West Pier fell into the English Channel last month, it was no great surprise. In winter, seaside piers, of which the UK has far the biggest concentration, are bleak and windswept structures, relentlessly pounded by corrosive salt water.

Little wonder that Brighton's Grade I-listed second pier which had had little or no maintenance for years, despite the offer of £14m of lottery money, gave up the ghost of its central section. Long ago reduced to a skeletal blot on the skyline, its future is in doubt, with various restoration projects having been stifled by infighting between residents and business interests. But on the Suffolk coast, another pier is enjoying a far happier ending, thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of one man.

Since 1987, Chris Iredale, has transformed Southwold Pier from a rotting hulk into the National Piers Society Pier of the Year. And he's done it with no lottery funding – a small grant from one of many European community funds was the only public money he managed to attract.

Having borrowed a small fortune, Mr Iredale knows he's going to have to keep forking out to maintain his investment against the ravages of the sea. Wood shrinks in salt water and at the end of the summer season, every nut on the entire pier has to be tightened. This year, maintenance men had to abandon work on more than one occasion and return when tides had receded. Southwold may be what Mr Iredale calls "the Hampstead Heath of Suffolk" – where three-bedroomed terraces go for £385,000, five-bedroomed houses (without a sea view) for £650,000, and even beach-huts fetch £50,000 leasehold – but this genteel town fronts on to a harsh coastal environment. This part of the country is prone to extreme sea erosion; a little further down the coast is Dunwich, an historic village which has been largely reclaimed by the sea.

A Londoner, Mr Iredale moved to East Anglia 25 years ago. He sold his house in Harrow for £11,000 and bought an equivalent three-bedroomed semi in Beccles, Suffolk for £8,950. He now lives with wife Helen in a four-bedroomed detached house at Reydon, outside Southwold. They are seeing rather more of it now than they did in the summer when they would arrive at the pier at seven in the morning and rarely leave before 10.30 at night. And Mr Iredale has more time to spend at their wholesale seaside gifts and souvenir business. Without that, he says, he would never have been able to raise the capital to buy the pier pavilion.

He is coy about revealing what he paid for the pier. "All I know is that it took five years to turn the pavilion into a profit-making business." During that time, he brooded about what to do with the rest of the dilapidated structure. Like many a British pier, Southwold had been damaged during the Second World War and pounded by countless storms. Some 810ft of wood and iron had been reduced to little more than a stump.

At 54, Mr Iredale is quietly spoken and slightly diffident. He is a self-confessed "pier anorak" who still remembers his visit to the world's biggest, Southend, when he was just 10. Southwold is as different from Southend as Hampstead Heath from Bethnal Green, and the Iredales had no corporate money behind them. The dream was abandoned for many years because of the difficulty of attracting investment in a such a structure.

It took 10 years after he had brought the pier until Mr Iredale saw a way of putting the backbone back into it. He discovered that a business colleague at Walton-on-the-Naze Pier in Essex was replacing corroded pillars with reinforced steel piles of massive diameter. Using the same technique at Southwold would surely make it a more attractive long-term proposition. All he had to do was persuade an architect, site manager, councillors, civil servants, crown estate commissioners and bank manager it could be done.

As the scale of the project grew, so did the size of his loan. "It started off at around £300,000 and soon turned into £1.5m," he says ruefully. Thankfully, crowds flocked to the pier during the summer in greater numbers than he could have anticipated. The café, bar, function room and fitness centre are now open in the winter, and the highly original amusement machines are accessible at weekends and during school holidays. And no one could have predicted the recent extraordinary upward mobility of the town's property market. At the local Adnams estate agent, sales manager Sonia Moore, says: "Compared to nearby Aldeburgh, Oulton or Great Yarmouth, prices are amazing. Southwold attracts the London person looking for a second home and over the past five years, there have been a few City bankers looking for somewhere to spend their million-pound bonuses."

Buyers and weekend property-watchers come in their droves, attracted by the ease of access via the M11 and A14 roads, the town's unspoilt charms, its good restaurants, and Southwold's trendy image.

"I bought the pier as a challenge, expecting to pay off the loan at some time," Mr Iredale says. "But it's been more popular than we anticipated." The implication is that he might be free of debt sooner than he expected. What he is not prepared to do is to skimp on maintenance. The paintwork must continue to gleam and the decking remain rock solid (the image of pier-goers plunging into the sea through rotten boards does not bear thinking about, particularly in winter).

He does not know what the pier is worth and has no intention of selling it anyway. Does he ever have a chance to enjoy the fruits of his investment?

"Yes," he says. "In the early morning when it's nice and quiet on here." Then he takes a few minutes to look back across the foreshore, past the £50,000 beach huts, to where so many fellow Londoners have spent so much on property. His own investment in Southwold has at least provided pleasure for others as well as quiet satisfaction for himself.