Britannia Pier
pier with a theatre in Great Yarmouth, England

Britannia Pier is a pier located at the seaside town of Great Yarmouth in the English county of Norfolk.
History
Planning and construction
A new pier in Great Yarmouth was first proposed in 1856. It was authorised by the Great Yarmouth Britannia Pier Act 1857 (20 & 21 Vict. c. xxviii), with building work commencing in September 1857 with engineer, surveyor and antiquary Alfred William Morant (1828–81) as the designer. A. W. Morant went on to become City Surveyor for Norwich.
Original pier
The completed pier opened on 13 July 1858 at cost of £6,000 and was originally 700 feet long but this length was reduced by about 80 feet in 1859 when the sloop James and Jessie collided with the structure during the Royal Charter Storm. The length was again reduced as the result of storm damage in 1868. The pier was demolished in 1899.
New pier
The building of a new pier was autorised by the Great Yarmouth New Britannia Pier Act 1899 (62 & 63 Vict.
“Britannia Pier” enters the record as pier with a theatre in Great Yarmouth, England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Britannia, Pier and pier can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Britannia Pier” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Britannia, Pier and pier provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q45843906. Authority coordinates are 52.608, 1.740. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1856, 1857, 1828 and 1858.
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This entry incorporates text from “Britannia Pier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.