It all looked so promising. Hastings pier, fire-wrecked – seemingly doomed, like fellow structures around the seaside towns of Britain, to perpetual failure – was gloriously rescued. Public money joined forces with community enterprise in a pioneering and exemplary case of what David Cameron used to call the Big Society. The Heritage Lottery Fund put up £13m, and more than 3,000 individuals bought shares totalling £590,000. A handsome new deck and superstructure were installed, clear where it had previously been cluttered, described by its architects de Rijke Marsh Morgan as “a canvas where people bring the colour.” The 2017 Stirling prize, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects for the best building project of the year, went to the renovation.

It was a great open space, pregnant with possibility, on which temporary constructions could be built to serve whatever events – music, markets, parties – might be desired. At the same time it was uncrowded, a place to wander, breathe the sea air and take in the sweeping views of a town which, tatty at the edges, doesn’t know how beautiful it is. It was to be sociable – the “town square that Hastings doesn’t have”, as dRMM’s Alex de Rijke put it. The style of the architecture was plain, relying on the beauty of the deck’s bare boards, with a few playful twists. It aimed not to obstruct the experience of air, view and sea.

Then it went wrong. In the autumn of 2017 the Hastings Pier Charity that ran it were advised that, their financial losses being unsustainable, they should go into administration. The accountants Smith and Williamson were appointed administrators, with the task of finding the best buyer for the pier. A crowdfunded community-led bid raised £475,000, plus pledges of further investment, but to no avail. Then on the evening of Friday 15 June last year, it was announced that the pier, in which so much public money had been invested, had been sold for £60,000 to Abid Gulzar, a businessman who also owns the pier in nearby Eastbourne.

For a community asset to pass into private hands was, says Steve Wilkins, who worked first as a volunteer and then as a paid supervisor on the pier, like a bereavement. Doubts whether a private owner would safeguard the public interest were confirmed in late December, when Gulzar locked the pier’s gates, giving as a reason essential maintenance following some thefts and a small fire. At the time of writing the gates remain locked (“Valentine’s Day”, “March”, “Easter” and now “Mayday weekend” have variously been given as dates for their opening).

So dRMM’s open spaces currently look barren and deserted, with flags announcing “1066 Country” flying forlornly above the closed gates. There is a scattering of recent additions, such as an off-the-peg shed painted with pictures of ice-creams. Golden sculptures of animals – a lion, a hippopotamus – have appeared behind the gates. There is no rapport between the latest interventions and dRMM’s work.

Gold is a something of a signature for Gulzar. His Mercedes, the domes of Eastbourne pier, the pineapples and signs of his hotels in the same town and the hotels’ Ford MPV, are all painted gold. He wears plenty of gold on his fingers. He likes lions too, with multiple images of the beast appearing outside his Mansion (Lions) Hotel and Albany (Lions) Hotel, their eyes, claws and tail-tips picked out in gold. The golden hippo has tended to grab the headlines, as the stamp of a man variously described as flamboyant, brash, a character. He has bridled at these descriptions and at exaggerations of his wealth. The colour of his car is “just wallpaper, for God’s sake”, he has said. But he definitely has, to quote a judge before whom he appeared, “braggadocio”: the judge was “not amused” at his offer, “whether in jest or not, to give the HMRC officers a free stay in his hotels”. He calls himself “Sheikh” Gulzar, although he is not a sheikh (he says it’s a family name), just as his associate and PR consultant Lord Brett McLean is not a peer.

But the funny animals distract from the more serious question, which is Gulzar’s capability to own and run the pier. Part of his responsibility is stewardship and maintenance of a structure that, apart from all that public investment, is also a listed building and a major part of the town’s identity. Looking after piers is a demanding and expensive business. Yet, as the Hastings-based journalist Emma Harwood points out, two of Gulzar’s businesses went into liquidation in 2017, owing hundreds of thousands, including to the HMRC. There have been county court judgments against his companies for non-payment of debts. Much of this was knowable at the time of the sale. The mystery is why the pier should have been entrusted to a man with this record.

First, though, it’s worth asking why piers in general are so troublesome and troubled – for tales of burning, failing, closing piers, or of piers falling into questionable hands, or any news item enabling the headline “The End of the Pier Show”, have become part of the national story. There is the decades-long struggle to rescue the rusting remnants of the West Pier at Brighton, the dismantling of Colwyn Bay’s pier in 2018, the addition of Blackpool’s three piers to the World Monuments Watch list of buildings at risk, also in 2018. It’s also worth asking why Hastings in particular went wrong.

Peter Wheeler, chief engineer to Hastings pier until late last year, gives the short answer to the first question: “Nobody in their right mind would build a pier out of metal,” he says. Wind and waves continuously buffet them. Salt and water corrode their iron and steel. Sand and shingle, dragged back and forth by the sea, scour. From time to time exceptional storms wreak exceptional damage. “It is like an earthquake environment 24 hours a day,” says Wheeler. All of which makes maintenance expensive: “It’s like taking a wheelbarrow, filling it with cash and tipping it over the end.” Without stop.

On the other hand, as he also says, their very improbability “is what makes them so brilliant.” That piers are there at all is a triumph of fantasy over fact, one that Victorian entrepreneurs, in the heyday of British seaside resorts, were happy to exploit. They were sustained on the pennies of day-trippers and tourists; when the resorts declined so did the revenues necessary to withstand the assaults of the sea.

They kept their romance. In Hastings I’m told stories of couples who met on the pier, or who conceived their first child underneath it. They are part of the physiognomy of the towns that grew up alongside them, which no more want to lose their piers than you or I would want to lose our noses. So there is always a desire to save them, even in the direst circumstances, which comes with a tendency to underestimate the complexity, cost and scale of the technical challenges beneath the deck.

Hastings pier has a history that is both similar to others’ and particular to itself. It was opened in 1872, designed by the architect, engineer and pier-specialist Eugenius Birch. It caught fire (as the wooden superstructures of piers so often do) in 1917 but was restored and revived. In the 60s and 70s it was a memorable music venue, with Pink Floyd, the Who, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones giving concerts there. Like most seaside piers, however, its fabric entered a long postwar decline, its accretions of candyfloss stalls and gaming machines looking ever more weary and its structure suffering for lack of maintenance. In 2006 it was closed for being unsafe. In 2010 it caught fire again.

If that seemed like its darkest moment, the pier’s supporters didn’t give up. The Hastings Pier & White Rock Trust, set up before the fire to save it from what was already a parlous state, campaigned for a compulsory purchase from the structure’s offshore owners, Ravenclaw, which Hastings borough council enacted in 2013. Money was raised from the Heritage Lottery Fund, dRMM was selected through a process of competitive interviews, and in 2016 the reconstructed pier opened to the public. A new organisation, the Hastings Pier Charity, was to be responsible for running it.

The architects’ idea was to leave much of the deck open, rather than reinstate the “shanty town of commercialism” that the fire had swept away. “We were not proposing a definitive single use,” says dRMM’s Alex de Rijke now, “but welcoming any imaginative use that doesn’t do permanent damage to the structure.” It was a creative response to the practical fact that most of the money had to be spent on the structure and the deck, rather than buildings on top. Some locals questioned how so much could have been spent on something so plain, calling it “the plank”, but the dominant reaction – as the comments made by donors suggest – was positive. “My great delight,” says Wheeler, “is to see people at the end of the pier, reading a book or looking out to sea. The best thing is children running to look through the gaps in the planks, then lying on the deck to see the waves crashing on the structure underneath.”

There was, though, a crucial missing element, a canopy that would have sheltered events and attractions, part of a second phase that was never implemented. A storm during the construction works, which caused £1m of damage, made it less likely that the funds would be found to build it. In its absence the pier’s programme would be hostage to the weather – a 90s festival held in September 2017, for example, lost two of its three days to storms. It’s possible that the Hastings Pier Charity’s business plan was optimistic in other ways. In any case the process of administration, which would end in the sale to Gulzar, started. It was announced barely three weeks after the pier had won the Stirling prize.

The Heritage Lottery Fund, as the main creditor, had a charge on the pier, which would be released by its sale. It meant that where possible the process of administration should serve their interests. The HLF provided funds to keep the pier going for – it was hoped at the time – the whole of 2018, until a good solution could be found. Their “top priority” from the sale, as they now put it, “has always been to see the pier protected and continuing to make a significant contribution to the town’s prosperity and culture.”

Smith and Williamson later announced that bids had to be received by April 2018. A new community group, Friends of Hastings Pier, scrambled to put together a bid, raising most of its £500,000 target in a few weeks. With the creative input of Adam Wide, a tourism and entertainments consultant who had worked on the revitalisation of Cromer and Bournemouth piers, they proposed an array of activities running from climbing walls and a “driftwood carousel” to a money-earning “entertainment hub”.

There was a further potential bidder, Boxpark, creator of pop-up centres for shopping and events in London, which was ready to invest £10m. Boxpark told the administrators that it required six weeks to carry out due diligence – to find out if there were any horrors in the structure that might wreck its scheme. “We don’t know a serious property company that would not do this,” says Boxpark’s CEO Roger Wade. It reduced by half the three months it usually takes to do such work, knowing there was pressure to make a decision, but it was still too long for the administrators, so Boxpark made no bid.

On Friday 15 June last year a story was going round that a sale had been made. The Friends of Hastings Pier had submitted a £1 offer, on the understanding that the objective was the long-term viability of the structure. During the day Jess Steele, one of the pier’s principal champions over the last decade, heard rumours that Gulzar had submitted an offer of £30,000, so the Friends raised theirs to £55,000, but received no response. “We only found out for certain the amount of Gulzar’s bid,” she tells me, “months later from the Land Registry.”

At 9.30pm the sale was announced. The pier’s staff, who had been anxiously awaiting the outcome all day, were still gathered there when the new owner arrived. They received no words of encouragement or support, says the former supervisor Steve Wilkins. Gulzar apparently asked them why they weren’t smiling and why they looked so scruffy. Many resigned soon after. Wilkins lasted three days before resigning. On his first day, he says, Gulzar “completely ignored” him.

The Friends of Hastings Pier and other residents say that they were prepared to work with Gulzar on making it a success and are indeed still encouraging him to be open and collaborative with the local community. They say that they are trying to make their point calmly. In January, 250 people attended a “peaceful march”. Then the local MP Amber Rudd, who has described “how passionately we feel about needing it reopened”, held a “summit” with Gulzar, representatives of the Friends, and the leader of the council, Peter Chowney. Gulzar made promises at this summit about reopening in March and keeping the public informed, but he was less conciliatory on other occasions. He has accused pier campaigners of “wanting something for free”. BBC TV’s The One Show staged a discussion between Gulzar and James Chang, one of the Friends, which had to be edited for the pre-watershed audience. “Those were the bits we could show,” said the presenter. “It got really, really heated. Mr Gulzar was not happy.”

Meanwhile, he applied retrospectively for planning permission for the ice-cream shed. Debbie Grant, who ran the pier’s former restaurant, has won a court order against him for money he owes her. Wheeler and the assistant engineers who oversaw the wellbeing of the pier’s structure resigned, saying that their jobs had been made impossible. They are suing for constructive dismissal. There is continuing bad news about Gulzar’s business affairs. As Emma Harwood reported recently in the Hastings Independent, he has been fined thousands of pounds for “trading illegally”, as the HMRC’s Fraud Investigation Service put it.

At stake is, in part, a divergence of views about ownership. Gulzar hasn’t responded to several requests to interview him for this article, but he has made it clear to previous questioners that the pier is his personal property and it’s his business what he does with it. He put such thinking into practice on Eastbourne pier, where he ejected anglers from their long-established perch there. Objectors say that, given the public investment in the pier, and its long history of public use, it should not be closed unless absolutely necessary. Rudd now says that “it is unacceptable if the pier remains closed indefinitely and I cannot support any scenario where this is the case”.

There are also different ideas as to what a pier should be. If it was fundamental to the dRMM concept that the pier should be free of the usual seaside honky-tonk, of amusement arcades and slot-machines, Gulzar appears to abhor the void so created. The ice-cream shed and gold animals look like steps backwards towards the cluttered environment that the new Hastings pier was meant not to be.

Following the news that Hastings Pier will remain closed past March, I update residents in my open letter below pic.twitter.com/WXM7C1nzwJ

— Amber Rudd MP (@AmberRuddHR) March 21, 2019

The main question, though, is whether he can meet his responsibility to take good care of the historic and public asset in his charge. According to Adam Wide, the administrators made it clear that the “single most important thing is [to have] an operator with deep pockets able to sustain two years’ losses, which we estimate to be £600-800k per year.” Gulzar’s erratic business history is not, in that respect, encouraging.

Nor is a visit to his Eastbourne hotels, which look tatty beneath their layers of lions and gold, nor one to their user reviews on TripAdvisor. They rank 35th and 36th out of 41 listed for the town, even though their average score is pushed up by a number of five-star ratings. Some of the one- and two-star reviews are specific: “regretfully all is let down by naff maintenance eg the wire hanging round the door frame, held in place or actually not held in place by a nail a staple would be good… Walk along the corridor to see cupboards held closed by the cheapest black iron hasps and padlocks. FINESSE is not a word that appears in the vocabulary.”…”. The most consistent complaints relate to the upkeep of the building which, given that good maintenance is the pier’s single greatest need, does not bode well for the future.

We do not know whether Gulzar carried out the due diligence that Boxpark proposed. There is no publicly available plan of what he intends to do and how he will fund it. His financial mishaps raise some doubt as to whether he has the means to sustain and invest in the pier. In March 2018, during the bidding process, the credit rating of his Eastbourne pier company was 9, which means “very high risk”. Yet Smith and Williamson stated that he had “demonstrated the best immediate financial capability as well as the operational capacity and experience, including from running Eastbourne pier.”

Hastings borough council, as they didn’t own the pier, were largely bystanders in the process, although Roger Wade says they were “very supportive” of Boxpark’s efforts to make a bid. A spokeswoman says that “we want it to be a successful operation which is attractive to residents and visitors, and provides jobs, ideally full time permanent ones.” Their position on the choice of owner is “neutral” and they knew nothing about the likely outcome until very late in the process. “It was 100% the administrators’ decision,” she says.

As for the Heritage Lottery Fund, they now tell me that “it was a matter of following the legal administration process. The final decision on the transfer of the pier lies with the administrator.” It became clear, they also say, “that the costs and losses were more than projected and a decision had to be taken earlier than the full 12 months” that they had originally intended. They say that is was “not possible to fund the administration indefinitely”.

It’s understandable, given the failure of the initial community-led initiative, that the administrators and the fund might look askance at another, even though that would have been in the spirit of the original investment. But there is nothing in the public record to suggest that Gulzar is a safer pair of hands, or that he has the greater resources and expertise. His tenure of Eastbourne pier, for less than three years at the time of the sale, hardly seems conclusive in this respect. There was a highly credible contender in the form of Boxpark, whose resources and track record appear to greatly outmatch Gulzar’s. The company was disqualified by its professional desire for due diligence. For the sake of six weeks, in a project that has taken many years, whose benefits could last for decades, the most convincing bid was ruled out.

The administrators, says Boxpark’s Roger Wade, were “extremely unhelpful. You’re not selling a corner shop. It’s Hastings pier, a Stirling prize winner, yet they seemed hell-bent on pushing one buyer. The people of Hastings have been let down.” Adam Wide says: “I’m not in the biggest paddy that we [Friends of Hastings Pier] didn’t get the gig. What I’m really angry about is the lack of transparency. We didn’t feel it was a level playing field. And this was an asset put back together by the blood, sweat, tears and love of the community. That’s the tragedy.” Even Gulzar called the process “a shambles”.

Smith and Williamson, who are being paid a minimum of £260,000 for their services, now say that “the administrators were required to select the bidder which offered the highest price for the pier”. This statement, although they also mention the importance of “a proven track record”, “least risk” and “future sustainability”, implies that the relatively trivial sum of £60,000 plus extras was a more important consideration than long-term viability. The process “ensured a level playing field for all bidders and all interested parties had over six months to work on their proposals.” They add that “we were unable to delay the closing of the sale process any further than 15 June 2018 as this would have made the business less attractive to purchasers by reducing the beneficial amount of the core trading summer season… Any further delay in the sale would also have increased the significant costs of the administration, and potentially frustrated and jeopardised the existing bids.”

In this account the current state of Hastings pier is the outcome of inexorable financial forces. Certainly the HLF and the administrators were put in a difficult position by the rapid failure of the previous set-up. But it is hard to believe that the pier’s current plight is the best possible outcome for the goodwill and public money invested in this exceptional structure.

Beyond the particularities of Hastings, the tale of its pier has wider lessons. For all the warm words and wishful thinking about community initiatives, it is extraordinarily tough to make them work at this scale. They need and deserve help. The sale of Hastings pier is at best a case of the sudden imposition of commercial imperatives on a project that until then had been based on an idea of the common good. The Heritage Lottery Fund could not, of course, have made a bottomless commitment to the pier, but, for the want of a million or two in ongoing support, the aims of their much larger investment have been put in peril.