Time and Tide, a photographic exhibition of Britain's 54 pleasure piers, comes to Saltburn this wek. Steve Pratt reports.

AS soon as the summer holidays arrived, photographic artist and university lecturer Lawrence George Giles climbed in his car and drove round the country on a unique coastal tour. His was a seaside summer holiday of a different sort. He was a man on a mission to photograph every remaining pleasure pier, enduring but dying symbols of seaside trips in the days before package tours. The results of the three-year project form a different kind of end of the pier show that comes to Saltburn this week.

Fittingly, Time And Tide, Giles's photographic study of the 54 piers, is being mounted on the pier itself, with the panoramic pictures attached to the railings. So far, the exhibition has been seen on the promenades in Blackpool and Brighton. Salturn marks the first time it's actually been staged on a pier itself.

"As you go down the right hand side of the pier, the photographs are arranged as if you are walking down the east of the country. The left hand side features the west coast. At the end of the pier is Saltburn. So it's possible to go from coast to coast," says Giles, currently course leader for MA graphic design, art and design at Salford University.

His interest in the piers wasn't solely for their architectural importance but also to mark their position in social history as places of popular culture, leisure and social interaction.

"One of the key things is to highlight the significance of this part of our heritage, and to show our appreciation," he says. "Piers are very important architecturally but the main interest for me was the fact that I was taken to them as a child and one of the first things you do is collect things like pebbles and shells - collecting memories to revisit at a later date. That links with photographs. We take a picture to review at some later date. It shows a belief there will be a future time, and is still one of our most usual media to record our own memories."

His earliest seaside pier memories stem from childhood trips to Blackpool with his mother. Making Time And Tide involved photographing 54 piers and their surrounding environment, including many places he'd never visited before and a few he'd never even heard of. There are actually 55 piers but Southampton Royal was excluded as it's not open to the public. At the turn of the last century, almost 100 piers existed. Now only half remain and several face an uncertain future.

He started work on the project three years ago. "I saved all my annual leave and as soon as I was able to take my summer leave, I got into my car and didn't come back until I'd done as many piers as I possibly could," he says.

He felt the pier pressure of undertaking the project. "I tried to do all the piers in the first year and that was very stressful," he admits.

"Every site has its own uniqueness, although all the piers are inter-connected. Part of the beauty is that you carry out similar activities, but they're individual sites in their own right. Each seaside is the same as the next, but each pier is quite unique."

The exhibition is more than a straightforward pictorial essay of seaside piers. The 54 panoramas are made up of hundreds of photographs taken at each site over several hours and then "stitched" together to make up one panoramic picture. "With a 360 degree picture you take one photo, move the camera 20 degrees, and do that 18 times. All my panoramas are greater than 360. Not only does the landscape recur, but also the people, because they were taken over a period of time," he explains.

"I stayed in some places five hours and took in excess of 1,000 pictures. I chose sections and hand-stitched them together, so they're not full parts of the photograph. The light has changed and the cloud has moved. People are doing different things. On occasions, I may have got three-quarters of the way through stitching, found it impossible and started again."

This stitching took up the greatest amount of time - some 9,000 hours, he estimates. Some locations were easier to photograph than others because of the changing tides. "At Saltburn the tide does go out quite far so there was plenty of time to take pictures. But there were some places where the tide hardly moves whatsoever," he says. He was keen to display his pier show outdoors to engage a wider audience, including people who wouldn't normally dream of going to an art gallery. The first dates in Blackpool and Brighton offered a potential viewing audience of three million people.

Time And Tide will be displayed along seafronts and piers over the next two years. It moves to Southend after Saltburn, then goes into storage until next year, when more dates are planned.

Giles looked into the possibility of publishing the pier pictures in a book, only to find the cost was prohibitive. But he has set up a Time and Tide website. The Liverpudlian already has an idea for his next project - photographing the remaining racecourses, with the emphasis on National Hunt courses - in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

He intends to employ the panoramic format again but, with 85 courses, thinks this adds up to a five year project. "There's a real move to change the nature of our racecourses. It's another aspect of English heritage that we are going to lose," he says.

* Time And Tide opens to the public in Saltburn on Friday.