Torquay’s The Strand: Secrets and stories from the heart of the harbour

The Strand is Torquay’s tourism centre and the heart of the resort.

Here we find the transport hub, churches, hotels, department stores, pubs, clubs, the grease and glitz of the arcades, and the still magnificent monuments to a past greatness. All clustered around the Inner Harbour and to a background of the unceasing rise and fall of businesses chasing the tourist shilling. In the interstices, always the lost and the lonely.

We know what was here before from ancient names, the Old English flēot, ‘tidal inlet’ which gives us Fleet, while Strand comes from ‘shore or beach.’  This isn’t the first of our harbours. That was over in Livermead, remnants which can still be glimpsed at low tide.

Torquay harbour’s timeline begins with the Inner Harbour of 1803 to 1815; the enlargement of the Strand and slipway in the 1860s; the construction of Haldon Pier between 1867 and 1870; and the Princess Pier and the new gardens on reclaimed land in 1895.

The resort was founded to meet the demand for a substitute Mediterranean Riviera and to access sea cures for everything from melancholy to tuberculosis. In 1840 Dr Granville observed, “The Strand is filled with respirator-bearing people who look like muzzled ghosts”. Hence, the later adoption of the Latin motto, Salus et Felicitas, meaning ‘Health and Happiness’. Or more cynically, “a town for the newly wed; and the nearly dead.”

Getting to and around early Torquay was expensive and time consuming. But in 1840 construction of the coastal Torbay Road began, avoiding the long inland journey to Paignton. However, the real revolution in the town’s fortunes came in 1848 with the coming of the railway.

From a population of 800 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by its end Torquay had 33,000 residents. The tourism industry transformed the lives of locals while incomers were tempted with the promise of employment and accommodation. This was especially the case with women who have always outnumbered men. In 1881 the resort had a population of 19,000 females but only 14,000 males. In 1939 the disparity had widened: 20,000 males to 32,000 females.

Developing resorts was expensive and so the hoped-for visitors were those with substantial incomes. The nation was consequently scoured for the best ways to satisfy the appetite for elite leisure; for theatregoing, bathing, yachting, and promenading. Through careful gatekeeping and promotion Torquay then became the richest town in England, its prime showcase being the Strand.

In time came grand constructions, including hotels, the Mallock clock, the Pavilion, and the Scala, making the harbourside a monument to an Empire at play but also a crucible of artistic and cultural innovation.

There was romance to be found at the Strand and along the promenade. For the aristocracy and middle-classes the seaside was a place to meet eligible marriage partners. For all, it was an arena for flirtation with the possibility of sexual encounters. What happened in Torquay, stayed in Torquay.

Since its early days the Strand has been a place of possibilities for tourists and the indigenous young, an optimism at times fuelled by caffeine, drugs or drink. We forget how once the pubs and clubs were famed throughout the nation. Some names still resonate; the 400, Macaris and, of course, The Yacht. In July 1976 we read of that legendary hostelry,

“It’s the height of the summer season in Torquay and lads from all over Britain are bevying it up in the long dark music bar. The girls are with them, indistinguishable with their long hair hanging over sweatshirts and faded jeans. This is Torquay’s most notorious public house which attracts the wild, the youthful and the unemployed. At a time of year when Torquay is one of the ‘in’ towns in the country, the Yacht is the ‘innest’ place of all.”

On the other hand, although resort towns cultivated a carefree image, they have long been environments of instability and tension; microcosms of an evolving society, experiencing the backwash of industrialism, science, consumerism, and modernity.

Away from the harbour such disputes played out in the Council Chamber. While national party politics only came to local government after the Second World War, interest groups had long formed amongst councillors, indicating fault lines in the town that continue to this day. On one side, factions coalesced around the holiday industry and businesses: on the other, residents and the retired. Much of this debate focussed on the Strand’s character and purpose.

The Strand accordingly was always a crucible of social change. The coming of rock and roll in the 1950s, for instance, was only the beginning of the creation of new kinds of youth culture. Rising incomes gave the young unprecedented buying power and the ability to travel. From May 1964 onwards, beginning with mods and rockers, bank holidays had the potential for trouble. 

The Easter weekend of 1970 saw a car rolled into the harbour and boats damaged. It was reported that, "During last Sunday's rampage by Hells Angels and Skinheads, a crowd of 200 on Torquay seafront scuffled with police - and a Newton Abbot man trying to telephone an ambulance was dragged out and beaten". Football-related hooliganism also became a regular feature of the troubled late twentieth century.

Those decades also saw air travel and the package holiday causing a decline in Torquay’s popularity. The tourist base contracted, the season shortened, the visiting clientele changed, and investment diminished. The outcome was more unemployment and a polarisation of wealth and poverty. Some found the out-of-season town a particularly harsh place as they confronted the realities of irregular employment and lack of opportunity; by October even the calm and tranquil sea was agitated and frightening.

Reflecting both economic and social change are the harbourside’s churches and chapels. All Torquay was a landscape of faith and the Strand a stage for largely amicable rivalries between the established church and upstart non-conformists. Here can still be seen the importance of two centuries of Christian belief, but also its inexorable corrasion. As early as 1867 poet Matthew Arnold was mourning the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar “of the Sea of Faith.  

In 1823 St John the Evangelist was the growing town’s first Anglican Church since the medieval period. It dominated the harbour, proclaiming Anglican hegemony, and in 1887 affluent parishioners commissioned two huge mural paintings. However, over time church income decreased and to pay for a new roof the paintings were sold to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1989. They are now in Pittsburgh's Museum, far from their intended setting and part of the asset stripping of Torquay’s cultural heritage.

Reflecting an even greater diminution is Holy Trinity Church. Built in 1895, Holy Trinity was deconsecrated in 1975 and is now a private home.

The demands of the tourism industry required that the harbourside be forever remodelled in a process of ceaseless tearing down and replacement. Gone are the Parkhill Road villas while idiosyncratic nineteenth century streets were swept away in the late 1980s to create the Fleet Walk complex. But the new, stylish, and chic soon becomes anachronistic leaving lingering regrets for what once was.

And there could be no greater metaphor for the striving for modernity and its inevitable obsolescence than at Beacon Quay where the Victorian Marine Spa was replaced by the brutalism of Coral Island, to lie derelict for near a decade. Then came Living Coasts…

For over two centuries the Strand has been the focus of Torquay’s many and conflicting identities. Those debates and disagreements continue: to stay upmarket or cater for mass tourism; to innovate or conserve; where to draw the line between individual freedom and irresponsibility; definitions of entertainment and exploitation; and disputes over what to build, where to build… and for who.

And now all under the impassive and perpetual gaze of Auntie Agatha.