Kevin Dixon: The goths of Torbay

What’s the connection between: Berry Pomeroy Castle and Black Sabbath; Torre Conservative Club and Mary Shelley; Castle Circus and Oscar Wilde; and Hele Cemetery and Siouxsie and the Banshees?

They’re all associated with a style of art and architecture, and a liking for the supernatural, that can be defined as Gothic. All around us are remnants of our Gothic past alongside a subculture that endures today.

Indeed, the Gothic is a true Torbay tradition.

The term ‘Gothic’ originates from the ancient Germanic tribe, the Goths, enemies of the Roman Empire. They had a reputation for being barbaric and later a form of architecture was named after them as an insult. 

Then the term became linked to a style of dark literature through Horace Walpole's influential 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, probably because of the book's medieval setting.

That book began a literary genre characterised by supernatural events and the intrusion of the past upon the present. Typical Gothic locations are ancient buildings with plots featuring vengeance, imprisonment, and murder. Those novels have left us with conventions that are common features of today’s popular culture.

The emergence of Gothic fiction during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be seen as a reaction to bewildering changes brought by industrialisation, technology, urbanisation and new ways of living. We can see this other side to the daylight of the rational in an outpouring of literature exploring the uncanny.

There was certainly an appetite for supernatural thrills, mystery, and romance in the rapidly expanding new resorts of Torquay and Paignton. Furthermore, many of the great writers on the macabre and mysterious over the past 200 years have had associations with the Bay.

To take a selection we have: Mary Shelley (Frankenstein); Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde); Edward Bulwer-Lytton (The Haunters and the Haunted); Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol); Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes); TS Eliot (The Waste Land); Rudyard Kipling (Tales of Horror); Oscar Wilde (Dorian Gray); Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White); Henry James (The Figure in the Carpet); James Joyce (The Dead); and Brian Lumley (Necroscope). All lived in or visited Torquay.

The Gothic created an affection for special places and became part of our tourism offer. Visitors wanted to further explore their fascination with the books they were reading and, by good fortune, close enough for day trips stood the dramatically ruined Berry Pomeroy Castle.

The castle’s reputation was established by Edward Montague in his 1806 novel ‘The Castle of Berry Pomeroy’ which told a Gothic tale of horror, jealousy, and revenge. It didn’t matter that much, then and now, that the stories told about the castle were largely based on Edward’s inventive fiction.

Continuing Gothic themes into the twentieth century and beyond we have horror cinema, including the classic 1930s Universal Monsters films, Hammer Horror movies, Roger Corman's Poe cycle, and in 2025 new versions of Nosferatu and Frankenstein.

Gothic fiction is also closely associated with local Victorian Gothic Revival architecture.

Beginning in the late 1840s, the style drew its inspiration from the pre-industrial rural landscape which it utilised for its picturesque and romantic characteristics. Torquay prided itself as having both these qualities.

But the Gothic Revival was more than mere fashion. As with Gothic literature, this was also a reaction to change; to machine production and the filth and poverty it brought. In response high church Anglicans adopted medieval imagery in their new churches. It was effectively a look back in envy, and the approach moved from the ecclesiastical to the domestic and secular. The Gothic villa was then surely a fitting architecture for a resort marketing itself in order to attract the retiring affluent urbanite.

One advantage of the Gothic was that it could be adapted. It could create Furze Hill’s great crenellated (battlement-like) Gothic ‘Castle’ which gave Castle Circus its name. On the other hand, it could mean little more than pointed window frames and mock medieval decorations on terraced houses. Note the Gothic windows in Belgrave Road and the dragon finials on the rooftops of Union Street.

The Gothic also made a political statement as it became associated with conservatism. The best illustration of this is the old Torre Conservative Club, a building designed to promote ideas of inherited authority and paternalism. But the Gothic also represented liberty, individualism and the commercial world. By the 1870s, inspired by the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, the Gothic had become synonymous with civic identity.

The other side to the reactionary messaging of Gothic architecture is the modern and subversive Goth movement, a dark subculture of distinctive fashions and art forms.

Much of present-day Goth imagery and fashion originated from Victorian practices relating to mortality. Death was commonplace in the nineteenth century, with three of every twenty babies not surviving, and those who did having a life expectancy of only forty-two years.

The elaborate Victorian treatment of the passing of life has been called a cult of death. We can see this in the icons, rituals and dress codes that were contrived to publicly express grief and to honour the recently departed.

Yet, while mourning dictated that the entire household dress in black, grieving was mostly focused on the widow. This followed the example of Queen Victoria's reaction to the death of Prince Albert in 1861. It was expected that a widow would never leave her home without full black attire, called widow’s weeds, and a weeping veil for the first full year. Her social agenda was church related only.

The Gothic then developed during a time when women’s lives were constricted by rigid societal rules and obligations. Women had had no place of authority and no positions of power in the church. They did, however, take a central role in the conventions of grieving and this influenced the evolution of the Gothic. Notably, women have always been prominent in the Gothic milieu as writers, mediums, artists and musicians.

Then there were the great Victorian garden cemeteries. So we have Torquay’s vast walled necropolis, displaying the wealth and predilections of the town’s status-conscious departed and their families.

Victoria’s bereavement likewise made the practice of communicating with the dead socially acceptable. It was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Spiritualism, tarot cards, Ouija boards, spirit photography and psychic shops were introduced to the Bay.

Prosperous and sensation-seeking Torquay subsequently became a centre of Spiritualist activity and welcomed its notable advocates to town. In 1920, for instance, the Sherlock Holmes’ author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave a lecture at Torquay Town Hall entitled ‘Death and the Hereafter’ proclaiming his firm belief that an unearthly world existed, and that contact with the departed could be achieved.

Torbay’s Gothic subculture continues into the twenty-first century. During the late 1970s emerged the Goth. Influenced by the Victorian cult of death, a typical fashion choice often involves black. The style draws from Gothic literature and horror films, alongside Celtic, Christian, Egyptian, and Pagan mythologies.  As for faith and belief, across Torbay there appears to be a degree of overlap between our 400 Pagan residents and Goth culture.

Every tribe has its own soundtrack, and Goth has a musical aesthetic that embraces darkness, melancholy, and the avant-garde as it explores themes society may prefer to ignore or censor.

In 1970 Black Sabbath’s debut album created a new dark sound and was called the first-ever ‘goth-rock’ record; Sabbath played Torquay Town Hall on 29 July 1970. Later bands include Bauhaus, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees; the latter played the Town Hall on 29 July 1981. Gothic themes are still to be found amongst local bands and musicians.

The Gothic has played a formative role in our Bay. All around are remnants and reminders of how the genre influenced building styles, attitudes, tourism, entertainment, and our fashion choices. The Gothic is still with us as a true Torbay tradition.