Kevin Dixon: Torquay's beautiful Italianate gardens

The transformation of the Bay began in the latter years of the eighteenth century when wealthy young men returned home from their Grand Tour.

They first enhanced their estates with replicas of the Renaissance wonders they had visited. When they could no longer venture abroad, they began to fashion a new Italy in an obscure bay on the Devon coast. After peace and prosperity returned to Europe that love of the Renaissance remained and an English Riviera slowly but surely emerged.

This was mainly evident in the Italianate, a phase in Classical architecture which was most popular between 1840 and 1885. It was yet another backward look, and part of the quest to associate a British health spa with the romance of another place and a far distant era.

We still have many local properties inspired by a peculiarly English interpretation of an Italian villa; with low-pitched roofs and overhanging eaves, further ornamented with porticos, columns and pediments. 

The style was easily adapted and could encompass spacious homes on sprawling properties for the resort’s wealthy, alongside great and small hotels, while also fitting into much smaller urban plots.

The surroundings of Torquay’s villas also needed to reinforce the exotic and faraway, so private and hotel gardens and then public spaces adopted the style of the giardino all'italiana, the Italian Garden.

The Italian Renaissance Garden emerged in the late fifteenth century and was inspired by classical ideals of order and beauty. The intention was to further the enjoyment of the sights, sounds and smells of the garden but also to fully exploit the view of the landscape beyond.

We can trace their unique appearance to the Italian Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), the inventor of the High Renaissance style of garden design. Leon drew upon what he learned of ancient Rome and advised that villas should be sited on hillsides to benefit from the climate and view.

The outcome was domestic and public buildings surrounded by open multi-level gardens; in sharp contrast with medieval hortus conclusus, the enclosed gardens of medieval Europe.

Before the 1840s there were no public parks in Britain. There were paved ‘walks’, pleasure gardens and private estate parks, but no areas that were open to all. Then came the Victorian conception of people’s parks, an alternative to drinking or gambling, where the public had the right to enter, exercise, promenade, and engage in healthy pursuits. 

As the British Empire expanded, so too did the fascination with exotic flora and elaborate garden designs. The Victorians were avid collectors, and Torquay’s parks were the showcase of the nation’s achievements, a display of affluence capturing the era’s fascination with elegance and progress.

Thus came an ongoing competition with other resorts to display rare plants and decorative features, so transforming our outdoor spaces into ornate living museums of wealth and status.

Following the Italian archetype, Torquay’s gardens were designed with geometric beds, balustrades adorned with urns, private spaces, and formal pathways. Such symmetry utilised squares and rectangles, laid out on several levels, or terraces, offering places to stand and view the garden from above.

A specific advantage of the Italianate that so suited Torquay was that our gardens and parks often needed to be designed for small spaces, steep slopes or were tasked with transforming the resort’s rugged cliffs. Indeed, Torquay’s unique selling point since its early days was the vista across the Bay and so a terraced garden had real benefits for both visitors and residents. This was the foundation of the resort’s abiding class divide: view or non-view.

Taking the opportunity to create multiple vantage points to an extreme we have the Royal Terrace Gardens. Always better known by locals as 'Rock Walk' the serpentine paths, steps, and wooden bridges opened in 1893.

Though much altered, here remains a fine belvedere, from the Italian for 'beautiful view', sited to take advantage of the elevation to admire the flower beds far below, the so-called parterre, and the Bay beyond.

When the ancient ruins of Pompeii and Hadrian’s Villa near Rome were uncovered in the sixteenth century, cascades, basins, canals and fountains were revealed. Seeing how integral water was to leisured Roman society, water features then became a focus of Italianate garden design, and thereafter a feature of the gardens of Torquay.

Likewise seeing the classical past as an ideal, in 1894 Torquay’s Princess Gardens installed a cast-iron and stone 3-tier fountain discharging into a round pool.  

In the 1870s Colonel Cary leased to the Council the field between the King’s Drive and the recreation ground in order for the scrubland to be made into a public park. This was originally named after the King’s consort as Alexandra Gardens, though later retitled King’s Gardens on 19 April 1904.

Here was constructed two connected concrete lakes, the largest being 400 feet long and 40 feet wide. Divided by a rustic bridge, the smaller lake originally contained two islands for ducks.

The larger lake, made accessible by a broad surrounding path, was a ‘Model Boating Pool’, a familiar pastime, relatively classless and popular across the resort’s social strata and the generations. How the resident fowl were meant to restrict themselves to their allotted territory beyond the bridge was never made plain.

Torquay’s parks have also inherited and incorporated other traditional features of country house gardens, albeit in idiosyncratic miniature.

During the eighteenth century no fashionable estate was considered complete without a grotto. These imitation caves, with their origins in ancient Greek and Roman shines, were revived in Renaissance Italy to lend an air of historical authenticity to neo-classical gardens. They caught the public imagination and swept across Europe; to a final destination as a micro-grotto on Rock Walk.

A further glance back at ancient history gave us the maze. Mazes can be found throughout the ancient world in a remarkably similar form; from the Bronze Age in Spain, to Ireland and India; from North Africa to the American Southwest. They were engineered so that it takes a long time to navigate, encouraging slow, meditative contemplation through many twists and turns.

The maze became a mainstay of British formal gardens and estates during the eighteenth century. However, even though their popularity had waned as ‘natural’ gardens became more popular by the conclusion of Victoria’s reign, in the 1920s Torquay still decided to fashion a miniature hybrid maze and sunken garden.   

Alongside the practical need to protect vulnerable plants from the elements, the maze supposedly encouraged contemplation, the convoluted layout encouraging visitors to think about the journey we all take through life. Yet, as the site was restricted in size, no-one could attain more than the very briefest of impression of being lost in a subtropical forest.

For over two hundred years Torquay’s public gardens have been meticulously crafted into formal arrangements to showcase the resort’s taste, intellect, engineering skills, and worldliness. 

Clever landscaping and lighting have transformed uninspiring small spaces into something enchanting, romantic and picturesque. On the other hand, we forget that the land was only borrowed from saltmarsh and sea and may return one day to nature as a consequence of climate change.

These gardens are meanwhile living art galleries, with each piece carefully chosen. Perhaps they do look back, rather than forward, to lost Empire, prosperity, and an investment in beauty in a time of certainty. Maybe tangible nostalgia isn’t a bad thing.

By moving through Torquay’s coastal parks we still enjoy a visual experience, but these public spaces also present a narrative of Torquay’s history while illustrating the resort’s singular character. Enjoy…