Town in Devon, England
Torquay
Torquay has palm trees, a prehistoric jawbone, Agatha Christie's birthplace and the site of the hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers. Quite a lot for one Devon bay.
Key information
- County
- Devon
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 65,000 (2011 Census)
- Known for
- The English Riviera, palm trees, Agatha Christie, Fawlty Towers, Kents Cavern
- Famous people
- Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling (lived nearby), Donald Sinclair (hotelier behind Basil Fawlty)
- Football clubs
- Torquay United (the Gulls), Plainmoor
About Torquay
The jawbone that beat the pyramids by 40,000 years
Long before anyone sold ice cream on Torquay seafront, someone was sheltering in the caves above it. In Kents Cavern, a fragment of upper jaw was found in 1927 and later dated to roughly 44,000 years ago. It's among the oldest remains of modern humans found in north-west Europe. The cave system had already thrilled the Victorians. The geologist William Pengelly led painstaking excavations there in the 1860s and 1870s, digging out the bones of ancient animals, including cave bears and sabre-toothed cats, alongside human tools. The caves are still open to visitors, so you can stand where Ice Age people once kept out of the weather.
How a naval anchorage became a posh resort
Torquay's name comes from a tor (a rocky hill) and a quay. For centuries it was little more than a few fishermen's cottages near Torre Abbey, which was founded in 1196 by Premonstratensian canons. The turning point was war with France. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy's Channel Fleet sheltered in Torbay, and officers' families rented rooms ashore to be near them. In July 1815, Napoleon himself sat in the bay aboard HMS Bellerophon, and crowds in small boats went out to catch a glimpse. He never set foot ashore. The mild climate did the rest. Wealthy Victorians came for their health, landowning families such as the Palks and the Carys laid out grand villas on the hills, and the railway arrived in the 1840s. Torquay was soon being sold as a Mediterranean-style winter retreat.
Why a Devon town is full of palm trees
Torquay's nickname, the English Riviera, is not just marketing. Sheltered by hills and facing a sunny bay, the town grows palms along its seafront and in its gardens. Those palm trees became the symbol of Torquay and still appear on its promenade postcards. The seafront has an Edwardian feel. The copper-domed Pavilion opened in 1912, and the Princess Pier stretches into the bay. Just along the coast, Babbacombe has a cliff railway and a model village, opened in 1963, that has been shrinking England into one-twelfth scale ever since. The English Riviera joined the Global Geoparks Network in 2007 and became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2015.
Murder, Monty Python and Basil Fawlty
Agatha Christie was born in Torquay in 1890, at a villa called Ashfield, and grew up roaming the town. She later said that the town shaped her imagination, and it shows up in her stories. Today the Agatha Christie Mile is a waymarked trail through places that meant something to her, including Torre Abbey, which has a garden with poisonous plants that she knew well. Then there is Fawlty Towers. In 1970, the Monty Python team stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming. John Cleese was struck by the hotelier, Donald Sinclair, whose famously rude and chaotic manner helped inspire Basil Fawlty. The sitcom, first broadcast in 1975, turned the English seaside hotel into a national joke. The hotel itself closed in 2015 and was demolished in 2016. Rudyard Kipling also spent time here, living at Rock House in nearby Maidencombe in the mid-1890s.
Sailing, Gulls and Plainmoor
Torbay's calm waters hosted the Olympic sailing events at the 1948 London Games, a reminder that this bay has always been about boats. On land, the sporting heartbeat is Torquay United, the Gulls, who play at Plainmoor. The club traces its founding to 1899, and the 1921 merger of Torquay Town and Babbacombe produced it under its present name. It spent most of the period from 1927 to 2007 in the Football League. It returned in 2009 and stayed until 2014, a long run for a club in one of the country's most south-westerly spots. Away fans know that a trip to Plainmoor involves a very long journey. For a quieter afternoon, Cockington village, with its thatched cottages and country park, sits just a short walk from the seafront. Torquay offers both a Victorian promenade and a village that looks as if it belongs in a different century.