TEIGNMOUTH
Teignmouth is the “second largest watering-place in South Devon” and the
most entirely delightful. It was more delightful when it was smaller;
but that is a fact known only to people old enough to have acquired
memories of the Has Been and to drag the clanking chains of reminiscence
and unavailing regret at their heels. In the Teignmouth of yesterday
there were no pavements but those made of pebbles gleaned off the
beach, of the size and shape—and considerably more than the hardness—of
kidney potatoes. It was a picturesque time, but painful for people with
tender feet and thin shoes, for the pavements thus constructed were
excruciatingly knobbly, and were only worn down to the level after some
two generations and a half of wayfarers had progressed over them. To-day
you shall find those old-style pavements only in the back streets and
alleyways of the town: in the main thoroughfares you have paving-stones
worthy of London itself.
There was doubtless a time when these kidney-potato pavements were
looked upon as concessions to a growing spirit of luxury, and it is
conceivable that, from the time when Teignmouth first arose beside the
azure main (somewhere about the time of Edward the Confessor) until the
first quarter of the nineteenth century, the place did very well without
pavings or sidewalks of any description. Sea-boots and shore-going
footgear an inch thick in the sole, and well hobnailed, overcame any
little difficulties with water, mud, or shingle; and it was only when
seaside holidays first came into fashion and “visitors” appeared that any
fine distinctions were drawn between roads and paths.
When the railway came to Teignmouth in 1846, it found a quiet, rather
out-of-the-way little town and port, of narrow and winding streets, lined
with rustic Devonian cob-built cottages, alternating with what had been
modish little plaster-fronted villas with skimpy little balconies and
bow fronts. Many of them still remain in the older part of the town, in
French Street and Hollands Road. If they were larger, they would remind
one of Brighton and the Regency, but, in the miniature sort, they are
oddly reminiscent of Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell and their ringleted
heroines.
[Illustration: APPROACH TO TEIGNMOUTH.]
In pre-railway days Teignmouth lay, as it were, in an eddy of traffic.
The mail coaches went from Exeter to Plymouth far inland, and only
strictly local stages hugged the coastwise roads; but with the opening of
the South Devon Railway, as it then was, Teignmouth at once was placed
on the main route from London to the West. There should certainly be a
statue of Brunel on the Den at Teignmouth, for by planning the railway to
run along the coast he not only made the fortune of the town, but added
magnificently to the picturesqueness of the shore, in building that two
and a half miles of massive sea-wall on which the railway comes into the
town.
Teignmouth is one of those very few places the railway does not
vulgarise, by bringing you in at the back door, so to speak, and through
the kitchen and the scullery. You are brought along that sea wall, in
full view of a gorgeously-coloured coast, into a fine airy station,
expectant of the best, and are not disappointed in that expectation;
if, indeed, a little mystified as to your bearings. To acquire those
bearings, the proper way, after all, here as elsewhere, is to enter the
town by road, whether by the extravagantly hilly high road along the
cliff tops, or along the sea wall. That is the geographically educative
way, by which you shall see how the original Teignmouth was built on a
flat sandy spit at the mouth of the Teign estuary, and how by degrees it
has grown upwards and backwards, away from river and sea, even to the
lower slopes of the lofty moorland of Haldon.
The most outstanding peculiarity, and one of the finest features of
Teignmouth is “the Den,” the wide sweep of lawn that ornaments the
whole of the seaward side of the town and at once stamps Teignmouth as
something wholly out of the ordinary. “The Den,” properly “dene,” was
originally a flat sandy waste where the fishermen of the old fishing
town dried their nets, and when the town suddenly was made to take on
the appearance of a fashionable resort, in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, and a formal front was built, looking upon the sea,
the houses were planned in a huge crescent, following the lines of that
open space. Whether this was done from choice or necessity does not
appear, but it would certainly seem that the builders of what was then
“modern” Teignmouth were offered no alternative, and that they dared not
lay hands upon what was really common land.
Within the memory of many visitors to Teignmouth the grassy Den has
wonderfully improved. A comparatively few years ago it was still scrubby
and common-like, and its bordering flower-beds and rockeries were rich
only in rocks, but the grass now grows green, the flowers flourish, and
sheltering shrubs have grown phenomenally. The fishermen still exercise
their ancient prescriptive right of spreading their seine nets out to dry
on the grass, but, for some reason or another, not so greatly as before.
The sea-front of Teignmouth, following the semi-circle of the Den, is
decoratively imposing when viewed at a little distance, for there is much
virtue, architecturally, in a crescent, however little there may be in
the houses individually. They are ambitious buildings, chiefly in these
times boarding-houses, but with the “Royal Hotel” and the ugly East Devon
and Teignmouth Club prominent among them. According to intention and to
the description given of the Club-house in local literature, it is in
the Ionic style, but seeing that it is of brick and rubble, faced with
plaster masquerading as stone, we shall not be far wrong in declaring
that, in spite of—nay, because of—its colonnade of squatty columns
pretending to be Greek, its style is more fitly to be described as
“ironic.”
There is, indeed, a great deal of very bad architecture in Teignmouth,
of the pretentious kind; very solid, stolid and ugly, and the newer
houses, although more pleasing to the eye, are generally of an incredible
flimsiness. If the natural scenery of sea, land, and river were not so
surprisingly beautiful, the builders’ handiwork would long ago have
ruined Teignmouth, and it says much for the natural advantages of the
place that, although there are less than half a dozen decent bits of
architecture, ancient or modern, in the town, it is voted delightful by
thousands of holiday-makers.
It is because I love Teignmouth so well that I criticise it so closely.
For the sake of the place that nature has endowed so richly, one must
needs protest against the things that have been done, the blunders and
the vulgarities that have been perpetrated. Was ever there a place where
advertisements could look more offensive? Yet the entrance to the pier
is smothered with them. They stand boldly out against the scenery, and
your view across to Torbay or to Exmouth is obliterated by the pushful
poster and the enamelled iron sign. Frankly, they are grievous mistakes.
One does not always want to be playing Rogers’ pianos, nor even, for that
matter, Paish’s; and there are times—incredible though it may seem—when
Fry’s Cocoa and Dunville’s Whisky are distinctly _de trop_. But enough!
Coming into Teignmouth by the sea-wall, almost the first building
met with is East Teignmouth Church, almost wholly rebuilt in recent
years, from the 1887 Jubilee Tower downwards. It is one of Teignmouth’s
two parish churches that once formed a couple owning the unenviable
distinction of being pre-eminently the ugliest churches in all Devon, but
now that the Jubilee and later activities have utterly altered the aspect
of this church of St. Michael, East Teignmouth, that unlovely brotherhood
has been dissolved, and St. James’s, West Teignmouth, reigns supreme in
the kingdom of the grotesque.
Not by any means that these much-criticised buildings were offensively
ugly. Their ugliness was of that supreme and old-fashioned kind so
greatly prized in (for example) old china. It transcended the merely ugly
and rose into the realms of the hideously quaint. St. Michael’s tower,
for instance, was a very gem of misbegotten early nineteenth-century
“Saxon” architecture, done in grim grey stucco, and looking like the
architectural monstrosities of nightmare-land. It would have genuinely
astonished any Saxon privileged to revisit the earth after a thousand
years and seeking the original Saxon building he had known on this site.
The present tower, in the Perpendicular style, is ornately pinnacled
and windowed, and although so very florid, is a beautiful and entirely
successful feature. The almost wave-washed position of St. Michael’s is
a startling surprise to the stranger, although the inhabitants and the
congregation take it soberly enough; as well they may, considering that,
although it stands so little removed from high-water mark, and although
the salt sea spray of winter’s storms flecks its walls, the sea does not
appear to have gained the fraction of an inch since the first church
arose on this site, in the tenth century. On a wall of this peculiarly
seaside place of worship the stranger may read a pathetic story of the
sea, in the epitaph to John and Richard Westlake, lost in the foundering
of the brig _Isla_, in the storm of October 29th, 1823, “within sight of
this church.”
St. James’s church, the surviving ugly brother, stands commandingly at
the crest of the steep rise through the town, at the entrance to Bitton.
It is often known as the “round church” because of its central lantern
tower, which is octagonal. It is only with a difference I endorse the
received opinion among architectural critics that this church of West
Teignmouth is so ugly. Architecturally, the lantern-tower and the odd
octangular interior additions made nearly a century ago are enormities,
but looked at from the lay point of view, the whole mass of the building,
while singular, is imposing—and I am afraid the uninstructed public
rather like it.
This is almost enough about churches, save for the fact that we are here
come, in this beautiful West country, into a deeply religious land, where
the Church of England weakens and Dissent takes firm hold.