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[92] 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 andheroines.
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[93] 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[94] 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[95] 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[96] 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!
[97]
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[98] 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.
