What to see
Torquay United hosted Oldham’s first game in the National League. Torquay themselves dropped out of the EFL (for the second time) in 2014. This, then, is an outlier to Towns of Two Halves. For more on Torquay (shopping, eating out etc) there’s The English Riviera or Torquay – A Local Guide.
Links to Torquay attractions include:
● Agatha Christie Mile – South West Coast Path
● Dinosaur World
● Torquay Museum
● Torre Abbey
Towns of Two Halves update
There’s always a sadness when a team drops out of the League, tinged with relief that it wasn’t your team. And then the day dawns when it is your team.
There are supposedly five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These apply to relegation from League Two in a modified, disorderly form. For example, you may begin to look forward to visits to new destinations – Torquay, for example – and congratulate yourself on reaching the stage of acceptance. And then the Carabao Cup begins, and your team is not involved, and the cycle begins all over again.
Torquay United suffered the Curse of Athletic when they dropped out of the league in 2007. Three years earlier, basking in the sunlit uplands of League One, the Gulls had beaten Oldham 2-0. A similar fate befell high-flying Hereford United, who also took advantage of a brief visit to League One to trounce Athletic 5-0; they barely paused in League Two before slipping into the Conference. Unfortunately the likes of Tottenham (5-0 in 1993), Fulham (5-0 in 1976) and MK Dons (7-0 in 2014) remain unaffected by the curse.
Z and I were on our way back from Cornwall when we sought out Plainmoor to break the journey one November afternoon. The idea seems utterly improbable but it was my first experience of Torquay and it left an impression.
The resort was out-of-season to the extent that the bowling alley was closing for the night a little before 10pm. Given Torquay’s skewed demographics it is tempting to wonder whether they closed at that hour every Saturday night. But let’s not resort to cheap shots. Earlier in the evening we had eaten in a Moroccan restaurant where we encountered a chill-zone for the first time. Torquay has plenty for people of all ages.
Besides, we never bowled better than on that evening. The youth taking our money ushered us to a lane on which low dividers prevented the balls from sliding into the gutter. Are such dividers part of preparing the alley for the night? Or did they simply make an accurate assessment of our abilities, just by looking at us?
Some years later my sister moved to Torbay and I have seen more of the English Riviera as a result. It’s worth taking a weekend; indeed with the exception of only two or three clubs, it will be quite a trek for most supporters.
If the weather’s fine, the South West Coast Path will take you past beaches and around headlands from Babbacombe in the east to Berry Head in the west. In between, the Agatha Christie Mile will walk you along the Torquay seafront and around some of the places associated with an author “outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare” (https://www.agathachristie.com/).
You’d have to be very unlucky – or for full-bore lockdown to be back – to find nothing going on. When I was at Babbacombe (Oddicombe beach via the Babbacombe Cliff Railway) it was a ukulele festival; at Torre Abbey, folk and heritage events in addition to the permanent and visiting exhibitions; further round the bay from Goodrington to Kingswear there’s the Dartmouth Steam Railway.
Indoors in case of bad weather or simply winter, Torquay has a flea market that must be worth a look. It gives you the chance to nose around the Town Hall in which the author who outsold the Bible and Shakespeare served, unlike Shakespeare, as a nurse during the First World War. The town’s museum has more Christie memorabilia plus Lego. Torre Abbey goes back to 1196 and is remarkably well-preserved, considering Henry VIII’s attitude to such institutions – this one was closed in 1539. Its permanent exhibitions concentrate on art from the 18th century to contemporary work.
Torquay United 2 Oldham Athletic 0
Plainmoor, 6 November 2004
This is a chapter added in 2022 to Towns of Two Halves, originally published in 2018. To order a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.