A postcard from Torquay, as the English Riviera struggles to find its feet
For The Telegraph, Tracey swapped her home turf of Brighton for the sandy shores of Torquay in the summer of 2020 — and found the English Riviera in a strange, sedate half-light: fully-booked boutique B&Bs cheek-by-jowl with boarded-up shopfronts, the Living Coasts aquarium gone for good.
Tracey traded Brighton pebbles for Torquay sand in that odd summer when the coach-loads of silver-haired seniors and American tourists didn't come. What she found on the south Devon coast was neither ghost town nor bumper season, but somewhere in between: fully-booked award-winning boutique B&Bs (the adults-only 25, TripAdvisor's world's best two years running) beside boarded-up windows on Avenue Road, distanced tables at Mitch Tonks' Rockfish holding steady while the Living Coasts aquarium closed for good after twenty years of penguins and puffins. A postcard from a resort taking stock, told in the specifics — a virtual buffet printed on a sheet, a carousel with a handful of kids, an Andy Banner-Price line about it taking three years to rebuild.