How do different places make us feel and behave?
Do we think differently at Castle Circus compared to the Strand; in a green park or a multi-storey car park? Can we experience a sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few yards? Maybe different times of the day and the seasons affect us more that we realise? Do tourists experience the same things as locals?
The idea is that environments shape our psychological states. This is the effect of both the location itself and our hardwired instincts which determine if is it pleasant or otherwise, safe or threatening. In fact, we often have an opinion about a space the moment we step into it.
Back in 1955 the French theorist Guy Debord called this psychogeography and, with much of this kind of thing, you could say it’s fairly obvious. Environments that are socially deprived, with heavy traffic, or just empty, are associated with higher levels of depression. Conversely, access to green and blue spaces, libraries, post offices, and health services are linked to lower anxiety levels. Who would ever have guessed?
Lower Union Lane Car Park
This is also not new. In 1886 Torquay visitor Robert Louis Stevenson used the seamy underside of the city to reflect the dark corners of the human psyche in his novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.
But this kind of experiencing a place can be taken beyond obvious first impressions.
Torquay town centre, for instance, can be seen as a palimpsest, a network of streets with many levels of meaning and memory; layers of often forgotten histories infused in its thoroughfares, homes, shops, parks, alleys, derelict spaces, and car parks.
We may even become aware that much of what Torquay presents is skilful mimicry, the consequence of the stories told to residents and tourists. The resort is indeed a grab bag of architectural styles: an Italianate tower in the Old Town Hall; Renaissance revival in the New Town Hall; an Art Nouveau Pavilion; the Scala, modelled on Milan’s Opera House. All set against a backdrop of Victorian terraces, Tuscan villas, Spanish haciendas, Mediterranean apartment blocks, and hybrid Anglo-Indian bungalows.
Do we think and behave differently in green spaces?
To really appreciate what we have, and to recognise what we have lost, the best way is to walk. And again, we look to the French for an appropriately romantic and nuanced term for a natural way of getting around. They called it the dérive, meaning ‘drift’, an unplanned journey through an urban landscape. The objective is to let the atmosphere of different neighbourhoods pull you along rather than by following a set route.
We have, of course, been doing this superficially aimless rambling for a long time. In the early nineteenth century, the English writer Thomas de Quincey recorded, “On Saturday evenings, I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance.” We wouldn’t encourage the opium bit though.
What makes a dérive different from a casual stroll is the attention given to how spaces shape our inner state. Our streets then become a text that can be read to reveal their history, present day culture, and future potential. The objective is to break out of the habitual corridors between home, work, and shopping, and to rediscover our townscape as something exciting and mysterious. 
We may have forgotten, for instance, that our town centre is built upon real earth, a prehistoric landscape. Beneath the roads and pavements are the escarpments of the mythical seven hills while the fast-flowing Fleet still flows beneath Primark.
As meeting points between land and sea, our beaches, cliffs, harbours and piers are liminal places, marking a messy boundary between civilisation and watery wilderness. As residents of a tourist resort, therefore, we live in a place of ceaseless movement with encounters, arrivings, and leavings reflecting the tidal ebb and flow. The outcome is constant change, both in a physical sense and in the psychology of its inhabitants and visitors.
For almost two centuries Torquay was dominated by the tourist industry, and this made the town starkly seasonal, a town of two distinct halves. The summer months were an arena for hedonism and opportunity where even the most conventional of folk could display their racier side; resorts have always been the setting for brief romantic interludes and transactional sexual liaisons. What happened in Torquay, stayed in Torquay.
But at the close of each season the crowds rapidly disappear, leaving the promenade and hotels unsettlingly devoid of life, an an alternative aesthetic of unease and nostalgia can become an environment for fantastical encounters.
By straying into the network of lanes behind Union Street and Fleet Street, we can be reminded that once people lived in the town centre. It was a different place to what it is today, a blend of housing, manufacturing, entertainment, businesses, and shops of all sizes and types.
Thousands lived in the poorly constructed buildings of Pimlico and Swan Street, and they often experienced poverty, hunger, and abuse. A different social apartheid existed. On one side the respectable middle classes on the hills and on the other the working-classes in the deep Fleet valley, a folk that were stigmatised as prone to immorality, indiscipline and sporadic rioting.
Conditions improved greatly in the last century. Then, in the aftermath of the Second World War, there was a general enthusiasm for ‘urban renewal’ and ‘modernisation’. This produced the present-day town centre of chain stores, offices, and car parks, prohibitively expensive for all but the most profitable commercial enterprises. The urban inhabitants, meanwhile, were relocated to generally better-quality housing in the estates and suburbs. Now the collapse of that twentieth century retail-centred model is clear to see in empty shops, streets deserted after nightfall, and a reputation for anti-social behaviour.
Walking at different times of day also offers another experience. At night everything can seem made from the same monochromatic substance and there’s something surreal about those limestone cliffs and the blackness at the edge of the palm-lined promenade.
Taking the town centre walk to another level, we have the nineteenth century French poet and writer Charles Baudelaire who made strolling a creative art. He advocated becoming a flaneur, an urban wanderer seeking out random and unexpected encounters: “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty”.
Baudelaire’s flaneur, however, was generally affluent and so free from the pressures of the workaday world. He could then amble through the Parisian arcades while ordinary people carried on their pressured lives all around him.
At night, there’s something surreal about those limestone cliffs and the blackness at the edge of the promenade
Today few of us have the time to dedicate to task-free walking, except the retired, under-employed and under-occupied. But 27% of Torbay residents are now over 65 and within a decade one in three of us will have reached that age. A boy and girl born in Torbay today has a life expectancy of 78 and 83 years respectively. So maybe living longer and changes to paid work will see more of us able to take up Baudelaire’s advice.
What we do know is that any activity is good for our physical and mental health. Torbay folk do walk for leisure more often than the England average. On the other hand, there are more preventable deaths across the Bay compared to the nation’s average. These deaths area are much higher in our deprived areas and amongst men. Exercise, of course, is an easy way to promote wellbeing.
And so, by getting out there with an open and enquiring mind we can experience our unique coastal landscapes, not just as a glorious meeting point between land and sea, but as a geography and a culture that shapes how we behave and how we see the world.
‘Torquay: A Social History’ by local author Kevin Dixon is available for £10 from Artizan Gallery, Fleet Street, Torquay. or:
https://www.art-hub.co.uk/product-page/torquay-a-social-history-by-kevin-dixon
