The story of Torquay’s Old Town Hall is the story of the resort’s rise to become the centre of an empire at leisure.
This was the town’s first municipal building and it oversaw the growth of Torquay from provincial obscurity to civic pride and prominence; a manifest product of economics, communal purpose, grand design, and noble sentiment in an era of dramatic change.
In 1800 Torquay only had around 800 residents, gradually increasing to 6,000 by the 1840s. Then in 1848 the railway arrived and within a decade the population had doubled. To meet the demands and challenges of a growing town, Tormoham’s Local Board of Health was formed in 1850 and one of its first priorities was the commissioning of a town hall. 
The town hall was completed in June 1852 and was typical of the civic and commercial buildings of the first half of the nineteenth century. It was classical but not Grecian or Roman, in a style now known as in the Italianate. This was a ‘common-sense style of architecture’, uncontentious and practical, its adaptability ideal as it allowed the construction to fit into a small and oddly shaped wedge of land on the corner of Abbey Road and Union Street.
The mission was to take on the challenges and opportunities of the nineteenth century as Torquay evolved from a scattering of rural communities into a true Victorian town.
The building’s focus was its multipurpose hall, which was used for meetings and events. It was always recognised that the building should be flexible and able to adapt to an emerging world based on science, commerce, and freethinking.
For example, until the end of the eighteenth century, time was normally determined in each town. But in 1840 the Great Western Railway demanded standardised time and so a manual clock mechanism and a series of clock faces were added to the three-stage bell tower.
For almost sixty years the town hall progressed reforms and urban improvements that transformed the lives of Torquinians. It directed public works, better schools, water supplies, sewage disposal, and housing. It could do this as huge resources were channeled through local government, with half of all national public spending being dispensed from town halls.
Specifically, there was an urgent need for coordinated reform of the surrounding overcrowded and unsanitary streets. In 1849 sixty-six Torquay folk died from cholera and dysentery, the cases occurring mainly in the oldest and poorest districts of Pimlico and Swan Street. In response, Torquay adopted the Public Health Act and conditions improved, directed by the town hall. “A good wide street between the bottom of Union Street and the Strand” replaced the narrow alleyways, while the odiferous river was confined to a tunnel to flow unseen towards the Strand.
Public order was also imposed from the town hall. The Hungry Forties saw starvation across the nation and in May 1847 bread riots broke in Torquay. Several thousand fought with traders and raided shops in Fleet Street and Torre. At the height of the disorder, sixty railway navvies joined forces with rioting locals and armed themselves with “pickaxes, crow bars and shovels, with the avowed purpose of pulling down the Town Hall”. To restore calm, a revenue cutter and a government steamer brought a detachment of coastguards, forty troops arrived from Exeter while 300 special constables were sworn in. Eventually, 27 rioters were jailed.
Alarmed by both local uprisings and foreign threats, in February 1853 a public meeting was held in the main hall. It was resolved to set up a company of volunteers, and 80 men were armed and given uniforms.
The nineteenth century saw the slow emergence of a peculiarly British form of local and national governance and democracy. The 1832 Reform Act had had begun a series of electoral reforms, redistributing seats in the House of Commons and widening the male franchise. However, it still limited the vote to men who owned property, leaving a large portion of the population without voting rights.
Awaiting the 1910 General Election results
Then the 1867 Reform Act expanded the electorate to include urban working-class men, doubling the electorate. Though local suffragettes often targeted the town hall, however, it was only in 1928 that women achieved the same voting rights as men.
The town hall should further be seen as part of a wider urban townscape, tying together the public, spiritual, and commercial life of the community. Nearby was the former Royal Theatre and Opera House, a conversion of the former Assembly Rooms of 1863. Opposite was the Non-Conformist British School which opened in 1853.
Situated away from the traditional established churches at Torre and the harbourside came the interlopers of the independent churches and the return of the long-absent Catholic community. Opposite, for instance, was the now-lost 1847 Abbey Road Congregational Church and a little further up Abbey Road is the extant Roman Catholic Church of the Assumption of Our Lady of 1854. And in the nearby interstices of the Victorian town were the chapels and meeting rooms of the smaller denominations.
The Cells
Ultimately all history is about individuals, not just the great and the good, and many have their stories tied to the town hall. Tom Moxhay, for example, was a petty criminal who, during the late 1850s, was regularly being “locked up for one cause or another” in ‘the Clink’, the town hall jail cells. The newly enclosed Fleet, now functioning as sewer, ran underneath the cells and Tom managed to remove some stones to access a subterranean escape route. From his cell, Tom crawled in the foul darkness underneath the entire length of Fleet Street and emerged at the harbour where he was recaptured.
By the last decade of the nineteenth century Torquay’s population was more than 25,000. The responsibilities of local authorities were steadily increasing and in 1892 the resort achieved municipal borough status with the town hall as its headquarters. Civic leaders were complaining that their home just couldn’t meet the needs of the richest town in the nation and properly respond to the high demands of a vacationing imperial elite. A new and more impressive showcase was required and in 1911 the council relocated to an immense baroque town hall at Castle Circus.
Torquay’s synagogue closed in 2000 though traces remain in the Stars of David
The redundant and demoted old town hall was then used as office space. In the mid-1950s the first floor was converted for use as a synagogue by the Torquay United Hebrew Congregation. The synagogue closed in 2000 though traces remain in the Stars of David adorning its old home. The ground floor was later re-purposed for use as public toilets. Locals remember the first floor as venues Fat Catz and Bar Envy.
Now drerelict and largely forgotten, Torquay town Hall was once the aesthetic and cultural core of the Victorian resort, a testament to the town’s history and its ambitions. It designed away disease and squalor and, though imposing and maintaining the strict Victorian class and moral boundaries of its day, it also ensured order and saw the gradual attainment of local democracy. 
The building is a metaphor of Torquay. From civic pride to a closed-down public toilets while nearby are similarly empty and disused chapels, shops, and pubs. But at least it’s still there; the Congregational Church was demolished in 1982.
The town hall’s current neglect is largely due to its location. This is a different place; apart from the vibrant tourist Torquay of the Strand. But Abbey Road was always the locals’ road; of the Odeon Cinema, the Mousetrap, EJs, The Falcon and all those long-lost stores and food retailers.
Now hopefully the next phase of regeneration will progress and encompass the entire town. As part of this new Torquay, the original town hall should be rescued from its current sad state as it truly deserves to be celebrated for its making of our modern community.
‘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
