Newton Abbot

The last stop on the Great Western before Totnes – twinned with Narnia – and the verdant contours of the South Hams, Newton Abbot is one of the last redoubts of indigenous Devon. Without seaside or moor-top, it lacks obvious draws for weekender, second-homer or relocator.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel tested his atmospheric railway here – driving the train along via a piston instated into a vacuum pipe – but it lasted only a year or so. Afterwards, Newton Abbot became a major rail-engineering centre, the extensive sidings now occupied by the Brunel Industrial Estate; from the train – I have passed through Newton Abbot dozens of times, visited perhaps five – my eye is always drawn to the large headquarters of International Dance Supplies. I think of ballet shoes, tutus, incongruous things.

There’s none of that nonsense down at The Cider Bar, which dates from Victorian times but has the rustic chairs and tables and pokey, sun-deprived ambience of a medieval inn. Ranked behind the bar are two dozen barrels of scrumpy, flat and astringent, vaguely apple-scented, somewhat sulphurous; some, like Gladiator (8.4%), Westons Vintage (8.2%) or Wiscombe’s Suicider (7% or 8%, sources differ), are provocations to see who can keep them down for seven, eight, 10, 15 pints. A painting on the wall depicts the inn’s Long Bar Cork Club, setting off on a pub crawl aboard a horse-drawn charabanc in 1911. While regulars are usually too deep into their cups to bother turning when someone comes through the door, they will later inform a stranger that the Cider Bar is strictly for locals. I have been made warmly unwelcome a few times. The hostility suits the setting, and farmers have so few meeting places these days.

Newton Abbot was cobbled together from two earlier towns. The two Newtons became one in the 17th century, but markets continue to divide residents. “Unrest over ‘Covent Garden’ revamp” of the old pannier market is a recent headline, with stallholders unhappy about plans to convert the building into a “mixed use space” and four-screen cinema. The 800-year-old livestock market has been threatened with closure many times, but continues to host auctions of “Prime, Cull and Store Cattle, plus Sale of Hoggs, ewes and Couples”. Today, the town is dominated by an Asda superstore, dropped like a retail H-bomb into the heart of Newton Abbot’s maze of one-way roads and confusing junctions. Perhaps the old markets will outlive it and one day someone will struggle to imagine how it might have felt to browse in a sky-less hangar full of garish packets, chilled vegetables, bottles and tins. The centre is the usual humdrum scattering of mid-market stores: Peacocks, Millets, New Look, Sports Direct. Of the independents, Three Wishes Inc Citygoth belongs here most fully, offering crystals, tarot cards and “Nemesis”.

Around the shops is a jumble of terraced streets and estates spread over the river valley. Mackrell’s Almshouses, built from Devon limestone, on the Totnes Road are the most attractive small homes. At the top of Courtenay Park, which covers a hillside to the west of the railway station, are a handful of streets lined with Italianate villas, suggestive of bygone prosperity. Why do solicitors and chartered accountants always get to install offices in the best houses? No doubt the lives of the gracious former residents were made easier by the fast up-trains to the capital. Today, the swiftest go to Exeter and then to Reading, briefly stopping at Taunton or a parkway in a field. The nocturnal Cornish Riviera also makes a stop at Newton Abbot. Well-connectedness hasn’t turned the town into a gateway to anything, and the A38 bypasses the town at some distance. A local green space is called Decoy Country Park, as if it, too, wanted to trick you out of arriving.

In the evening, when you leave the Cider Bar, a whole street of restaurants serves all-you-can-eat curry buffets. A local author has called her book Noticing Newton Abbot. The town is easily missed, hard to fathom. It is no longer split in two, but is a place of fragments and fissures. In Ikaria, they hold rowdy bacchanals called panigiri, where all the islanders meet for music, dance and drinking deep into the night. It creates social bonds and may well play a part in Ikarians’ startling longevity. The bookies and ballet dancers, farmers and goths, commuters and curry-eaters of Newton Abbot need something similar, perhaps at the annual Cheese and Onion Fayre.

Things to see
Stover Country Park (and the Ted Hughes Poetry Trail), Templer Way, Ugbrooke House