Depressing to see how much Torquay has deteriorated

✒ I WAS born in Torquay and grew up in the glorious ’50s and ’60s.

What a wonderful place to live. My parents were very sociable and went to the Imperial Hotel, to the nightclub and restaurant. We weren’t rich; it was a treat. The beaches were safe, clean and the sun shone.

That was then; this is now. I live in Wiltshire but love to visit Torquay every few years.

It just gets worse and worse. What is going on? My husband and I spent two days in early September. We were lucky, as the sun shone for our visit, but even the sun couldn’t mask the decay: crumbling shops and property. The Strand is still dominated by Debenhams signs, now covered in graffiti, even though it closed years ago. Homeless people everywhere; pavements dirty and weeds growing; closed banks!

Who owns them? What is the local council doing about this? Why aren’t the landlords of these properties being made to pay for the upkeep?

Whose crazy idea was it to even imagine wealthy people would come to Torquay in the winter, shop in the then-new shopping area when they could stay in the sun in Spain? All the expensive shops left, as exactly that happened. What’s left now is a dirty area of closed shops, except for TK Maxx, and a broken escalator, the overriding smell of cheap fried food from the cafés trying hard to make a living: but the worst and [most] tragic by far is the beautiful Pavilion. I went there to the pantomime every year as a child. It was a wonderland. It was wrecked to make it an ice rink, then yet more stalls selling goodness knows what; now it’s a miserable, crumbling,