Block Management in Torquay

Torquay harbour is one of the three enclosed harbours inside the statutory harbour of Tor Bay, whose limits take in 22 miles of coastline and 16 square miles of open sea. The shoreline management plan divides Torquay's frontage into twelve policy units, more than half of all the units in Torbay and the only town in the bay spanning two management areas. The defended stretches at Oddicombe and Babbacombe, Meadfoot, the harbour, Torre Abbey Sands and Livermead are hold the line across every epoch to 2105, while the headlands between them, Walls Hill, Anstey's Cove, Hope's Nose, Daddyhole and Corbyn's Head, are all no active intervention. Within one town the policy alternates between defending and letting go, and which applies depends on which cove a building stands above. Ground instability is what most sets Torquay apart from the rest of Torbay, and the national coastal erosion mapping makes the point without ambiguity: the only two potential ground instability zones in the whole of Torbay are here, at Babbacombe and at Meadfoot, carrying rear-scarp recession allowances of 50 and 10 metres respectively. Paignton has none and Brixham has none. The Oddicombe landslide brought down what the geopark records as over 100,000 tonnes of rockfall debris, with the cliff top estimated to have regressed by about 30 to 40 metres over a length of roughly 140 metres. The council's own beach page still records that the north end of Oddicombe beach is closed because of the risk of rocks falling from the unstable cliff face, and it is the only one of Torbay's 26 beach pages carrying a closure of that kind. The shoreline management plan has an outstanding action to reassess the management intent for the undefended cliffs in light of recent falls and to consider defining a coastal change management area here. None has been defined, so for a building near those cliffs this is a live and unresolved question rather than a historical one.

Metalwork is where coastal exposure shows up first and costs most. The standards put a high-salinity coastal atmosphere in category C5-M, losing over 80 micrometres of steel in year one against 1.3 to 25 inland, so railings, balustrades and fixings on a Torquay block are surveyed more often and the reserve fund is modelled on the findings.

A live query at the TQ1 3DR postcode centroid returns band 4 of 6, a maximum potential of 5 to 10 per cent of homes at or above the action level, where UKHSA advises measurement. Torquay Central is 70.7 per cent flats and nearly a third of those are conversions, so the enclosed ground-level space that needs testing is often a converted basement rather than a plant room. Across the town as a whole the picture is milder than that postcode suggests and milder than either neighbour: of the 53 one-kilometre squares covering Torquay the dominant band is 3 to 5 per cent, over 45 per cent of the area, and Torquay is the only one of the three Torbay towns with any ground in the lowest 1 to 3 per cent band. It has effectively no ground in the top band, against Brixham where more than half the town is above 30 per cent.

Going Deeper in Torquay

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