The Grandest House in Paignton (And Far Too Late for the Shacklefords)

As I’ve recently been fully involved in writing Beatrix, it has been really interesting to learn about the town and area around me!

There is something rather lovely about living somewhere with a long memory. You can be going about your ordinary business, thinking about the shopping or the weather (usually the weather), and find yourself in a place that has been watching people come and go for centuries.

Torbay is full of that sort of thing. Although, to be fair, it has also acquired quite a lot of things that are considerably newer.

Oldway Mansion in Paignton is a case in point (pictured above before any alterations).

It is a magnificent place, all grand architecture and French-palace ambitions, and if you have ever wandered through the grounds, you can see why it catches the eye. It is also, rather inconveniently for me, far too late for the Shacklefords.

I do wish someone had thought to mention that before I started writing about a family who lived here two hundred years ago.

Oldway was built for Isaac Singer, of sewing machine fame, on the Fernham estate he bought around 1871. Work on the mansion began in 1873, under the architect George Soudon Bridgman.

Singer died in 1875, but the building work carried on. Then, between 1904 and 1907, his son Paris remodelled the house on the grand scale, taking Versailles as his inspiration.

Versailles. In Paignton.

One does rather admire the ambition.

And here I am, trying to write about the Torbay that Beatrix Shackleford would have known, when this enormous French-inspired confection belongs to a much later chapter in the area's story.

There is a gap of several generations between the world I write about and the world Oldway represents. I can admire the mansion, enjoy the grounds and wonder what it must have been like to see the place taking shape, but I cannot simply pop it into Beatrix's life because it happens to be one of the grandest things in town.

Historical romance does require a little restraint now and again. Not too much, obviously. We wouldn't want to get carried away.

The Torbay of the Shacklefords would have been a very different place. No Oldway Mansion, no promenade, no railway. The coastline was a working one, with fishing and farming shaping everyday life rather than visitors arriving to admire the view.

I find that rather interesting.

We tend to look at a place as it is now and assume, without really thinking about it, that its familiar landmarks have always been part of the picture. But the people who lived here before us had their own ordinary days, their own worries, their own favourite places to go and things to grumble about.

I suspect the weather was still a popular subject of conversation. Some things do not need two hundred years to change.

And that is the part I love about writing a family rooted in a real place. You can stand in the present and try to imagine the landscape before all the familiar modern pieces arrived. You have to leave room for what isn't there, as well as what is.

Oldway has its own extraordinary story, of course. Paris Singer's life included a long affair with the dancer Isadora Duncan, which ended in 1917. Even without inventing anything, there is enough there to remind you that grand houses are not simply collections of impressive rooms. They belong to people, and people have a habit of making life complicated.

Some things, it seems, are timeless.

The mansion itself has had a less glamorous recent chapter. The council stopped using it in 2013, and it has been closed since. The grounds remain open to the public, thankfully, and in 2023 the building was added to Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register.

It is sad to see somewhere so impressive left waiting for its next chapter. I hope Oldway gets the future it deserves, although I shall leave the difficult business of deciding what that might be to people with considerably more knowledge than me.

I am only the woman who turns up, looks at a building and starts wondering whether one of my fictional family would have walked past it.

In this case, the answer is no. Not unless I want to upset the calendar, and the calendar has enough problems without me interfering.

Beatrix will be out on 29th October, which feels rather appropriate for a woman who belongs to a Torbay that has long since changed around her.

Because that is the thing about living here. The place keeps rearranging itself. Buildings rise, familiar landmarks appear, disappear or stand waiting for someone to decide what happens next. The town you knew as a child is not quite the town you know now, and the town that existed before either of us arrived would be almost unrecognisable in places.

But the sea is still there.

It doesn't seem particularly bothered by our plans, our grand houses or our determination to improve things. It just keeps doing what it has always done, which is probably a sensible way to approach life.

I know just how lucky I am to live somewhere with so much history tucked into its corners. I can enjoy the Torbay of today, imagine the one Beatrix knew, and still be surprised by what turns up in between.

And if I ever find myself feeling that everything has changed too much, I can always go and look at the sea.

It has been here rather longer than any of us, and I don't suppose it will be asking my opinion about the next set of alterations.

Much love, Bev xx