Great Western Coffee Shop

September is an important month for Paignton. A town the fourth largest in Devon and Cornwall and even bigger than the oft featured Melksham.

Paignton was devastated when Nortel closed (early 2000's) with the loss of 5000 jobs and the population hardly grew between 2001 and 2011 census.

September 2019 sees the opening of The Range, M&S food hall, Pets At Home and a stand alone Costa Coffee on the site with two other units still to be let but I am hopeful now a date has been set for the others. 250 homes will also be built to the North on the former car parks.
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48098465452_e8c937f9e4_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2ghid47)

Hundreds of other homes have been built in the vicinity notably at White Rock which includes the South Devon College Sports Centre which was originally to be a just football pitch and changing rooms built by the house builder for the residents of White Rock. The college raised £3m for state of the art facilities and got Torquay United involved who often train there and at the college gymnasium. The college is trying to persuade them to take over their defunct grass football pitch and move training completely from Seale Hayne. Some of the students on sports courses train with the Torquay players.

The South Devon College (South Devon University by 2022) opens it's high tech centre in September and has plans for 250 student flats. The college is halfway through a 15 year plan of development and half the site yet to be developed.

In September the EPIC building will be up and running; built as a speculative build by Torbay Council to attract all the expertise of Nortel that are still in the area. An American firm has taken one or more of the 15 labs that are there.

The widening of the ring road, at Sainsbury, is due for completion at the end of July as is the Windy Corner improvement. Buses (22, 23, 13,) from Paignton station take from 15-20 minutes.

A billionaire is developing two hotel sites on the Esplanade; two others in Torquay.

Paignton has the largest primary school in Devon (700) at the sought after Oldway (don't mention Oldway Mansion) and has two grammar schools to the North in Torquay and one to the South at Churston. My next door neighbours teenager went there and she is at Cambridge studying medicine.

Now the bad news. Paignton lost out on government money to improve Station Square and the associated works by GWR to improve the station entrance seems to have disappeared. The council were caught out by a hoaxer promising to develop the run down shops opposite the station. The owner of the derelict Crossways has no intention of improving the site content to sit on his income from the car park. Paignton does have a problem as do many seaside towns that bed and breakfast accommodation is being used by other councils to house their homeless leading to anti-social behaviour in the town. Torquay as well.

The Devon Metro will hopefully start in December but like the South Devon Highway will accentuate commuting to Exeter; not bring jobs in that had been hoped.


**Not sure why some of the text is in colour and flashing?**
Edit - I have updated the markups in your post and I think it should now work as intended - Grahame

Thank you!!

I used to go to Paignton on holiday as a child (30+ years ago), and am going back this weekend for the first time since
Looking forward to how the town looks now
Am trying to convince those I am going with to do the Dartmouth trip over the weekend

It's a nice little run to Kingswear/Dartmouth and now you can break the journey at the recently(ish) built station that serves NT Greenways, Agatha Christies old country pile.

The text in post #1 that is in colour is because you have accidentally deleted a [/url] tag somewhere. All the coloured text is therefore a link to the source of the photo.

Paul

Using my magic moderator's wand, I have updated the original post so it behaves as I think was intended.

I get into trouble when uploading images lately as flikr seems to add too much data. I don't have any trouble on Sky scraper city where I upload most of my images.

https://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1738074&page=18

When you leave the station you will not see much difference. The station did have  a repaint as did Torre and Torquay a few years ago. The area where the taxi's are was meant to be paved over and the two lanes of traffic narrowed to one; but no money. As you cross the crossing to the steam railway you'll find the old cinema boarded up. The steam railway sold it to a charity and work is going on inside, aided by the South Devon College students who also repaired two shelters on the esplanade badly damaged by last years storm in March.

If you look back up Victoria Street nearly all the shops are occupied as are those in Hyde Road until you get to the derelict, save two shops, at Crossways. There is a good model railway shop at the station end of Hyde Road.

If you look down the Torbay Road from the crossing about five shops are boarded up and in various states of repair. There was an end of season fire sale at the Fish and Chip shop and when Paignton has a fire sale they mean fire. A few years ago the same happened on the opposite side of the road at a cake shop.

Victoria Square to the left of the Torbay Road is run down and the council want to rebuild part of the multi-story car park as flats and more flats above the shops. Here was also an idea to rebuild Paignton Station with a new entrance fronting Victoria Square so the trains did not have to close the crossing but the council idea is to pedestrianize  the crossing and leave it open a la continent! with refuges. The council would also like to relocate the VUE cinema to Victoria Square and knock down the cinema so there is an open view of the sea down the Torbay Road but VUE are not interested.