A Cottage Three Centuries in the Making

Before a single stone of Hocking Cottage was laid, St Marychurch was already ancient. The parish was founded between 637 and 690 AD — recorded as Sce Maria circean in the Domesday Book and becoming Seintmariachurche by 1242. At its peak, St Marychurch was more important than Torquay, serving as the centre of local municipal government with its own Town Hall on Fore Street.

The parish church, which still stands today, has a Saxon font dating from around 1110 AD and is considered one of the earliest places of Christian worship in all of Devon.

Hocking Cottage was built in the early eighteenth century using local materials — a quaint stone-fronted façade, thick walls, and the heavy exposed wooden ceiling beams that still define the interior today. It was constructed as a traditional, compact home for local village workers.

At the time, St Marychurch was a fully independent hilltop settlement, quite separate from the fishing hamlet that would eventually grow into Torquay. The cottage sat within a tight cluster of homes and shops that encircled the parish church — a community that would have looked remarkably unchanged for generations.

By the middle of the 1800s, the population of St Marychurch was growing by a thousand residents every decade. In 1850, William White's Directory of Devonshire described it as "a handsome village and picturesque parish with many neat mansions and marine cottages overlooking Babbacombe Bay."

Grand Victorian shops, inns and public buildings rose along Fore Street. The St Marychurch Town Hall — built in 1883 in Italianate style and now a Grade II listed building — was erected just yards away. Through all of this growth, Hocking Cottage survived, tucked just behind the main building line.

In 1903, the independent borough of St Marychurch was amalgamated into Torquay — ending centuries of self-governance. Local legend has it that the real motivation was Torquay's desire for St Marychurch's steamroller, which it couldn't afford to buy on its own. Whatever the reason, the village retained its own distinct identity, and it does to this day.

When Fore Street was pedestrianised in the 1970s, closing the road to through traffic, Hocking Cottage became even more secluded — a calm, quiet pocket right in the middle of one of Devon's most characterful shopping villages.

Today, Fore Street is something of a rarity: a genuinely thriving high street packed with independent traders — a butcher, a greengrocer, a bakery, a fishmonger, antique shops, hardware stores, cafés and pubs — all within a few steps of the cottage's front door.

In recent decades, Hocking Cottage was sensitively renovated — updated with hardwood flooring, a contemporary kitchen and modern living spaces, while carefully preserving its historic layout and those wonderful ceiling beams that have watched over the cottage for three centuries.

Today it welcomes guests from across the country who come to explore the Torbay area: Babbacombe Downs and its famous Victorian cliff railway, the Babbacombe Model Village, the South West Coast Path, and all the independent shops, seafood restaurants and tea rooms that make St Marychurch such a special place to stay.