The Town Today
Kingsbridge has been the main market town in the area for centuries. Being situated within the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and its proximity to the spectacular south Devon coast and sailing venues, such as Salcombe, Kingsbridge has developed into a popular tourist destination. Its attractions include several restaurants, pubs, a cinema housed in the town hall building, and a museum devoted to the chemist William Cookworthy, born in Kingsbridge in 1705.
There are two supermarkets in Kingsbridge; a Morrisons and a large Tesco Store - which opened on Valentines Day 2011. It also has a large secondary school, Kingsbridge Community College, which has over 1000 pupils and serves the surrounding area. 'Coast' is the only nightclub in Kingsbridge, with the next nearest being in Torquay
The town is linked to Plymouth and Dartmouth by the A379 road, and to Salcombe and Totnes by the A381. For seventy years Kingsbridge boasted a railway station until the branch line, via South Brent, was closed in 1963 as part of the reshaping of British railways, commonly known as The Beeching Axe. An industrial park now occupies the site of the former station yard. But evidence of the railway's existence can still be seen in the form of disused bridges dotted around the town. The current Mayor of Kingsbridge is James Grant.
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Famous quotes containing the words town and/or today:
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siècle. What holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in common.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)