Aerial photography and video in Dawlish

Dawlish occupies a narrow gap in the red sandstone cliffs, with the town spreading up both sides of the valley cut by Dawlish Water. The Lawn, a strip of gardens running through the centre with the stream down its middle, splits the resort core from the shops, and from above the town reads as a single green channel running down to the sea between two built-up slopes.

At the foot of the valley the main line to Cornwall runs along the sea wall, close enough to the water that the railway and the beach share the same narrow strip of ground, a piece of engineering instantly recognisable from any angle. Above the town, post-war bungalow estates line the cliff tops on both sides, each built to face the same view out over the bay, and along the coast towards the Exe estuary mouth, the sand spit and dunes of Dawlish Warren mark the approach to Exmouth on the far bank.

Every bungalow on the cliff tops here is selling the same thing: an unbroken sea view with nothing built in front of it. An estate agent showing one of these from the ground can only prove the view exists from inside the lounge window; an aerial shot proves it from outside, showing exactly how the plot sits above the water with nothing to block it, which matters more here than in almost any other town on this stretch.

Dawlish Warren draws a different client. The holiday parks, the golf course and the RSPB reserve on the spit all rely on showing scale, the dunes, the estuary channel and the wildfowl habitat together, a combination no single ground photograph can capture. Hotels and apartment operators along The Lawn and the seafront also use the aerial view to show guests exactly how close the gardens, the beach and the town centre sit to each other.

Inland from the seafront, the newer estates near Dawlish Warren serve a different buyer again: not the cliff-top view, but proximity to the beach, the reserve and the golf course. Developers marketing these homes use aerial photography to place a development against that wider setting, showing the walk to the sand and the open ground around it rather than a sea view from the window itself.

Most aerial commissions on this coast want sea, cliff and beach. The Lawn gives Dawlish a second subject entirely: a run of Regency and Victorian buildings framing a green corridor with a stream through the middle of it, more parkland than seafront. Developers marketing the modern estates further inland use this shot deliberately, to show that Dawlish is not only cliff-top bungalows and a storm-battered sea wall but a town with a real green centre.

Storm season photography is its own category here. Dawlish's sea wall is one of the most exposed stretches of railway in the country, and images of the wall and the line during rough weather are sought after independently of any property sale, for tourism projects, rail heritage interest and local press. Calmer weather is booked separately for the property and holiday-park work, since the two jobs want opposite conditions.