Aerial photography and video in Torquay

Torquay's ground plan is unusual for this coast: rather than a single seafront, the town climbs across seven limestone hills, so streets run up and along gradients rather than flat behind a beach. Grand Victorian and Edwardian villas and hotels, many in an Italianate style with rendered fronts and elaborate detailing, sit on terraced plots that step up the slope, and from above that terracing reads as layer after layer of building rising away from the harbour rather than a single flat frontage.

The harbour itself is the centre of gravity, a natural anchorage that gave Torquay its start as a resort and now holds a working marina full of yachts and pleasure craft. Torre Abbey's grounds sit close to the seafront as a rare patch of open parkland among the built-up hills, and along the coast to the north Babbacombe and Oddicombe give the town a second, quieter identity: a cliff railway down to a small, sheltered cove that looks nothing like the main harbour front.

Many of Torquay's grand villas and former hotels have been converted into boutique hotels, wedding venues and apartments, and the pitch for all of them is the same: a period building with a view over the bay. A photograph taken from a hillside garden gate struggles to show how a property sits against that view, the harbour below it and the neighbouring terraces on a sloped plot; from above, the relationship between all three is clear in one frame.

The harbour and marina bring a separate set of clients: boatyards, charter operators and yacht brokers, who need the moored yachts, the marina walkways and the bay set out together in one image, and event organisers using the harbourside for regattas and seafront gatherings through the season. Developers marketing the modern seafront apartment blocks lean on the same harbour view, usually alongside a wider shot that places the building against the whole sweep of the bay rather than in isolation.

Torquay's tourism economy runs beyond the coast too. Kents Cavern, set back from the seafront in its own grounds, is a show cave and visitor attraction that markets itself on its setting and grounds rather than any harbour view, and draws a different kind of aerial commission, one built around trees, paths and the shape of the site rather than water at all.

Most bookings in Torquay want the harbour, the marina and the layered hillside villas, but Babbacombe and Oddicombe offer something entirely different within the same town: a narrow, tree-lined cove reached by cliff railway, closer in character to a secluded beach than a resort front. A venue or holiday letting business based there benefits from being shown as its own place rather than folded into the main Torquay seafront image, since the two locations read as different towns from the air.

Light matters more here than on the more open stretches of coast nearby. Torquay's bay faces broadly south-east, sheltered by the headlands that also give it shelter from the prevailing wind, so the harbour and the villa-covered slopes catch strong, direct light through the middle of the day rather than the low, raking light that suits a due-east-facing front. Bookings are timed around that rather than around tide, since there is no significant estuary or exposed sand here to change with the water.