The sea-front of Teignmouth, following the semi-circle of the Den, is decoratively imposing when viewed at a little distance, for there is much virtue, architecturally, in a crescent, however little there may be in the houses individually. They are ambitious buildings, chiefly in these times boarding-houses, but with the “Royal Hotel” and the ugly East Devon and Teignmouth Club prominent among them. According to intention and to the description given of the Club-house in local literature, it is in the Ionic style, but seeing that it is of brick and rubble, faced with plaster masquerading as stone, we shall not be far wrong in declaring that, in spite of—nay, because of—its colonnade of squatty columns pretending to be Greek, its style is more fitly to be described as “ironic.” There is, indeed, a great deal of very bad architecture in Teignmouth, of the pretentious kind; very solid, stolid and ugly, and the newer houses, although more pleasing to the eye, are generally of an incredible flimsiness. If the natural scenery of sea, land, and river were not so surprisingly beautiful, the builders’ handiwork would long ago have ruined Teignmouth, and it says much for the natural advantages of the place that, although there are less than half a dozen decent bits of architecture, ancient or modern, in the town, it is voted delightful by thousands of holiday-makers. It is because I love Teignmouth so well that I criticise it so closely. For the sake of the place that nature has endowed so richly, one must needs protest against the things that have been done, the blunders and the vulgarities that have been perpetrated. Was ever there a place where advertisements could look more offensive? Yet the entrance to the pier is smothered with them. They stand boldly out against the scenery, and your view across to Torbay or to Exmouth is obliterated by the pushful poster and the enamelled iron sign. Frankly, they are grievous mistakes. One does not always want to be playing Rogers’ pianos, nor even, for that matter, Paish’s; and there are times—incredible though it may seem—when Fry’s Cocoa and Dunville’s Whisky are distinctly _de trop_. But enough! Coming into Teignmouth by the sea-wall, almost the first building met with is East Teignmouth Church, almost wholly rebuilt in recent years, from the 1887 Jubilee Tower downwards. It is one of Teignmouth’s two parish churches that once formed a couple owning the unenviable distinction of being pre-eminently the ugliest churches in all Devon, but now that the Jubilee and later activities have utterly altered the aspect of this church of St. Michael, East Teignmouth, that unlovely brotherhood has been dissolved, and St. James’s, West Teignmouth, reigns supreme in the kingdom of the grotesque.