Always Worth a Detour

The conversion of main country highways into freeways means that it is now possible to drive long distances through populated rural areas and not see a town or township. Country towns of historic and economic importance are bypassed and reduced to exit signs. This is a pity, because country towns are as much a part of the countryside as the plains and paddocks around them. If you don’t see them you only get half an idea of what the country as a whole looks like.

The towns are the places where the aspiration and endeavour of generations who have wrenched their living from the land on those plains and paddocks—or in the bush or by the sea—have found visible expression in bricks and mortar. They are places of administration and commerce. It was the town that offered farmers, isolated on their properties, relief from the solitude of work in the companionship of the community. Country towns, sleepy or busy, carry in their being the social history of the countryside, and for anyone interested in our national fabric it’s worth taking the exit and spending a few hours looking around the town it leads to. It doesn’t matter whether the town is “historic” or not, large or small, or even a town at all. The smallest hamlet of three or four houses, a derelict shop and a one-room school among the willows by a dry creek will have something to reveal to the visitor who looks for it.

Most country towns have an “information centre” where you can pick up a leaflet with a map of the town and perhaps an itinerary for a “self-guided” walk with a numbered list of local places of interest. These are no doubt helpful in their way but I have found in my experience of visiting country towns that visitors’ brochures often leave out the kind of things that the historically- or architecturally-minded visitor will want to see, the buildings of substance and significance, the town halls, mechanics’ institutes and churches that are the essence of a town, buildings that the townspeople take for granted and the local tourism marketing board doesn’t regard as “attractions”, preferring instead cafés, wineries and old train rides.

The most satisfying way to visit a country town is to leave the tourist guide on the back seat of the car (in case you need the map part of it) and to use your own powers of observation. When you identify those buildings and monuments that chart a town’s growth and present status (which compared with the nineteenth century can mean decline) you get to know a place, to enter into its history and see why it came to be as it is. You see what it has in common with other similar towns and where it differs. You recognise it as you do an individual, with its own character, not merely as the background to a farmers’ market or wine and food festival.

Visually a town is its buildings: it is the buildings that attract the eye and distinguish one town from others that may be demographically and historically similar. True, the kind of civic and public buildings that you see in country towns are found in the big cities, especially in older and inner suburbs that were once themselves effectively small towns, but they are seen to better advantage in a country town because there are fewer of them and they are not lost in a city-centre forest of steel and glass. Many of the fine nineteenth-century buildings that were once the pride of the state capitals now lurk like pygmies in canyons between the office behemoths that since the 1970s have given those cities their character, such as it is—an anonymous international character that could be Denver or Johannesburg. In the country, historic buildings can still largely be seen as their architects and builders intended them to be seen, with their cupolas and roofs forming the town’s distinctive profile. I have found that there are certain types of buildings in most country towns that are almost always of interest, inside and out—indeed, inside is often more interesting than outside. You can generally see them all quite easily in a visit of a few hours.

The town I have in mind will have a population of not more than three or four thousand, though it could be much smaller. It will be in the less deserted parts of New South Wales and in southern and seaboard Queensland, in central and southern South Australia and the south-west corner of Western Australia. There are towns like it all through Victoria and in Tasmania. (Tasmanian towns are especially rewarding and easy to visit; their architecture is amongst the finest in Australia and is concentrated into a smaller state.)

Like nearly all country towns, the one we are entering is built on a river or creek, willow-fringed, which you rattle across on a bridge with timber planks showing through the bitumen. The bridge is due for widening, or replacement, because it inconveniently slows down the gigantic B-doubles that its venerable fragility obliges to inch their way across it. Beyond the bridge you are in the town’s outer fringe of motels and service stations.

As you park your car in or near the main street (it is not usually hard to park even in the middle of a country town) you will immediately notice a prominent Town Hall in Italianate style, opened with much pomp in 1882 when the municipality was proclaimed. This was an era when public architecture was intended to impress with its dignity and—if the building was in a town considered important enough—grandeur. The dignity will still be intact even if local government boundaries have changed and the Town Hall is no longer used for its original purpose. Probably a higher proportion of public buildings in country towns no longer fulfil the function they were built for than in the city, such has been the change and decline in country life. The Town Hall we are visiting might now be occupied by the local historical society and museum. Or its stately pilastered auditorium, with proscenium arch and heavy plush stage curtain fringed in faded gilt intact, could well be full of antiques and old wares, set out on little stalls on the dance floor over which debutantes once glided. Town halls inside will be every bit as stately as outside and it is worth trying to get in, although if the Town Hall is still a place of municipal administration it might be difficult to penetrate beyond the counter where the rates are paid. Even then, if no one is looking, you might be able surreptitiously to ascend the imperial staircase that rises from the entrance hall and open the heavy cedar doors at the top for a quick look into the council chamber, all polished panelling and leather and heavily framed portraits of past mayors.

In the 1930s there was a rash of public building in the more important country towns, and some town and shire halls date from then. They are usually built of cream brick in a mildly Neo-Georgian style and many are very good examples of their type. Their auditoriums were sometimes designed to double as a cinema, as some still do. Hospitals and schools often date from this era too.

Of more recent construction, there might be a 1990s extension to the Town Hall of glass and treated timber and curved sheets of corrugated iron in the “Australian vernacular” idiom. This may house the vastly expanded offices that councils seem to need today, or a library (with an exhibition of “kids’” coloured drawings), or a Performing Arts Centre where cutting-edge theatre is staged thanks to various public subsidies, or an art gallery (see below). It might contain them all.

If the Town Hall doesn’t have a clock tower the Post Office certainly will, or the clock will be let into the facade if there is no tower. Post offices in country towns are generally adjacent to the Town Hall, sometimes forming a group with the Court House. If built in Victorian days the Post Office will be of Classical design in stone or of brick faced with stucco, not dissimilar in spirit to the Town Hall. But in many towns the Post Office is Edwardian and built of exposed brick in the Arts and Crafts style (this was particularly popular in rural New South Wales). In a smaller town, where there is less enthusiasm or energy for implementing head-office diktats, the Post Office might still bear the royal cipher on its facade; most of these were removed from post offices in an act of republicanism by stealth in the 1980s. An inspection of the Post Office interior is unlikely to be rewarding. The main chamber will probably have been partitioned and have had its ceiling lowered—if it’s still used for postal business at all. In many towns Australia Post has moved out of the Post Office into a shop further up the street, and the Post Office is now used, like the erstwhile Town Hall, as an old wares market or a second-hand bookshop or, if the town is one that attracts gastronomically minded visitors, as a restaurant-bar-grill where an urban émigré chef contrives elaborate dishes from “fresh locally sourced ingredients” but with too many flavours. In this case it will be called something like “Zsa Zsa’s at the Old Post Office” and the postal chamber will be hung with enlarged black-and-white photographs of 1950s movie actresses. There will be tables with market umbrellas outside and piped disco music everywhere.

Music might also, improbably, be heard in the Court House, where formerly the silence was broken only by the solemn sound of justice being dispensed. Judicial proceedings have been transferred from many smaller towns to bigger ones and the Court House vacated by the majesty of the law is tenanted by yet another café or antiques market (in which case the strains floating above the stalls will be classical) or perhaps, given the building’s inherent dignity, by a more august body such as the town’s historical society (which might be expected to be sans music).

These civic buildings, actual or erstwhile, are the most prominent in the long wide street that is the heart of the town. If wide enough the main street might have a plantation up the middle with seats and a band rotunda and a statue or two of some past civic dignitary. A larger, nineteenth-century, town will almost certainly have a statue of Queen Victoria and there may be one of Edward VII or George V but not their successors. After the First World War public funds for marmoreal commemoration of monarchs were scarcer, because rural economies suffered badly in the Depression.

What funds were available were spent on the war memorial—in smaller towns a soldier in slouch hat and puttees on a plinth, his rifle by his side, a grander structure in bigger towns, perhaps in the form of a circle of classical columns with “France” and “Mesopotamia” incised around the cornice and lists of First World War fallen on long bronze plaques inside. The names from the Second World War have the appearance of afterthoughts, crammed onto a memorial which, having been erected to commemorate the end of the war to end war, was not furnished with space for further instalments of bellicosity. Any names from the Korean or Vietnam wars have been fitted in wherever they could be, perhaps on a shard of granite set up nearby. Except on Anzac Day, country war memorials often give the impression of being ignored by everyone except the pigeons. The old soldiers have faded away and the RSL across the street has turned to poker machines to pay its way. There may be a First World War cannon nearby, surrounded by heavy iron chains climbed over by children, or in a coastal town some rusted-iron-brown anti-shipping mines, impotent but still sinister.

Somewhere outside one of the public buildings there is likely to be a monument of another kind, a Bills trough, gift of a wealthy animal-lover to the working horses that were once ubiquitous in the streets of country and urban Australia. There are some seven hundred of these troughs, installed under a trust fund set up by manufacturer George Bills, who in 1924 became a life governor of the RSPCA. In some cases there is a smaller subsidiary trough at the foot of the larger one, for dogs and cats.

Occasionally you will see, in a substantial town, a civic clock tower rising above the plane trees in the main street, the gift of a rich local benefactor. The other prominent buildings in this street are pubs and banks. Bank buildings were designed to be solid and dignified and thus proclaim the seriousness and permanence of the institution they represented. They are not universally still fulfilling that purpose. Some banks—if their marketing departments at head office feel the town can still yield enough profit to deserve a branch—have “relocated” to bright new premises in a shop from which the dark forbidding woodwork and mausoleum-like hush of banks of yesteryear have been banished in favour of pastel-hued user-friendliness. All the banks had a house architectural style, and though the building, like the Post Office, might now be an estate agency or restaurant, it is easy to tell that it was a bank, and which one. The Commonwealth Bank rebuilt many of its premises in the 1930s in an elegant Classical Moderne; the National generally retained its 1880s Italianate; the ES&A, later absorbed into the ANZ, was primly Neo-Gothic and built in brown brick.

The pubs in the main street are still used for what they were built for, though the original Victorian buildings have in many cases been remodelled and overlaid with the preferred styles of later generations. Thus you will see two-storey verandahs once trimmed with cast iron now encased behind Art Deco arches. The 1930s seems to have been a particularly enthusiastic era for pub remodelling. People were buying cars and “touring” in greater numbers and hotelkeepers were competing for their custom to augment that of the commercial travellers for whom the residential pub had traditionally catered (there is one hotel named the Commercial in just about every Australian town).

If you are staying a night in the town and you feel you can manage as visitors of earlier generations did without an en-suite bathroom, you might choose to experiment with one of the main-street hotels rather than a 1960s motel in mission brick with its ersatz “Victorian” cast-iron balconies and carriage lamps, its noisy air-conditioning and cigarette-burned bedside tables with the lamp too low for reading by. To book in, you make your way around the side of the pub to the “residential entrance”, where a sign advertises “boutique accommodation”. Up a blackwood staircase with squirl-patterned carpet a dark corridor stretches the length of the building. You are probably the only guest. Peering for the room number and scratchily pushing the key into the 1950s lock (no smart-cards here) you will find yourself in a high-ceilinged room with a comfortable if squeaky bed, a wash-basin and a vast wardrobe full of twisted wire coat-hangers. You may later discover that you are also in a species of gas chamber into which the eccentricities of the internal ventilation bring the accumulated smoke from the bar below while the live band in the bistro keeps you awake half the night. At least it will have been cheap.

The main street is lined with shops of various eras, the older ones with graceful wide verandahs trimmed with wrought-iron filigree and arching out over the pavement, and here and there an unmodernised Victorian shopfront. Unmodernised interiors are few, but old-established family businesses such as the draper and haberdasher might be essentially unchanged inside since at least the 1940s. There are still shops in country towns that have, unused but in working order, a “cash carrier”, a system of overhead wires on which, when the shop assistant pulled a handle, a canister containing the customer’s money shot across the shop to a cashier on a kind of central throne, who sent it whizzing back with docket and change.

In a bigger town there will still be a butcher and greengrocer and other useful shops, though many fewer than there were before the supermarket appeared on the site of the former bowling club in the street behind. There may even be an embalmed 1930s milk bar with a moulded plaster ceiling in the jazz moderne style and zigzag cornices lit by fly-specked fluorescent tubes. In a smaller township possibly one general store will survive and any other shops will either be empty or sell old wares and collectibles—the generic name for the assortment of superannuated toasters and china that share the front windows of such emporia with two or three blowflies hopelessly buzzing their last before dropping to join their predeceased fellows on the sill below.

The town may also have a late-nineteenth-century theatre that at some point became a cinema and is now a domestic-appliance warehouse or DVD-hire shop. Since conversion to these latter uses required only the removal of the seats, the upper parts of the interior could still have their original Rococo decoration of curlicued plaster, a bit dusty but intact. Dusty, too, will be the local-history museum, housed in some redundant public building, with its collection of old newspapers that look as though they’ve lain under someone’s linoleum for years and sundry discoloured objects unidentifiable without reference to a handwritten label on the glass-topped case. Country museums tend to open irregularly and it is more than possible that this one will be shut when you turn up; but if you do manage to get in you will find the elderly volunteer in attendance a mine of information on the town and its history, far more instructive than the brochure, though possibly less concise.

On display will be a world gone by immortalised in black-and-white and sepia photographs of the town in yesteryear. The principal buildings are recognisable but they stand out pristine and unweathered, with a newly minted look, as if they haven’t yet settled in among the humpies and straggly scrub you can dimly make out in the background. How proud stands the new Post Office above the ruts and mud of the main street with its sparse traffic of bullock-drays and jinkers! There is the opening of the Town Hall and the arrival of the first train, with top-hatted dignitaries and the mayor in his chain and ladies with parasols. Groups of local worthies gaze into the primitive camera: a shopkeeper and his customers, moustachioed and shirt-sleeved with waistcoats and hats, posing stiffly in front of a boldly-lettered shop front; the watch-chained manager of the mine or mill and his dust-streaked personnel holding their tools of work; a Sunday School picnic of ragamuffins with spinsterish teachers in voluminous black dresses. How many descendants of these people are in the local telephone book today? Perhaps not many, except for some of the farmers. People in trade or employment left in droves during the Depression.

The largest and oldest established towns will also have an art gallery full of nineteenth-century rural landscapes—many of them quite sumptuous—and glowing still lifes by Australian painters of the 1930s and 1940s. The gallery itself will be new (perhaps part of a civic cultural centre)—an exciting design by a celebrated avant-garde architect, with lots of glass, sandstone and exposed treated timber. It will smell of toasted focaccia and muffins and echo to the clattering and tinkling from the café in its foyer.

At the town’s imposing railway station, the booking hall is empty and a bus timetable has been pasted onto one of the closed ticket windows. On the long asphalt platform with its slender cast-iron stanchions supporting a wide roof there is no movement save that of the occasional pigeon strutting across the patterns in chiaroscuro formed by the sunlight and shadow. Country stations that are still in service often appear empty and abandoned for most of the day. They were built as the town’s principal connection with the rest of the world to be used by everyone who travelled, not for the few pensioners or schoolchildren who board the train or two a day to which the timetable has been reduced.

The architectural style of country stations is generally Classical of the late nineteenth century, the age of railway expansion, but their size and grandeur—there are towns where the station is the most notable building—are now out of proportion to their contemporary importance in the scheme of rural transport. Even for carrying freight, rail has been eclipsed by road. At the station we are visiting, a row of goods wagons sits motionless and rusting in the marshalling yard and the cavernous entrance of the handsome brick-and-stone engine house beyond reveals only dark emptiness inside. A tall round water tower, with corbels like a medieval fortress supporting its projecting upper storey, still keeps sentinel over the yard; built to last forever, it has become redundant. Stations in wheat districts will have a soaring set of silos, visible over the flat and fertile countryside for miles after you have left the town.

Some country stations open only at weekends, when railway preservationists turn up in their cars to play trains. Everyone has a wonderful time working on the rickety collection of cast-off carriages or taking it in turns to drive the engine on destinationless steam-train rides half a mile up a section of restored line and back again, with more blowing of whistles than were ever heard when the station was a proper working one. To the credit of these enthusiasts, they have ensured that a number of lines that would have disappeared altogether still function in a sort of way. One group of preservationists in Victoria has restored a branch line so completely that it has been grafted back onto the main railway network and can be used by ordinary passengers.

In some towns there is no station but there used to be one. It is interesting to work out where. The obvious clue is the Station Street which exists in almost all country towns. Nowadays this leads to a dead end with a few houses and empty building blocks, but if you look closely and use your sense of direction to establish which way the line would have come in and gone out of the town you can usually make out a grassy hump where once there was a platform. Other relics can then be recognised. What looks like an abandoned boarding house standing all by itself well away from the town centre turns out on inspection of faded lettering to be the one-time Railway (or Station) Hotel. Unmistakably of railway origin is an iron-roofed weatherboard cottage of the sort once found beside every railway crossing in town and country. It would have been a stationmaster’s or signalman’s house. If you look from the cottage back towards the station you may discern the shape of an embankment on which the tracks once lay, now cut across by roads and with gaps where the timber trestles that carried the line across drains and culverts have been dismantled or burnt in bushfires.

The town will have an 1880s government school of brown brick with pointed windows and an elegant spirelet on its slate roof. As the alma mater of some minor national notable—a politician or a pioneering aviator—it is one of the few buildings in the town to qualify for a mention in the visitor’s guide. There will be a two-storey red-brick Roman Catholic school built in the 1930s and a large convent now in the hands of secular owners who run it as “boutique accommodation”. The municipal library, if there is one, is likely to be in a 1960s “contemporary” extension to the Town Hall or, in a town without such refinements, in the late-Victorian Mechanics’ Institute, a weatherboard hall with a single-storey Italianate pilastered front which is also of timber but grooved to look like stone (“Queen Anne at the front and Mary Anne at the back”, as they used to say). Here you can consult the recently commissioned municipal history, which has made much use of the early photographs of the town in the museum collection.

Of all the buildings in a country town the most varied in style are the churches. You will probably have to locate them yourself since guidebooks are unlikely to list them unless they are associated with a music festival. They are interesting because they have evolved with the town. They have been added to and furnished and decorated by successive generations of townspeople so that in a way they are a record of the life of the town itself.

A country town will generally have at least three churches whose architecture, stained glass, pipe organs and other fittings make them worth stopping and looking at outside and in—if you can get in. Until ten years ago Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in country towns were usually left unlocked. Now most are not, and the explanation is always vandalism and theft; insurers won’t insure a church that is left open and unattended. It’s a sign of the change that has come over country towns in which householders too used to leave their doors unlocked. No one is that trusting nowadays. If however you can get into the church, if necessary by borrowing a key from the vicarage or manse, the memorial tablets around the walls will give you a good idea of local names and who was who in the town and the hazards the pioneers faced—death by bushfire, in floods or rivers or at sea by drowning, in mining accidents, in attacks by Aborigines, in childbirth—the first two of these far from eliminated today. Other tablets proclaim the prodigious ages some country people live to. If there is a churchyard with graves the same stories can be read, succinctly incised in weathered stone.

These stories can be read in greater numbers at the town cemetery, which should always be visited. The most pleasantly melancholy cemeteries are those on a patch of land among the paddocks on the edge of a township, where the air is heavy with eucalyptus and chirruping and there are not many new arrivals nowadays to join the long-mouldered dead whose headstones have been heaved into crazy angles by the settling of the earth.

Of the three churches the most architecturally appealing, even if seldom the largest, will be the Anglican and Presbyterian. In a town which has had a certain substance, these will be in correct Gothic Revival style of the 1850s to about 1885, built of limestone, sandstone or brick or (especially in Victoria) bluestone. In a town where there has never been much money a church may consist of a short brick or stone nave with iron or weatherboards blocking up the opening in the end wall where it was intended to add the chancel that will never now be built. A very small town may have timber churches, indistinguishable from the community hall next door except for pointed windows and the noticeboard, also pointed, on which the once- or twice-a-month service is advertised amid much scratching-out and over-painting where service times have been varied.

A tower or spire is usual on churches in bigger towns if they were finished before the Great Bust; otherwise there will be a stump, perhaps surmounted by a timber and galvanised-iron bell frame. A congregation that has maintained a degree of prosperity may have added a tower in the 1950s when church attendance was still good, but if, as is common, a modified—that is, cheaper—design was used in place of the tall structure in the original architect’s drawing, the result will be disproportionately small, with the tip of the spire hardly higher than the roof of the church. If there is a tower or spire, there is a high likelihood it will carry the further adornment of mobile phone transmission apparatus, sometimes tactfully but not effectively disguised as an over-large cross.

In those considerable tracts of the country where there was a Scottish predominance among the earliest settlers the Presbyterian will be the bigger and more prominently sited of the two churches. It will still be Presbyterian too, its congregation having rejected the 1970s union with the Methodists and Congregationalists. A smaller church will in most cases have been absorbed into the Uniting Church and subsequently sold when several combined congregations retreated into one building. In many towns you will look in vain for the church of one or two of the three uniting denominations until you realise it too is now an old wares and collectibles market, a craft gallery or the home of “Heavenly Pizzas”.

In the past more than now, not a few non-churchgoing Protestants expressed their belief through Freemasonry. The sometime hegemony of the Craft over at least half of the town is demonstrated by a two-storeyed Masonic Temple of about 1920 with a sombre grey-stuccoed façade and the square and dividers in bas-relief on the pediment. The architectural inspiration (of the front—the back is unembellished red-brick utilitarian) is De Mille Babylonian. The masons are fewer now and the Temple looks permanently locked, though a “hall for hire” sign is propped in one of the frosted-glass front windows.

The largest church, and the last built, will be the Roman Catholic, dedicated in Irish solidarity to St Patrick, St Kevin, St Colman or St Finbar. It is likely to be a product of the 1930s, the culmination of a series of temporary churches that preceded it and are now incorporated into the Catholic school as classrooms. Its style could be Romanesque with a campanile, Byzantine with copper-capped cupolas, or Neo-Gothic with or without a tower. A parish large and rich enough to have built its church in the nineteenth century might well have a fine edifice in French Gothic with a high timber vault and a nave tinted with orange glass and divided into three by arcaded aisles. At the far end an elaborate marble altar and reredos with niches and pinnacles fills the chancel (unless it has been removed in supposed conformity with the prescriptions of the Second Vatican Council) and there are rather too many plaster saints standing around on pedestals. Even in the rare cases where it is not the largest church in the town the Catholic church will have the largest congregation (although the Pentecostalists who rent the Masonic Hall are catching up).

But most country churches are not growing. The majority have tiny congregations with hardly anyone under middle age, where a generation or so ago they were full every Sunday. This is partly attributable to the decline of the rural population but more so to the abandonment of religious practice, which took longer to make itself felt in the country than in the city. Country people used to be statistically quite devout compared with urban-dwellers (though get to know a country town well and you will find that in recent years some of its residents have discreetly transferred their adherence to witchcraft). It is now becoming clear that a considerable number of churches in country towns will not survive as such much longer and the visitor should look at as many as possible while they are still there. Hundreds have already closed. You can find townships with three or four churches and not one used for its original purpose.

The pretty little Gothic edifice of brick or stone you see from the road, just after the “60” speed sign has indicated the existence of an otherwise invisible hamlet, still has its bell hanging in the bellcote but there is smoke rising from a metal chimney and a sign on the front gate says “Private Property”. If in addition an SUV is parked beside the porch you will know that the church has been “recycled” as a second home by someone who has enhanced the beauty of its exterior by installing solar panels on the roof. If the attendant vehicles are a ute on blocks and a rusting Kombi van it has become home to rural hippies, an increasingly common category of country resident. Either way the new owners will have got a bargain when they bought the church after services were given up for lack of a congregation.

Older and larger country towns usually have Botanic Gardens with venerable trees and gravel walks and a pleasant absence of modern sculpture (what there is of that will be in front of the new library or Town Hall extension). If not gardens, at least there will be a park, by the river or the lake if there is one, with a rotunda of sprightly iron columns and conical roof, and, as our generation’s contribution, electric barbecues. In the streets around the park are various large houses surrounded by lawns and shrub-filled gardens and representing a compendium of architectural styles. These were built for the plutocracy of the town in the years between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s, when many country towns ceased to grow.

Not all that I have described will be found in every town or township and much will be found that I have overlooked. My portrait of a town is a composite, but then all towns are composites, which is why each is in its own way distinctive. Location too imposes its own character.

The further one travels inland the less urban a town will appear. There may be a few trees along the creek and a triangle of brown grass around the war memorial but in an outback town there won’t be much else in the way of greenery and the scrubby plains are never far from sight even in the main street—you look out at them from the hotel beer garden or catch a framed glimpse down the alley between the general store and the garage.

Coastal towns have their own invariables—a jetty with its perpetual anglers or a wharf where fishing boats tie up, to the sustained screeching of seagulls overhead; a lighthouse, where these days you can stay in the lighthouse-keeper’s erstwhile quarters in comfort the lighthouse-keeper never knew; and a long esplanade lined with refurbished Victorian guesthouses and a marina crowded with gleaming yachts, where the Norfolk Island pines along the seafront form a pattern of dark green cross-hatching against the turquoise and white of the breakers beyond.

In each type of town there may be several buildings worth visiting, or streets of them, or none, but for those with eyes to see there is bound to be something that has made the detour worthwhile.