page_title: Sidmouth
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Sidmouth / History
caption_attribution_description: Reproduction ID: G3377 Maker: Francis Frith &amp; Co Date: About 1924
context_page_description: Sidmouth is a town on the English Channel in Devon, South West England, 14 miles southeast of Exeter. At the 2011 census the population was 12,569, with a median age of 59. It is a tourist resort and a gateway to the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. A large part of the town has been designated a conservation area.
context_section_description: Sidmouth appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Sedemuda, meaning "mouth of the Sid". Like many such settlements, it was originally a fishing village.
  Although attempts have been made to construct a harbour, none has succeeded. A lack of shelter in the bay prevented the town's growth as a port. The most concerted effort was a short-lived attempt in the 1830s at the west of the seafront; this included the construction of the Sidmouth Harbour Railway along the seafront and into a tunnel at the cliffs to the east that would have transported stone from Hook Ebb. Only a few traces of the railway and tunnel survive today.
  Sidmouth remained a village until the fashion for coastal resorts grew in the Georgian and Victorian periods of the 18th and 19th centuries. A number of Georgian and Regency buildings still remain. In 1819, George III's son Edward, Duke of Kent, his wife, and baby daughter (the future Queen Victoria) came to stay at Woolbrook Glen for a few weeks. In less than a month he had died from an illness. The house later became the Royal Glen Hotel; a plaque on an exterior wall records the visit. Sidmouth was connected to the railway network in 1874, by a branch line from Sidmouth Junction, which from there called at Ottery St Mary and Tipton St John. This was dismantled in 1967 as a result of the Beeching Axe.
  In 2008, Canadian millionaire Keith Owen, who had been on holiday in the town and planned to retire there, bequeathed about £2.3 million to the community's civic society, the Sid Vale Association, upon learning that he had only weeks to live due to lung cancer. The bequest was used as a capital fund to generate an annual interest dividend of around £120,000 for community projects.
caption: Sidmouth Beach in 1924
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