I stepped into The Corbyn Suites and I felt like I’d levelled up in seconds. Everything felt esclusive and clean, carpeted in forest green and furnished in mahogany with gold detail. It was 1998, the summer I turned eighteen and I was impatient for womanhood. This felt like a step closer to it.
This was in Torquay, where I had spent every summer since I was eight, but The Corbyn Suites were a completely different world from Summerdyne. If Summerdyne was a haven, the Corbyn was an upgrade. Or at least, that’s how it felt at the time. Because by then, I wasn’t just looking for escape anymore. I was looking for elevation.
The Corbyn Suites didn’t have flat numbers. They had names.
The Degas Suite.
The Monet Suite.
The Turner Suite.
The Phillips Suite.
Each one styled after an artist, complete with replicas of their work on the walls, as if you were stepping into a curated version of someone else’s taste.
We stayed in the Degas Suite first. My enduring memory is hiding in there from the rain. Every. Damn. Day. Rain tapping against the windows. Grey skies. Nights spent watching football, since it was too wet to go out, so we sat inside this carefully constructed version of “better” watching France win their first World Cup there, in a suite named after a French artist, which felt oddly fitting.
The Corbyn had things Summerdyne didn’t. Such as an indoor swimming pool nobody ever used. Magazines in reception nobody wanted to read. Cleaners you could request, for a fee that we never called on. A receptionist who never smiled. Wake-up calls we laughed about - who needs a wake up call on holiday?! There was a faint suggestion that this wasn’t just a holiday place, but somewhere people stayed on business trips, for longer stretches.
I remember the leather furniture in the Degas Suite was a bougie shade of green called “pampas” and I eventually discovered that it was the same in the Turner Suite and the Phillips Suite. There was a lift, because this wasn’t a place where anyone climbed stairs unless they had to. I’m sure a few people descended stairs with style though. Each apartment also had a Juliet balcony. You’d open the doors and there was the sea stretched out in front of you. Torbay glittered, even in the rain. I carry around in my purse, to this day, a small pebble I borrowed from the beach across the road from The Corbyn Suites. A good luck charm that I never want to part with - but I’ve told my husband I want the pebble returned to that beach after I die.
I remember the constant sound of traffic, trains behind the apartments that shook the building, car horns always in the distance and the occasional siren.
It was anything but peaceful. But it looked impressive and at that point in my life, that mattered to me.
But the enduring memory was the smell. Lilies. Always lilies. The kind of sickening, heady scent that hits you the moment you walk in and never quite leaves your nostrils, even once you’ve left the building. I ended up quite liking the smell since it reminds me of bougie summer holiday apartments but my mother really struggled with it and reached for the ibuprofen on more than one occasion.
I didn’t go to the Corbyn looking for comfort. I went there looking for a feeling that things were improving and therefore I was improving. I wanted to feel like I was moving up in the world, even if all that had really changed was the postcode and the furniture. I felt rich there, like I had stepped into a life that was waiting for me to grow into it. But really? It was just a nice flat.
But something was missing.
There were no gardens. I didn’t wander down long paths at dusk. We had no spontaneous conversations with other families. We lost the sense of belonging to a shared, temporary little world. I missed the morning stroll to Circle K in Walnut Road and wandering to Cockington for cream tea.
(Not that I would have eaten one anyway. By then, I was deep in ARFID, quietly navigating food in my own complicated way.)
The Corbyn didn’t feel cosy. It presented itself and you either matched it… or you didn’t.
I visited for three summers in a row, my last visit being 2000. I left for what I thought would be the last time the week before I tuned twenty. But it wasn’t the end of my Corbyn Suites adventures. I went back years later in 2011 for my son’s first holiday when he was four months old. I think we stayed in the Turner Suite, though I wouldn’t swear to it. What I do remember is a photo of him sitting in an unforgiving leather armchair, scratch mitts on his tiny hands, cradle cap, eczema-rosy cheeks… laughing like the world had already decided to love him, which, to be fair, it had.
That visit to The Corbyn Suites sits differently in my memory. It was less about proving anything and more about being there with people I love.
I never knew who owned the Corbyn Suites. I think that says everything. At Summerdyne, there were names, faces, and lives intertwined with the place. Jo and Derek and their family were part of the story. At the Corbyn Suites, there was only the image.
It didn’t know me and I didn’t know it. Nobody watched me grow up with each passing year and visit and I doubt anyone remembers I was even there.
You can still find the Corbyn Suites now. They’re on Airbnb, part of the endless stream of places interchangeable travellers can dip into for a few days.
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