The Grove sits on the Esplanade where the River Exe finishes turning into the sea, with a beer garden and an upstairs veranda that catches the sun since they swapped a solid wall for a glass one. It's a Young's pub, so you get Young's Original and Special, but the taps also run to Otter ales from up the road and Beavertown Neck Oil. The mussels are the thing to order. One reviewer put it plainly: "The Mussels were first class as was the service and to my delight the real ale was perfect." Dogs get a treat and a blanket. The kitchen does day-boat fish specials, and on weekend mornings from ten there's a full English and smashed avocado on sourdough, which tells you roughly who's staying nearby.
Walk into town and you reach The Powder Monkey, a Wetherspoon's in an early-eighteenth-century Grade II building on The Parade that used to print the local paper. It's named after Nancy Perriam, an Exmouth woman who served aboard Royal Navy warships in the Napoleonic Wars, filling shells with gunpowder. She was at the Battle of the Nile, and mending her captain's shirt when his ship went into action at Cape St Vincent. In 1847 she was one of three women refused the Naval General Service Medal on the grounds of being women. She lived round the corner in Tower Street, died at ninety-five, and has a blue plaque.
The beach does most of the work here. Two miles of sand, Blue Flag for a decade running, backed by the longest seafront promenade in Devon, with rock pools, ice-cream kiosks and Dawlish Warren's sand spit sitting across the river mouth. Queen's Drive Space runs a Jurassic-themed playground and an evening programme that includes pop-up cinema and, at least once, live opera on a screen. You can hire a paddleboard, a kayak or a windsurfer, or a "mega SUP" if several of you want to fall off the same board at once.
Behind the front, The Beacon is a Georgian terrace on a low hill of red sandstone. Lady Nelson lived at No. 6 for twenty-six years after Nelson left her, "a quiet and dignified life," and is buried a little inland at Littleham church, her railed tomb just inside the gate. Ada Lovelace stayed along the same terrace as a child in 1828. There's a blue-plaque trail if you want to join the dots.
Holy Trinity, the parish church, has a west tower that reads on the skyline from most of the seafront. John Rolle paid £13,000 to build it in 1824. Exmouth itself isn't in the Domesday Book — it grew out of two inland manors, Withycombe and Littleham, valued in 1086 at one pound and two pounds respectively.
Everything else is a short walk or drive. The Geoneedle at Orcombe Point marks the official western start of the Jurassic Coast, made from seven local stones. The estuary trail runs flat all the way to Exeter, and in winter it fills with avocets. The train, the little Avocet Line, has been running to Exeter since 1861, back when Exmouth first decided it was a resort.
