Aerial photography and video in Sidmouth

Sidmouth sits in a steep-sided valley at the mouth of the River Sid, closed in by Peak Hill to the west and Salcombe Hill to the east, both rising well over 150 metres. The town forms a kind of amphitheatre around the river and the esplanade, a shape that is obvious from above and almost impossible to read from ground level, where the hills simply frame the edges of every view rather than showing their true scale against the town.

The housing stock is unusual for a town this size: an unusually complete Regency and early Victorian core, rendered and painted elevations, ornate ironwork on balconies and verandas, and elaborate architectural detailing throughout the old town. Later villas climb the valley sides above that core, and the more ordinary post-war housing sits further out at Sidford and Sidbury, away from the seafront entirely.

Sidmouth's esplanade hotels, several of them grand Regency or Victorian buildings in their own right, sell on their position as much as their rooms: the seafront, the valley behind and the hills either side all belong in the same image as the building. Estate agents marketing a Regency townhouse or an esplanade apartment have the same need, since the architecture and the setting are equally part of what a buyer is paying for.

Connaught Gardens, on the clifftop above the esplanade, is used for weddings and small events, and photography there benefits from showing the gardens in their clifftop setting, with the sea and the coast beyond, rather than as an enclosed space alone. The Jurassic Coast cliffs either side of the town are a further draw for anyone marketing walking routes or coastal accommodation nearby.

Away from the esplanade, Sidford and Sidbury sit further up the valley, with more ordinary post-war housing rather than Regency terraces. Agents and developers marketing property there are usually selling to families rather than second-home buyers, and the pitch is different: garden size, parking and proximity to the town centre matter more than sea views, and an overhead shot showing how close a house sits to Sidmouth itself, without being part of the tourist core, does that job better than a photograph of the house alone.

The valley shape that makes Sidmouth so photogenic also funnels wind straight up the town off the sea, and the hills on either side create gusting, turbulent conditions around the higher ground, so flights here are planned with an eye on wind direction and timed for calmer windows rather than flown to a fixed schedule regardless of conditions.

Sidmouth's summer folk festival fills the esplanade and the town with visitors for a week each year, and events on that scale are exactly the kind of thing an aerial shot captures better than anything taken from within the crowd itself: the scale of the gathering along the seafront, set against the valley and the hills that shape the whole town, is a view nobody on the ground actually gets to see.