Words: Ed Cumming
The picturesque village of Feock, on Cornwall’s south coast, is not an obvious place for a battle. It sits on a peaceful estuary just south of Truro, where the River Fal becomes the Carrick Roads on its way to the sea. On a rare sunny morning in mid-May, sailing boats and ribs bob contentedly at their moorings. Dog walkers amble along the beach. Beneath the placid surface, however, tensions are reaching boiling point as Cornwall prepares for its busiest summer ever. “It feels like the calm before the storm,” says Alastair Smith, who owns the kayak rental business on Loe beach. “We’re going to get hit, which is good. Normally I only get bookings on the day, but this year I’m booked for late August. People are thinking ahead.”
In recent weeks, however, Feock has become an epicentre of rising tension. In April, a local roofer, John Carnon, reported that his motorboat had been targeted, its hull damaged. One night a little later on, Mike Bastian, an oyster fisherman, was awoken by a call telling him his boat’s anchor had been cut and its battery smashed. Without the quick actions of his family, the boat would have sunk. The family called the police. Bastian said he was “gutted” and that “people like this need hounding out because they’re horrible people.” He put a sign up on his boat saying. “Please leave the boat alone, leaving friendly Feock on Tuesday.”
The estuary at Feock, Cornwall, where the calm waters hide bubbling tensions
Bastian’s daughter, Erin, said she suspected that the vandals were local second-home owners, whose views might have been impeded by the boat’s mast. “People are protective of their lands, views and beautiful, massive second homes,” she told reporters. “I find it shocking that a local person could do this to another — to actively damage another’s livelihood so callously in such a calculated manner.” On a Facebook page, Sarah Hill weighed in: “I have never known such un-welcoming people in such a beautiful place to non-Cornish people. Always blaming outsiders first, without evidence. Shame the people aren’t as nice as Cornwall itself.” These are not isolated incidents. Up and down the coast, there are reports of property being damaged or going missing. If the cases in Feock are unusual, it’s because the aggression is being directed at the locals rather than the incomers. Often it is the other way round. In nearby St Agnes, Steve Ridholls, a former policeman, put up a sign saying: ‘No more second homes (our village is dying!!)’.
Nonetheless the vandalism encapsulates the struggles of a county where relations have long been fraught between the rich and poor, residents and tourists, locals and incomers, blow-ins or ‘emmets’, in Cornish slang. For all its gorgeous Grand Designs homes and manor houses, the county is also one of the most deprived in the UK, with stubbornly high unemployment and an economy increasingly reliant on tourism.
“People like this need hounding out," said Mike Bastian. "Because they’re horrible people..."
The pandemic has amplified these contradictions and inflamed tensions between locals. There are fears things will get even worse as peak summer approaches. With the UK opening up while most of Europe remains on the government’s amber or red lists, discouraging foreign holidays, British holidaymakers will be heading down to Cornwall in droves. Brexit, which south-west England overwhelmingly supported, had already encouraged local holidays — but it had damaged international tourism and Cornwall’s remaining other industries, like farming and fishing. Add to this the general exodus from cities, which has seen rural property prices rocketing as more and more professionals realise that, thanks to Zoom, they can trade pokey London flats for expansive country properties with no hit to their career. Then on top of it all, there’s the G7 summit from June 11-13, where Boris Johnson will host world leaders including Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron at the Carbis Bay resort in St Ives. Between all these forces, Cornwall is shaping up for the biggest summer in its history. The events of 2021 could shape the relationship between locals and incomers long after the dust settles on this extraordinary year.
A sign in Padstow, in April 2020, warning tourists to stay away
Inevitably, plenty of attention has been focused on property prices. In April, the property website Rightmove reported that Newquay was the hottest market in the UK, with eight out of ten listed homes selling since the start of 2021. The rest of the top ten was concentrated in Devon and Cornwall, with inner cities lagging behind. An earlier survey in conjunction with the BBC found that Cornwall was the most searched-for location on the site.
“It has gone crazy,” says Bradley Start, a partner at local estate agency Start & Co. “We’ve always had people looking for second homes, but it’s more than ever. Supply is at an all-time low, demand is very high. It’s nice for everyone who’s got a house, not so nice if you haven’t got one. In the last six months there’s been an increase of 15-20% in house prices. I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unprecedented.” He adds that as well as being pushed by Covid, buyers have also been drawn by Cornwall’s excellent PR in the media over the past few years. Between Rick Stein, Poldark and John Nettles’ Devon & Cornwall series, there has been no shortage of appealing aerial shots of the Cornish coastline. Start says locals have always grumbled about being priced out. “There’s always an element of resentment,” he says. “The locals will jump on social media and say [the price rises] are all well and good, but we can’t afford anything. Frankly, it’s the laws of supply and demand. There are plenty of places they can still afford houses, they just might not be overlooking the sea.” Rather than a short-term bump, he thinks this could be the start of a more lasting shift. He says: “when you look at the investment in water sports, restaurants and other facilities, coupled with people realising they can work from Cornwall rather than the City, I think it’s a long term thing.”
"Holiday homes in Newquay are being let for nearly £8,000 a week..."
Prices for rentals and holiday lets have gone through the roof, too. Everyone with a spare patch of land is throwing up shepherd huts, teepees and “glamping pods” faster than you can say “profiteer”. Meanwhile, Start says decent-sized family homes around Newquay are being let for up to £8,000 per week. Others report prices have nearly doubled. In St Ives, a three-bedroom former council house was sold off and demolished by its new owners, who have replaced it with a £7,000-a-week holiday let. The Carbis Bay resort itself has not been shy of making the most of its moment in the spotlight. In advance of the summit they embarked on drastic expansion works, with bulldozers and tree cutting. The Council urged them to stop what it called “unauthorised” work, but the hotel carried on regardless. “I think it’s a disgrace that this summit, which is meant to be looking at the effects of climate change and the environment, is being organised and hosted by people who obviously don’t give a damn about either,” said local councillor, Luke Rogers. None of the rooms are available for the weeks before and after the summit, but earlier this month it was reported that the hotel was charging up to £4,000 for a single night’s accommodation on June 4th. It’s in contrast to figures that show 17 Cornish neighbourhoods are in the top 10 per cent of the most deprived in England. Before the pandemic, almost 20% of children were living in poverty.
St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall
The expected influx will put pressure on Cornwall’s infrastructure, already stretched to breaking point in peak season. Smith owns a small camping pitch, as well as the kayak business. “We haven’t advertised it anywhere, but somehow people are still finding out and asking to book it,” he says, adding that a big problem is the roads. “Cornwall was designed for horse and cart,” he says. “Nobody imagined such a thing as a car would ever exist.” At the Punchbowl & Ladle, just up the road from Feock, landlord Roan Spring has put in extra seating and a new beer garden. “We’re trying to utilise every corner of the pub to make money and cover the bills of the past year,” he says. “You can already feel it’s getting busier and busier on the roads. There’s going to be enough trade for everyone to be successful. It’ll be the busiest season anyone’s ever seen, but we need it.” Since he took the pub on, he has refurbished it to be more appealing to tourists. “Before we took over, it had lost its love. It had become ‘locals only’. You would never come down from London and walk in because there would be a group of locals not allowing you to get to the bar. It was very important to me to stop it being the kind of place where people would drink 15-20 pints and be shouting and screaming at one in the afternoon.”
“Cornwall was designed for horse and cart — not a Range Rover Evoque..."
Blood can run high at the beach, too. Reubyn Ash is a former European surf champion who now runs a surf school at Widemouth Bay, near Bude in North Devon. “Last summer most days were like the busiest day of a normal summer and it’s going to be the same again,” he says. Tourists invading established local surfing spots is a perennial problem in the water. “Surfing definitely has a bit of localism. There are established places that people have spent years surfing, and then you get new faces who turn up and expect to get in the mix straight away, which is very much not the case,” he says. “It’s like if a guy has a fishing spot and one day he comes down and finds someone sitting in his chair, he might have something to say about that. If people show respect, it’s fine, but if they turn up with a car full of people and don’t respect the local community, they’re going to get told to go away. There’s a hierarchy, an etiquette, and a lot of people don’t abide by it.”
In Newquay, some house prices have nearly doubled
None of these are new problems for Cornwall, which has been battling many of these issues since Ross Poldark was in breeches. Tiki Yates, an entrepreneur, moved to Crackington Haven from London more than two decades ago. From his base there, he has run several businesses, including a touring company that helped organise concerts for The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, among others. He is circumspect about the current anxieties. “Unlike many other places in England, Cornwall exists with a permanent emigration of its native sons to seek their fortune,” he says. “It’s a hard place to make a living. By the same token, people who’ve made money in less beautiful places have flocked down here to buy houses.”
There’s nothing new about it, he adds. “It’s always bubbling below the surface. This year has brought it into view and put a particularly sharp focus on things. It’s brought out in parts of Cornwall extremely xenophobic behaviour. People who are normally law-abiding find themselves nearing vandalism or eco-terrorism in some cases.” He says he knows of people who had their house burned to the ground during the middle of building works. “The Cornish applaud people who come down and throw themselves into the community. They don’t applaud second home owners, but in economic terms the county is utterly dependent on tourism. There aren’t any other businesses here.” Recently there have been proposals to look in Cornwall’s old mines for deposits of lithium, much sought-after for high-tech batteries, but they have so far yet to bear fruit. Agriculture struggles to achieve competitive scale on small, often steep fields.
A possible upside from covid-19 is that a boom in working from home encourages more of the kinds of long-term professional migrants, who become active members of the community. Yates says he realised years ago that you don’t need to be in W1 to run a business, although he shies from calling himself a local, despite having lived there for more than 20 years. One factor in Cornwall’s tensions is that it is near enough to London to come for the weekend but too far to commute every day. It’s partly an accident of geography, and partly a function of the south-west’s notoriously poor transport infrastructure.
Not every move out from London is as successful as Yates’. Last November, buffeted by a breakup and the pandemic, the journalist Katie Glass upped sticks from Dalston to Marazion, near Penzance, in hopes of a new life. Despite throwing herself into local life, volunteering with students at Falmouth University, she says she never felt accepted.
St Ives beach in summer 2020, where overcrowding has caused tensions to run high
“Cornwall has its own culture war going on, about incomers with Range Rovers and new Barbour jackets coming down and pricing everyone out,” she says. “But like all culture wars, the reality is a lot more nuanced. I joined a Facebook group called ‘follow your dream to Cornwall’. They weren’t all Londoners. There was a nurse from Manchester, a guy who worked in a shop in Birmingham. People with normal salaries and normal jobs who just love Cornwall.” For some, she says, the pandemic became an excuse to air old prejudices. “There were signs saying locals only, or that outsiders were ‘putting locals at a risk of death’. Cornwall had legitimate concerns about covid, but it all felt a bit angry. Covid became a lightning rod for things people were worried about anyway.” When she wrote about her travails, she received angry messages on social media. In one case, a new neighbour sent her an aggressive email before she had even moved in. Another time, someone took a copy of one of her articles to warn a potential vendor against selling Glass her house. This month Glass admitted defeat. She wrote in her Telegraph column that she was giving up and moving back. “One thing after another went wrong,” she says. “Houses I was looking at fell through, I was ill, I couldn’t meet anyone. The vibes were wrong.”
Down at Feock, meanwhile, there is little outward sign of festering enmity. Like many with seasonal businesses, Alastair Smith has found it tough going at times over the past 14 months. He is looking forward to the summer. The more people who make it down, the better “I don’t know there’s been much more [fighting] than usual. People always jump on those stories about ‘no incomers,’ but they’re always there. I’m looking forward to earning some money. It’s always a long winter down here, but this winter has been particularly tough. Sometimes it can be an all or nothing business. When we’re busy, we’re really busy.” In the endless battle for Cornwall, there are always winners and losers.
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