In St Ives, herring gulls dive-bomb for ice-cream and rib boats stalk the bay. I am listening to Lizzy, who lives in a van. As a child she lived on the hill in her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother had five bedrooms and six children: that was her estate. When she died, the house was divided between them. None could afford to buy the others out on a native St Ives salary, so Lizzy rented in the town: pretty cottages, and bungalows with views. She worked in retail and kitchens. When she had a partner, she had money to spend: a good life in a town that looks like a storybook.
She lost her partner and, two years ago, her bungalow became an Airbnb. With 18,000 on the waiting list, the council told her to go to a homeless shelter. Instead, she bought a van from a friend, insulated it and put a mattress in the back. She joined a spa to use the washing facilities, and she meets second homeowners there. “And they go, ‘Do you live here?’ I say, ‘I live in a van.’ And they go, ‘Where’s that?’ And I go, ‘I live in a van. You know – those things on wheels?’” All tourists have an obliviousness, but it is particularly marked in St Ives. They park Ferraris in loading bays meant for tradesmen, or stare at the sky. Braver ones wrestle with fish: I met a man on the quay as the flounder he had caught died, bloodied, in his arms.
St Ives is a seasonal town. Lizzy works 12-hour shifts in summer and saves money; she spent last winter in Thailand. She wishes she had bought the van years ago. “I was surviving, just getting by. Whereas now I live my life. It’s given me the freedom to be able to save the money I would have been spending to go travelling and do the things I want to do. I’ll probably end up in the future looking at something like a bit of land in Portugal.” She will, she adds carefully, share it with Portuguese natives. She wouldn’t inflict her experience of social cleansing elsewhere.
In winter, St Ives is empty and in summer, overwhelmed: a town that has lost its balance. Holiday cottages and Airbnbs fill the town with carnival, or absence, depending on the season, and locals are priced out. This dynamic plays out nationally – in Wales, Kent, Norfolk – but it has a brittle poignancy here. St Ives is, from its hill, the prettiest town in Britain and, as if cursed for it, it is also the patient zero of overtourism. I moved to west Cornwall seven years ago, to Newlyn, on the other side of the peninsula, but St Ives has a powerful lure on my imagination. I spent much of the last year driving across the moor, speaking to locals and visitors, trying to understand its agony, and magic.
One in, many out. Lizzy’s friend moved to Leicester when her rent increased by £400 a month. Of the three young people she worked with at a takeaway, one moved to Wales, one to Manchester and the third to London. She wonders if the stress of making rent is killing people because, she says, the native population is declining. “All you’re doing is paying bills. Panicking. Worrying.” She is lucky, she says, to pay nothing, because she parks up on the cliffs: even a caravan on a piece of land can be £600 a month. There are tent villages on cliffs and in valleys now – a man camped on a grassy roundabout until his tent was removed by the council. Meanwhile, the old fishing town is empty, and businesses cannot get staff because there is nowhere for them to live.
“Why would you buy a house just to come and use it for a short amount of time?” Lizzy asks me. “Why wouldn’t you just come down and, you know, stay in a hotel?” I think the answer is a deliberate unseeing. She wonders if the bubble will burst: after Covid people got greedy, raised their rates, and Airbnbs are quieter this summer. Council tax on second homes will double next year. She thinks many owners will sell up, and I agree: the slightly rich will be replaced by the very rich. When a local referendum in 2016 decreed that all new housing should be for locals, construction declined.
I ask her: aren’t you afraid to park on the cliffs? The National Trust knock on the van sometimes, she says, to ask what she is doing, but a policeman told her just to say she’s tired. “It was a bit scary at first but, to be honest, I’m quite a strong character. Things don’t faze me too much. Some people couldn’t do it. And” – now she laughs – “I’m a taekwondo master.”
The St Ives food bank is in a late-Victorian villa above the station: trains bring tourists like the tide on the half-hour. Everything in St Ives feels tidal: the harbour empties twice a day, the town twice a year. Outsiders have come since the railway opened in 1877, and made myths: Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence; the artists Patrick Heron, Barbara Hepworth and Sven Berlin; the occultist Aleister Crowley; Joachim von Ribbentrop, who wanted to rule a theoretical Nazi Cornwall from the Treganna Castle resort. American academics visit Woolf’s childhood holiday home and, learning it is private, stare through the hedge, seeking.
The food bank has a different clientele. Its founder, Chris Wallis, shows me round. It is clean and echoing, and they pay £12,000 a year to rent it, plus bills. They used to use a Methodist chapel, but it was wet and the food rotted. The food bank began in 2010, Wallis says, at the request of the town council. They served four families a week in summer and 12 in winter. “Now, we’re serving an average of 30 families a week in the summer and 60 in the winter, because of the seasonal work element and the fact that house prices, or rentals, are so high. People are really struggling these days.”
Demand was high during Covid because pensioners, who are often too proud to ask for help, were afraid. Wallis is worried about them: “What’s happening now in terms of how they’re coping?” The cost of living crisis has led to another spike. Donations rose during Covid; now they have halved. The food bank fundraises, picks up excess food from supermarkets – “end of shelf life stuff” – and works with Gleaning Cornwall who, at this time of year, deliver broccoli, potatoes, marrows and cabbages (“What’s been left in the fields as being not to the standards of the supermarket, like wonky food”).
Wallis is also worried about local children. “I know from the schools that they have been doing breakfast for the kids because they haven’t had any food before they come. But now it’s the summer holidays. Who’s giving them school lunches and breakfast?” He is soothed by the fact that there is more work in the town because it’s summer, and parents are cleaning holiday cottages or working minimum-wage jobs in the town. Cleaners are scarce and rates have gone up: some get £18 an hour now, but prices rise to meet them.
It’s hard to get donations from visitors because unseeing is essential to a fantasy of west Cornwall. If you know local children are living in insecure, mould-slaked housing and eating from food banks, it’s harder to follow your own paths into its dreamworlds. Cornwall is increasingly sold as a wellness destination, and if you have pity for others, you have less for yourself. Even so, some visitors donate. Wallis says a Swiss couple give £500 each year. People ring and ask him to collect excess food from their holiday cottage when they leave.
At the St Ives School of Painting overlooking Porthmeor beach, in November, the artist Camilla Dixon is teaching a course: observation and abstraction. She makes work about environmental activism through the lens of St Ives. Postwar, it was the world centre of western art, but St Ives is tidal, and it didn’t last. Later I will see Dixon’s 2024 show Original Rebels in this room. Her work Disruption details how Patrick Heron prevented the Admiralty from using the Penwith Moors as a training ground for helicopter pilots. A Figure in the Landscape shows how Barbara Hepworth stopped part of the town being made into a car park. If St Ives is a town of competing myths, it is also a town of competing needs, and Dixon yearns for balance. Foresight is a collage of Fore Street, where Hepworth sat down to prevent the cobbles being torn up for tarmac in 1967: she told the workmen she was valuable and if they touched her, she would sue them. In Dixon’s painting, the cobbles are gold.
I meet a student who is legal counsel for a multinational company in the Netherlands. It is his third visit to St Ives and he hopes to live here one day. He says he loves the colours and the smells. Then his face changes and he tells me, “My life is pretty chaotic at the moment. Stressful. I’m trying to find some kind of way of coping with this without going crazy, without falling into a big black hole. I’m not seeking to be featured in the Tate gallery. For me, art is a way of staying sane.”
I meet a woman from Kent, widowed suddenly before lockdown. She is in St Ives “trying to have new experiences”. She says she heard shanty singing this week and followed the singers as they moved from pub to pub: she knew they were not tourists. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to get out my camera or do a video.’” Rather, she made a pen and ink drawing in her notebook because to draw something is to really see something; or to change the way you see it. I think that is why people come to west Cornwall: to change the way they see the world. But, in coming, they change St Ives, too.
On a blazing Saturday in June, I meet Dixon again on the harbour beach. She is planting yellow flags with red inked messages in the sand on a rising tide, surely a deliberate metaphor. People Need Homes Now. Let to a Local. Locals Need Homes. Homes for All. Two small yachts in the harbour carry sails that read Holiday Homes Cause Homelessness & Wreck Lives. First Not Second Homes. “St Ives and Padstow are among the poorest towns in Cornwall but also have the highest proportion of second homes,” Dixon says. “Regulating the change of use of a dwelling house to a holiday home, through planning and developing a culture of ecotourism, would allow Cornish communities to benefit from, rather than be displaced by, tourism. I believe we needn’t have a housing crisis, but it would require a complete change of attitude to property, entitlement, leisure and the culture of staycation colonialism.” She wants “to raise awareness of the direct connection between holiday homes and homelessness, to create stigma around ownership instead of status, to open that conversation peacefully – but urgently”.
A local woman is on the beach, looking on with her child. She was asked to leave her rental in 2022 and spent 10 months in emergency accommodation. The fellow residents were so chaotic, she says, she was too frightened to leave her daughter alone in the room. Now she has a job with accommodation included: it wasn’t the work she wanted, but she took it for the home. “It’s just a rich man’s playground down here now,” she says. “You used to be able to discern different accents – St Ives, Penzance, Porthleven. Not now.”
In February I visit the Penwith Gallery with Ken Turner, 98, an artist, activist and former teacher at Central St Martins. He did a performance here in 1999. He bound himself with wood and ropes, and lay on the ground. Then he got up and walked to the gallery. “And as I was walking up, I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ I approached the gallery and banged on the door and kept banging, saying, ‘Let me in! Help! Help! Help!’” A woman opened the door and looked at him. “I had written on cardboard the words: ‘This gallery, the Penwith, is moribund.’ She looked at it and said, ‘Piss off.’” He laughs. Another time he wrapped a piece of cod in plastic, presented himself at the Tate – it was closed – and told the guard, “I’m here as a work of art.” The guard, surely a Cornishman, replied, “Oh, that’s a nice bit of cod. You’d get lots of fish and chips out of that.”
Turner won’t paint St Ives. He can’t, and for this I find him singular and touching. He knows it is a dreamscape and he prefers to paint reality. When I meet him, he is painting Gaza. We view the seascapes for sale. Turner, mostly, doesn’t like them. He points at one. “It’s supposed to be the sea,” he says, “but it has no idea what the sea is, what it feels like. You go into the sea and feel the torrent. You feel the waves. You feel the power of the sea.”
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Artist and activist Ken Turner, who fears tourists are destroying the town. Photographs: Harry Borden, Orlando Gili/The Guardian
A few months later, in May, we return. I wonder why the paintings have no people in them: are they St Ives in winter? Turner says they are academic. “It’s all technique, and nothing else.”
We meet two women who ask what he paints. “I paint with social themes like climate change, wars,” he says. “I think it’s necessary for artists now to look at what’s happening to the planet. The planet is dying. We’re killing it. And these paintings are not observing that. They’re ignoring it.
They think they’re making art, but what’s art for? Why did Rembrandt paint like he did? Why did Michelangelo sculpt like he did? Because of the conditions of the time: the church. It’s very different here. The motivation is to produce interesting works. And I’m fed up with interesting works. I want passionate works, fully felt from the heart, from the guts.”
“You’re tourists!” he cries at the two women. “Tourism is destroying!”
“We’re doing a course at the School of Painting,” they say sadly. “It took us an hour and 40 minutes to park.”
In winter I go to the St Ives Feast Day, and the hurling of the silver ball, to celebrate the consecration of St Ia church. This is when St Ives belongs to itself, and this is what they do. At the well of St Ia, the town’s patron saint – she crossed from Ireland on a boat made of ivy – the vicar blesses a silver ball. All the townsfolk wear ivy round their necks. The musicians of Bagas Porthia play the old folk tune Bodmin Riding: the drumbeat of the Earth. A procession walks to the church by the lifeboat house and the mayor throws the ball – sterling silver around a core of applewood – to the children of the town. He shouts in Cornish, “Guare wheg ya guare teg” [fair play is good play] and it is theirs until noon, when they must return it.
Matthew Pascoe stands on his boat Gemma and pulls lobsters in St Ives Bay. A hundred years ago there were 250 fishing boats here; now there are 20, and in summer they are outnumbered by tourist craft. He is from a St Ives fishing family; his father taught him to fish “a long time ago. It’s very rare you don’t catch anything. But whether it’s a day’s work or not is a different story.”
In winter he makes nets in his loft on Porthmeor beach, which is immune to holiday letting. As part of the alliance between artists and fishers unique to St Ives, the lofts are let to fishers in perpetuity and artists work in the studios above: Ben Nicholson, Heron and Francis Bacon once painted here.
From April to September, Pascoe fishes for lobster. His cousins fish out of Newlyn, whose harbour never empties, so get more fish. I ask why he doesn’t. “It’s just being at home, really,” he says. “You’re in control of your own destiny. It’s all on your head. I wouldn’t do any other job.” Fishing used to be “a collective enterprise. Fifty men, one net, catching herring off Porthminster beach. It’s dog-eat-dog now. You can still earn £500 a day.” Though not every day: the weather, and the fish, forbid it.“That’s why it’s fishing! Fishing not catching!”
He likes to fish at night when the tide permits. Last week he fished on “a handsome night, flat calm, not a breath of wind. If there’s any wind from the north, it’s not very nice at all.” Dolphins keep him company; seals are his rivals. He says he once lent his boat to a friend, and some visitors, staring from a holiday cottage, rang the police and said the boat was chasing dolphins. “I’ve never chased dolphin in my whole life. You can’t eat a dolphin” – he looks aghast – “but they’re chasing you.”
The gulls dog him: one tried to take a cheese and ham sandwich from his hand, three miles out. “I’ve watched them evolve, attacking on the harbour front,” he says. “Working in teams, one from the front with no intention of thieving. I’ve seen people bleeding. You don’t see a seagull before half-term. They know when it is.”
Pascoe pulls up a pot, throws the spider crabs back, saying, “They’re worth nothing.” The brown crab is too small to sell. So is the lobster, which is blue-black and tiny: “You get bigger prawns than this.” He measures some lobsters. He throws back a pregnant one – the eggs are black – and one marked with notches on the tail to denote fertility: the stocks must be preserved. He empties each pot, adds bait and throws them back.
Within two hours he has nine saleable lobsters. He is doughty, but I find one tiny piece of sentiment. He once caught a vast lobster – an ancient, perhaps 70 years old – and threw him back in. “You know what,” he told the lobster, “you go back.” He excuses himself by insisting such a large lobster would be hard to sell. We look at the nine. “It will have to do. Because it’s all I’ve got.”
As we return, I ask him about the competing fantasies of St Ives. He points at a wooded hill, where people protested about the removal of trees. “Those trees,” he says, “were only planted because the gardener couldn’t be bothered to cut the grass 200 years ago. That part of the Treloyhan estate was open gardens. You look at all the old pictures from whenever it was built. It’s open fields. But people are up in arms about the woods being destroyed. There was nothing there to begin with.”
I knock on an open door in the old town, which locals call Downalong. It is answered by Phyllis Rashleigh, who moved here from Lancashire when she was five. Her husband was born in this house, and she says she will tell me how St Ives used to be. Her parents had a hotel in Fore Street in the 1950s, over what is now a Mountain Warehouse shop, a bright, pale house with 13 bedrooms. “And it was hard work,” she says, “but everybody did that.” Richer people bought Victorian terrace houses on the hill for B&B, and fishermen’s wives rented out the best bedroom. “They had a family who stayed with them, and that same family would come down every year. Then the visitors were mostly working-class people. Each season would be a carbon copy of the one before, because before those people went home, they said, ‘Save me the same week next year.’
“I know people who are in their 90s,” she says. “They still come and say, ‘Oh, we’ve been coming to St Ives for the last 70 years. Oh, we used to stay with Mrs So-and-so in such a street, but she died, and then we stayed with so-and-so.’” But it’s not like that now, she says. “It’s impersonal, and the holiday lets are usually owned by people who’ve bought them especially for that purpose, who don’t live here. They’ve hired it out through an agency. Nobody knows who actually owns it.
“Nobody lives here any more out of season,” Rashleigh adds. “If you go uptown now you won’t see many people. I’ve just walked down from Tesco and I don’t think I’ve met four. We’ve got a parking space at the Sloop Inn and most of the people there will be tradesmen, because this time of year scaffolding goes up like a forest because everybody wants their work done before Easter.
It’s just changed completely,” she says. “We’ve lost all our banks, all of them. We’ve lost all our post offices, except one at the back of the toy shop. Most shops are boarded up except in the summer. Most of the cafes have shut down for the winter.”
When she was a child, Rashleigh’s next-door neighbour was Barbara Hepworth. “Mother used to say the lady next door was an artist and sculptor. We used to lean over the wall and wave to her, and she was very nice: a very quiet lady, always smiling. We used to draw pictures to show her and she’d look at them and draw a bit of smoke coming out of the chimney or something like that, and smile and give them back.”
Hepworth had a machine for sculpting, Rashleigh says, “for chiselling rock. And it was in the days when TV was quite primitive.” As she watched with her parents, “wavy lines would come on the TV. Father used to say, ‘Oh, Miss Hepworth is doing her sculpting again.’” She remembers when Hepworth died in a fire in 1975. “The firemen said she was lying in bed looking quite peaceful, but black from head to toe.” She remembers Sven Berlin, whose novel The Dark Monarch added more myth to St Ives. She remembers his car. “He had a very old-fashioned, open-top car with a hood like a pram at the back of it. He used to park it outside the Union at dinner time and go in for a drink. You could do that then because there wasn’t any other traffic.”
These myths are multiple. They grow on top of each other. It is said Crowley performed dark magic at Carn Cottage in Zennor, a few miles away. Bob Osborne, the artist who wrote Zennor: Spirit of Place, says he found someone sacrificing a goat at the cottage. A local farmer told me he was working nearby and his dogs fled.
I ask Rashleigh how many people live in Downalong all year round? “Well, I don’t know. That’s a holiday let,” she says, pointing as we walk, “that’s a holiday let. That’s a holiday let, that’s a holiday let. That’s a holiday let, that’s a holiday let. The one with the white gate there: she lives here. She’s a relative of ours. Holiday let, holiday let, holiday let – all empty.
“It’s been going for the last 20 years, bit by bit by bit,” she says. “You see they’ve all got names on them and no lights on.” The names are gruesome, and sea-themed. Did you know the people who lived here? “All of them,” she says. “Sea Fever, that belonged to Eileen.” She points again. “Maggie had that one. Edward Perkins’s mother that one. Another Eileen had that one. Peggy had that one. You could go on and on and on.” We pass the graveyard: of course, the dead can stay.
“Local people don’t own St Ives any more,” she says. “It’s all speculative. No lights on anywhere, nothing. All shut up this time of year, it’s just dead, for sale. I wonder how much that is?” Homes on Downalong cost £400,000 and more. We pass council houses built for fishermen after the war, but they left. Rashleigh’s nephew, a fisher, said he couldn’t stand the garden birdsong he heard when he lived at the top of the town. He missed the gulls.
In answer to the question of how many people live in Downalong full-time, I will say maybe nine. The same as Pascoe’s lobsters. We stop at a house called Ahoy There. I gawp, while Rashleigh gropes for another name, less absurd. She pauses, then says, “Nowhere.”