Tresco Island Cornwall... or the Caribbean?
This private island in the English Channel has the royal seal of approval – but will it get Hattie Garlick’s vote?
“We’re going on holiday to Tesco,” the seven-year-old told people haughtily. “Cars aren’t allowed, so I’ll have a bike.” When she scribbled her “holiday goles” (“eat new foods”), the image of her pedalling up and down aisle six sampling different types of hummus was so joyous I almost wished it were true.
What a difference an “r” makes. Tresco is the only privately owned island in the Isles of Scilly – 30 miles off the Cornish coast, two and a half miles by one mile, and out in the Gulf Stream where a microclimate allows subtropical plants to flourish. The white sand is flecked with mica, so it genuinely glitters. Regular visitors to this “Cornish Caribbean” include the royals.
Two things caused Tresco to break the internet last summer. First, a regular, year-round helicopter service was launched from Penzance, cutting the journey from a choppy two hours and 45 minutes through the waves to a 15-minute glamorous glide above them. Then, the Cambridges booked another summer break. The hype about the island, though, was of limited utility to those of us who are intimately familiar with the layout of our local Tesco since, in August, you could holiday in Mauritius for much the same money.
This, we realised after stumbling awestruck from the helicopter and into our beach-front cottage, is perhaps fair enough. Some holiday snaps of the two would look surreally similar – hallucinogenically pristine beaches, crystalline water, palm trees… The light in
Tresco is so vivid that arriving is like stepping from black-and-white Kansas into the Technicolor paradise of Oz.
Here, however, follows a less poetic but potentially more pertinent detail. Our cottage – Flora – sleeps six comfortably, eight cosily, and costs nearly £7,000 a week in August. In November? £1,505. We are clearly not the first to discover this hack. Cycling around on hired bikes, big extended families were everywhere. “In August, this beach would be covered in day trippers. Now, we have it to ourselves with the grandchildren. It’s a haven from the modern world,” one grandmother told me.
Over the next few days, the children would pedal every inch of this car-free island, discovering beaches daily. They explored Cromwell’s Castle and the famed Abbey Gardens in total solitude, barring the birds, butterflies and red squirrels that played fearlessly with us.
Change is in the sea air, too, making off-season trips more tempting still. Fifty years ago, you brought your own bed linen here with you. Today, you can charge posh ready meals to your cottage from the small (and very chichi) general stores, or flat whites from the new Flying Boat Café. Organic Ila treatments are available in the spa complex, alongside an indoor pool, sauna and gym.
Accommodation is also in flux. Our Flying Boat Cottage is one of 12 that sit right on the sand beside the shop, café and pool. While the bedrooms and bathrooms display an aristocratic distaste for visible evidence of the fortune you have spent securing them (spotless but lino-floored bathroom, perfectly comfortable bedroom seemingly kitted out from Ikea) the sitting room has recently been spruced in a style that will soon seep upstairs. On the island’s east coast, new cottages such as Seabreeze and Lighthouse show what is to come – slouchy linen sofas, open fires, whitewashed walls and Roberts radios.
I met Nick Halliday, Tresco’s chief executive, at the New Inn, one of its two restaurants. In contrast with the bright Ruin Beach Café, this one is decked out like a cosy smuggler’s tavern. Come spring, its 16 rooms and the “pavilion” lounge will reopen looking far more welcoming and luxurious. But not, crucially, unrecognisable. Halliday has consulted regular guests in an attempt to preserve the island’s eccentric character. The pub itself – crowded with maritime trinkets and portraits of locals with names such as “Long John” – will not be touched.
The designs he showed me – tongueand-groove wall panelling, sea-green shades – look promising. But it’s the world outside, really, that draws people back to Tresco. On our last evening, we lay on the jetty at the end of our garden and stared up at the stars. “I love Tesco,” said the seven-year-old. “I’ll save my pocket money so we can come every year.” Every little helps.
A family of four can stay on Tresco from £1,000 per week in low season. Penzance Helicopters fly to the island from £122.50 per person, one-way, year-round