‘There are no Cornish here any more’
St Ives has become a ‘mini Monaco’, and the priced-out locals have had enough. talks to residents on both sides
In the end, he was told the shirt could not be framed in time. LindonTravers marched out empty-handed and decided to write a letter to the local paper, detailing his frustration at being treated like an outsider. He titled his missive: “Turkeys voting for Christmas”.
“They know they cannot survive without the second home-owners,” he says. “This is just shooting themselves in the foot.”
The recent EU vote (in which 182,665 Cornish residents opted to Leave, and 140,540 to Remain) was the second referendum held in St Ives this summer. In May, the town also voted overwhelmingly to ban the sale of new homes to outsiders. Some 83 per cent of voters from an electorate of 7,300 chose to back the ban.
In St Ives, they call these interlopers “emmets”, the old Cornish word for ants. And on the sort of fine summer’s day we have been experiencing, they swarm down the steep cobbled streets in their droves.
Supposedly, according to LindonTravers, some locals are so keen to differentiate themselves from the throng that they go so far as to place “non-emmet” stickers on their car windscreens.
The irony is that Lindon-Travers himself is a local, of sorts. He was educated at Humphry Davy Grammar in Penzance (named after the Cornish inventor of the mining lamp), and in 1976 his father Kenneth built St Nicholas Court, a development of 49 apartments in St Ives, constructed out of local granite and Delabole slate. The complex was in the vanguard of the town’s second-home revolution, and today the majority are holiday lets.
Back then, with the tin mines closed, pilchard fleets dwindling to a few boats and tourism yet to take off, a home in Downalong, the old part of St Ives, was available for a few thousand pounds; now, more than 80 per cent of properties are holiday homes.
James Veal, 79, a retired builder and grandfather of five, who was born in St Ives and has never left, bought his property near the harbour for £2,500. He says a house has just been sold around the corner for £1.3 million.
“There are no Cornish people here any more,” says Veal. “The beauty of this place is its downfall, and what I mean by that is the clientele it attracts – the millionaire brigade. The only thing a millionaire is interested in is making a second million, and they are quietly changing things all the time.”
As we speak, an endless procession of visitors tramp past the harbour. A report released in 2014 by Visit Cornwall (based on 2012 data) found St Ives attracted 540,000 day visitors annually and more than 217,000 staying visitor trips. The £85 million a year spent by tourists was the second highest figure in the country.
On the harbour front, amid the Cornish pasty bakeries and fudge shops, are restaurants such as the award-winning Porthminster Café, where one can watch the sunset while sipping espresso martinis, or Louis Roederer Cristal at £205 a bottle.
While the town always braces itself for a summer influx, this year, says Lynn Wilkes, who works in a chocolate shop, the numbers have been overwhelming. “It’s a beautiful place and we love it, but sometimes it’s just too much,” she says.
Wilkes, like almost all locals, doesn’t live in St Ives and has a house up the coast in Carbis Bay. Others, such as Paul Le Bas, live over the bay in Hayle. The 43-year-old is an estate agent and volunteer on the St Ives lifeboat. He says there is no way he, his wife and two children, aged 15 and 12, could afford to live in town.
An estate agent in St Ives for 17 years, Le Bas remembers selling his first £100,000 home just before the turn of the millennium. Nowadays, Residents know tourist cash props up St Ives; they just do not want it to become a theme park.
Norman Laity was born in St Ives in 1941 and lives on Westcott Quay. He bought his home in 1993 for £37,000. Now it is worth in excess of £600,000. “I’m completely surrounded by holiday lets,” he says, sitting on his sun-soaked balcony which has panoramic views across the harbour. “But, the point is, that is how it works. The second homes bring visitors and visitors bring money.”
Laity is a proud Cornishman and has Pentreath as his middle name – he is a descendant of Dolly Pentreath, the last native speaker of the Cornish language who died in 1777. However much property prices rise, he insists he will never be persuaded to sell up. “They can bury me here.”
As we speak, tourists swarm in the street below us. Regardless of his defiance, perhaps it is inevitable that one day this Cornish citadel will also fall to the emmets.