Making a down-at-heel port town trendy

DAMNED if you do, damned if you don’t. We all have that feeling sometimes, but perhaps politicians suffer it constantly. Regular readers will know I don’t often defend the people who like running countries but this week, as I sat in a new West Country arts centre eating a delicious platter of food, I was thinking about the impossible dilemmas they must face on a regular basis.

The arts centre was a prime example. It has taken a long time to bring the East Quay development at Watchet Harbour to completion – partly because the port wall collapsed just feet from its front door and partly because of Covid. But the female-led Community Interest Company (CIC) which has worked hard to see the thing through got there on Tuesday, just in time for Somerset Arts Week.

I like the place but it’s an unusuallooking building which, according to one observer, bears an appearance that suggests “local schoolchildren have come along with Lego and each done their own thing – not following a plan…”

In other words, like so many architect-designed contemporary artspaces, it has not been met with universal acclaim. A bit “marmite” as people say.

After putting photos online this week I was surprised by the onrush of opinion which swamped my social media accounts – most in favour of the development, I hasten to add, with many saying it was much better than the semi-derelict wasteland it was built on.

If you don’t know Watchet, it used to be a busy commercial port. I remember it with two, three or even four cargo boats at a time bringing esparto grass or mountains of wastepaper bales to the town’s giant paper mill (now demolished and also a semi-derelict wasteland ripe for development).

When industry disappeared a marina was built, but it has been plagued by the Bristol Channel’s infamous mud. So the working dock area lost direction and became the sort of place which tumbleweed haunts and time forgets.

Enter: The Onions, as the CIC is known. Now the East Quay is home to two art galleries, 11 artist studios, an artisan paper-mill, a geology workshop, print studio, restaurant, education space and five accommodation pods. I put you in the picture because what is happening at Watchet could, in so many ways in so many locations, become the story of our green and pleasant peninsula.

News of the development has reached the ears of national newspapers and several in the last month have described Watchet with superlatives such as “England’s most desirable affordable seaside town…”

Suddenly the long-forgotten port is making headlines. An estate agent told me prices of terraced houses in the old part of town are rocketing. The 1,000-year-old seaport where the tide goes out so far you can hardly see the sea, is becoming trendy.

The East Quay lights now twinkle in the maritime dusk and the place shines like a grounded container ship that can be admired from the church which inspired Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner all the way down to the fossils at low tide in the petrified submarine forest.

A light switch is turned on and suddenly a town or community is enjoying the kind of acclaim and fame it’s never seen before. People want to be there – to come and see what all the fuss is about. Another headline claimed Watchet was now in the top six most popular UK places searched for on Airbnb.

Inevitably, some have been voicing fears that this will lead to what’s known as the “Frome Effect”. That’s how media commentators describe the “yuppification” of eastern Somerset – a finance-fuelled tsunami which came down the tracks from Paddington and swamped places like Frome with London earnings and property-acquiring dosh. If you don’t believe this syndrome exists, spend an hour in Bruton.

If that can happen in east Somerset, it can move 40-miles west to the county’s dramatic seashore. Watchet is only a mile from the Quantock Hills AONB and three miles from the borders of Exmoor National Park. In other words, it has a great deal going for it as well as a new arts centre.

“They should never have built it! It’s made Watchet trendy and soon no local person will be able to afford to live here!” declared someone on social media. But a larger chorus chanted: “The East Quay is brilliant – just what the tired town needed!”

So how do politicians deal with such levels of polarised opinion? You wouldn’t want to stop developments which brought jobs and vibrancy to a town, but neither would you want to see the unique social make-up of an ancient settlement broken up and ruined forever.

Me? I’d ban second-home ownership locally or tax it heavily and I’d put tight controls on converting homes to holiday lets, while supporting the arts centre and its associated projects. But no one listens to newspaper columnists, so I guess in Watchet and many other West Country locations, it’s a matter of watch this space…

Some voice fears of yuppification with places swamped by the wealthy