Dear city slicker, wish you weren’t here...
Fear and loathing of ‘second-homers’ is awash in Britain’s holiday villages, finds Peter Stanford
Some of the warnings are blunt: “Locals only”, etched in the sand on a beach in St Ives, Cornwall, or “Visitors go home”, daubed on to a sign outside the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh. Others convey the same sentiment but in a rhyming couplet. “Don’t infect us,” implored a yellow banner outside the town hall in nearby genteel Southwold, where 60 per cent of properties are holiday homes, “respect us”.
All, though, give voice to the same fear that those escaping soaring levels of infection in our big cities during the Covid-19 lockdown to take up residence in a bolt-hole in sparsely-populated coastal and countryside areas will bring the contagion with them.
Reports of open hostility to such evacuees are legion: the village shop in sleepy Devon refusing to serve “outsiders”; the notices under windscreen wipers of cars parked in a north Norfolk seaside town popular with ‘second-homers’ telling them to “b----- off ”: and a Cotswolds’ village Facebook group labelling those retreating there from London “irresponsible idiots who should be locked up to save the rest of us from them”.
Enforced social isolation and the ever-present fear of catching the deadly virus from neighbours who are not playing by the rules is having an impact on every community during lockdown, often alongside the “We Are All In It Together” spirit. But in holiday-home areas, the impact is greater as it exacerbates long-standing tensions between permanent and “irregular” residents.
Gordon Ramsay and his wife Tana have decanted their five children, aged from one to 22, from the family’s London home to sit out Covid-19 at their luxury beach house close to the “Chelsea-by-the-sea” hub of Padstow in Cornwall.
Locals are up in arms. There have been threatening posts on community social media sites and pictures of the celebrity chef in a finger-wagging altercation next to his Land Rover in a local high street.
Government guidance is that everyone should stay in their “principal residence”. Cabinet minister Brandon Lewis, who represents the Norfolk coastal town of Great Yarmouth, has explicitly told those with holiday homes to stay away. Yet Ramsay – like many second-homers – has argued that with his grown-up children now living in their own places, the Cornish property is where the family gathers and therefore counts as their main base. And, he adds, they arrived before the Government issued instructions for everyone to stay put.
To prove he isn’t a complete leper in Cornwall, he has also tweeted a picture of the freshly grown asparagus
‘I’ve been coming here since 1948, and have never witnessed such animosity’
left on his doorstep by a well-wisher, complete with a note that reads: “A little gift from the fields across [from] your house.”
Some do seem to accept that these are nuanced decisions, tied up in family connections, but within affected communities, on both sides of the insider-outsider divide, no one is denying the tensions right now. “It is worse in the towns rather than the villages,” says one Londoner staying at his cottage in rural Suffolk, “but we’re keeping a low profile.”
On the north Norfolk coast, where some prime locations have only 13 per cent of houses permanently occupied, matters are closer to boiling point. “I have been coming here since 1948, and have lived here all the year round for two decades,” reports one home-owner, “and I have never witnessed such an undercurrent of animosity.” She echoes locals’ fears that the influx of well-heeled citydwellers could cause a spike in infection rates: “The community here is mainly elderly and many are acutely worried about how our overstretched hospitals will cope.”
Friction between locals and holiday-homers is nothing new in such areas. Even if the part-timers do push up property prices, many argue that they contribute to the community by boosting the local economy.
What lockdown has done, however, is close many of the pubs, cafés and amenities where they would spend their money and sustain jobs.
“It has always been a fine balance,” reflects one local mother in Norfolk, whose grown-up children, like her, work in servicing the second-homers, “but when we hear about someone dying from the virus who worked at our local hospital, it inevitably makes people very anxious. They look for someone to blame.”
The blame-game, though, can get “rather silly”, suggests John James, who, with his wife Mary, runs the Aldeburgh Bookshop. “We rely on second-homers, many of whom spend a lot of time and money here. Many of the people who complain [at the moment] have not lived here very long and are trying to prove how local they are by being cross with outsiders.”
And when you get angry, you can lash out indiscriminately. In the Lake District, a local nurse, self-isolating in a friend’s holiday home, woke up one morning to find her car tyres had been slashed, and had to miss her next shift. Meanwhile, pictures of Sue Skyba’s yellow VW Beetle convertible in Duporth in Cornwall, with white paint poured down the front of it, made headlines.
The 63-year-old is convinced the vandalism was intended as a warning to second-homers. “I can only assume,” she says, “people thought it [belonged] to someone on holiday.” In fact, it was her son who was staying in the holiday rental because he suffers from an autoimmune condition. “We don’t want to turn into a vigilante society,” warns Sarah Butikofer, the Lib Dem leader of North Norfolk council. She has been “hearing reports pretty much on a daily basis” about outsiders who are accused of flouting the rules in lockdown. Some of the suspicions do have something in them. North Wales Police tweeted about stopping courier vans delivering suitcases from cities to second homes. Their owners, it seems, were anxious to avoid being caught with the luggage in their own cars en route and turned back. “Surely,” the police said, “people aren’t that selfish and cunning?”