“I’m in St Ives”

OK, so I was in St Ives when I wrote that but I finished it at home. “So what?” you may well ask. I was back in St Ives again, having recently read an article in the Guardian about the town by Tanya Gold (10/8/24). She had conducted a series of interviews with local inhabitants, including a former resident who had fallen on hard times and now lives in a van, the local food bank organiser, a fisherman in a shrinking business and a local artist who was campaigning against second home ownership. The message was the same. Tourism is bad for St Ives. 

St Ives faces the same problems as other peripheral coastal resorts – poor accessibility, seasonal employment patterns and a consequent high unemployment rate in winter, exorbitant house prices, local people being priced out of the housing market altogether, and that ghost town atmosphere out of the holiday season, where shops, cafes, second homes and holiday lets are often just empty shells.

So, why pick on St Ives, particularly? The gist of the article was that St Ives is a worst-case scenario. This could well be true. For all sorts of reasons, St Ives is possibly the most beautiful of all British seaside resorts. That’s why we go there and have been doing so since 1969. St Ives was already under a bit of pressure then. We parked up the hill, somewhere close to where the leisure centre is now and walked down into the old town centre. When we took our young family there in 1986, we had to make do with two basement rooms in a Victorian terrace that stank of damp and mould. I felt sick that I’d committed us all to this for a whole week, but it was before the internet and the accountability that has accompanied modern online accommodation provision. In short, they would not be able to get away with that today because it would be denounced as totally unsuitable in a very public way.

Should I feel guilty taking an expensive holiday let here in St Ives? I’m in favour of national and local government intervention to curb all sorts of excesses that are caused by capitalism and which magnify inequality when left to their own devices. Should I stay at home and never visit anywhere on the grounds that unessential journeys are harming the planet? I would find that difficult as there’s a wonderful world out there just waiting to be discovered. We were finding out that for ourselves in the 1960s when we first happened upon St Ives. Should I go by train? I’d like to but its considerably more expensive than coming by car and I know where the side streets are where I can still park for nothing.    

Perhaps I should feel apologetic about keeping on coming back, but I just can’t help myself. Maybe it’s just my acutely developed love of place. I hope that St Ives can continue to squeeze me in from time to time. I should probably try it out of the Easter to October half-term season so that I can better understand the problems it faces. I bet it's still beautiful, though.