It is holiday season in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, which means ice cream, pasties and social anxiety. There are Facebook posts about parking infractions; laughter at cars left on beaches to drown (curiously not everyone seems to understand tides); the annual appearance of a basking shark at Porthcurno, as if it is booked in advance like Morecombe and Wise.
It is tempting to analyse this simply: locals versus incomers; the righteous versus the appalling. The longer I live here, the more self-serving this feels. There are many tribes in Cornwall, and the most defensive — the most passive-aggressive, the most anti-tourist — are wealthy incomers like myself. It’s a hunger to identify which segues into entitlement and denial. We are as much to blame for the housing crisis as anyone, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to us. Like Daphne du Maurier and Virginia Woolf, we invent a fake Cornish aesthetic (they were from Hampstead and Kensington) and call it real.
The Facebook groups speak of good and bad tourists: it’s class-based of course. The King is welcome
I learnt this when I was a tourist myself. I went to the Isles of Scilly. They are lovely — 140 low-flung islands, 24 miles west of Lands End, of which five are inhabited and the rest are for the birds. They are the richest archaeological sites in Britain: the dead outnumber the living (centuries of ship wrecks line the seabed) and it feels like it. There is something necrotic and claustrophobic about St Mary’s, the only isle on which you can drive: a village on an island in the ocean. Only travel here if you want to be known.
Perhaps it was the dregs of pandemic, when they had the isles to themselves — the most monied villages in Cornwall adored lockdown and reported playing children to the police — but I found them peevish. Each day the Scillonian ferry docks, bringing a fifth of the year-round population of the islands for the day or more. They spill out onto the off-islands, all of which (insufferable over-monied Tresco, Kensington-on-Sea aside) are wondrous.
Even so, I found the islanders — surely not indigeni, but incomers wedded to a fantasy of rural living, for who else can afford properties which cost double the national average? — unkind. It’s quite something to buy a £10 piece of ornamental driftwood and a £5 bar of soap and feel despised. The Facebook groups speak of good and bad tourists: it’s class-based, of course. The affluent are welcome: the King, who owns most of the isles, is a precious visitor. Any interruption in paradise feels like assault if you are spoiled. I only wish their gratitude for their surroundings extended to wanting to share it. If tourists invade in summer, they pay for it — and not just in ornamental driftwood and soap.
Without the benevolence of the British tax-payer, whose children do not have the benefit of this landscape, the isles would not be an idyll. They would barely be habitable, and wealthy retirees would have to dip into their pensions for their comfort. The taxpayer subsidises transport links: there is a hospital for a population of 2,000. This makes the isles not only the loveliest, but the most fortunate village in Britain.
Yet too often they have a landowner’s outlook — mine, not thine. I once read that when London schoolchildren were evacuated to Cornwall during the Blitz, the whole of Penzance turned out to greet them. I can’t imagine that scene on the isles again.
Selling Sunset — the UK version
In the United States, Netflix’s Selling Sunset made female real estate agents and their mindless, grasping aesthetic world famous. They are all over Instagram, selling the very ugly houses the rich adore. They have a complex relationship with feminism. They dress for disempowerment — their shoes are vertiginous, as if they want to be skyscrapers. Now a new BBC2, series called Crazy Rich Agents, seeks to do the same for the UK.
Young agents will compete to join a global firm called Nest Seekers International which sells red-brick monstrosities in Hampstead and, weirdly, a development in Dudley town centre. I never thought the celebrity estate agent would take off here (they are too unpopular to be famous) but these are mad times. It seems the housing crisis is so acute it takes a celebrity to get you a house.
