One sign announces that Charlburians are “NOT TOO POSH TO PROTEST”. That isn’t true: the demonstration is specifically not a protest, but a “Vance Not Welcome party”: that’s why its organizers, the Stop Trump Coalition (STC), brought the cake. Immaculate dogs saunter obediently on leads as their owners chat. (I overhear one person suggesting that this caucus should be called “Labradors Against Vance”.) A passing Volvo estate car toots its horn.

This is an omnicause demonstration: some fly Palestine flags, while others attend on behalf of the climate, “courtesy”, migrants and Ukraine. All these myopic single-issue angers converge in the figure of Vance. “This is a man whose regime is authoritarian,” says Jake Atkinson, a speaker from the STC. “They are abducting people off the streets in the US and deporting them without any due process. They are funding and arming a genocide in Gaza and they are rolling back support for a free Ukraine.”

But it’s not just Vance’s politics that have angered locals. Last Sunday, his 19-car motorcade thundered into Dean — a sleepy, 12-house hamlet where the former British prime minister David Cameron lives — after having spent the previous weekend with David Lammy at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s grace and favor country house. He rented Dean Manor from lightbulb millionaire Johnny Hornby and his wife Pippa (who apologized “for the circus” on a local WhatsApp group seen by the Telegraph). George Osborne arranged the rental for him. There, Vance duly set up an itinerant court, to which he summoned the likes of Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage, and Thomas Skinner — the ex-Apprentice star, acclaimed for eating sloppily patriotic breakfasts and saying “Bosh”.

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“People have not been able to use footpaths, have been stopped, asked for their contact details and social media — that’s a real intrusion,” complains Juliette Crisp, who moved to the area in the Eighties. The entire hamlet was “secured” last weekend, as checkpoints were hastily erected at both road entrances, while sweaty police officers rushed to block all nearby tracks and footpaths. A British policeman, whose job it was to move traffic cones back and forth by the south checkpoint, told me that he was averaging 12,000 steps a day within the same small patch of road. A few Americans, presumably Secret Service agents, perambulated in civvies and wiry sunglasses.

One local farmer posted on Charlbury Forum to say that 14 sheep grazing near Dean had disappeared. Soon, Charlbury was rife with speculation: a gate left open, or something darker? The sheep seem to have been found. Elsewhere, Clarkson’s Farm star Kaleb Cooper’s tractor was stuck behind the vice presidential convoy in Chipping Norton as it started to rain. “[If] he just drove around in a VW Polo,” he wrote on Instagram, “nobody would know who he was.”

Charlburians are used to this level of attention. In the last three weeks alone, they’ve hosted the former vice president Kamala Harris — who stayed at The Bull pub for Eve (daughter of Steve) Jobs’s wedding — and the Wilderness Festival. If there’s any truth to the oft-used moniker “sleepy”, it’s that Charlburians have spent the last few decades with their eyes wedged open by cocktail sticks, teased with small plates and matcha lattes and desperate for a rest.

This being the land of black labs and Ukraine flags, some kind of demonstration against Vance was inevitable. Here, Vance’s treatment of President Zelensky is deemed unforgivable. In Spelsbury, one woman told me that she hoped to “give Vance the kind of welcome he gave Zelensky”. But when I asked one of the demonstrators whether that’s what she hoped to do, she said: “No. We’re far too middle class for that.” His comments about the UK also wound up the demonstrators. Since becoming Vice President, he has called the UK “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” and “the first truly Islamist country” with nuclear weapons. Georgia, 23, accuses him of “hypocrisy”: to go around “slagging us off, and now he’s on holiday here”.

Many of the demonstrators belong to what is called the Pastoral Bourgeoisie — a class of comfortably middle-class, cottage-dwelling, Coalition-nostalgics, who work locally or from home, or are in semi-retirement. They are cakeists, unwilling to countenance lower migration despite being proprietorial over their own neighborhood. Theirs is a retrograde liberalism that’s left them trapped in a sort-of glitching VR headset jammed in a Sunday Times Property Supplement in the Summer of 2022. That was their heyday: they’d seen off the pandemic in leafy good cheer, and the nation still considered their values (honesty, integrity, courtesy) important enough to vanquish Boris Johnson. Next up, JD Vance. “I am just incandescent at the thought of Vance dumping himself on my countryside,” says Jude, a 60-year-old man. “People [here] might look old and crusty and wrinkly, but they value courtesy, morals.” Jake Atkinson tells me that Vance is guilty of “egregious abuses of power that don’t agree with British values”.

It’s unsurprising, then, that so many wealthy Democrats have moved here since Trump’s re-election last November. Charlbury sits in what estate agents call “The Golden Triangle”, the bit of countryside between Burford and Chipping Norton, where the proliferation of country clubs, good restaurants, and passable coffee means it’s been dubbed “The English Hamptons”. Plum Fenton, director of Savills’ country house team in the Cotswolds, told me that there had been an increase in dollar-based transactions since then, while David Henderson, who works in their residential department, said that many of these buyers have been coming from Democratic strongholds — though as yet they don’t have data on this.

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Ellen DeGeneres is certainly the most famous of these newly landed “Yanks on the Wold”, and she decided to move here the day after Trump was re-elected. She bought Kitesbridge Farm at the end of 2024 for £15 million, made considerable renovations, and then sold it to move elsewhere since she “needed a home that had a horse facility and pastures for them”. Once again, though, she’s escaped MAGA-dom after reportedly taking an urgent holiday whilst Vance is in the area.

In his 1971 book The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner writes that “America, here [in the Old World] had imaginative advantages, being unencumbered by the worldliness with which Europe had learned to inhabit the European world”. In looking at the UK, they have a radical idealism — oft-misguided — which cuts through the lumbering, skeptical fatalism of worldly Europe. Thus wealthy Democrats, liberated from their homeland’s tyranny, ignore the UK’s present disorder and see a liberal idyll where a center-left government came to power on the back of a landslide. So too can Vance believe that within the caricatured “Yookay” of the online Right — a lawless world of failed multiculturalism — there’s still something worth salvaging.

“It’s what they imagine England looks like,” says Charlbury’s vicar Fergus Butler-Gallie — a land of yellow oolitic sandstone and Hobbitish Cotswolds vernacular. As far back as 1929, American industrialist Henry Ford imagined such a Cotswolds: he imported a cottage from Chedworth which he rebuilt at Greenfield Village in Michigan, a museum that sought to preserve the old world as it was swept away by Ford’s innovations. But his buying agent knew the cottage wasn’t what Ford wanted, and so he made several modifications to make it look how Ford had imagined it would. The Times observed how the villagers “viewed the whole proceeding with disfavor, not unmixed with indignation. In common with most rural parishes, Chedworth suffers from a scarcity of houses, new ones are so costly to build as to put them beyond the reach of the ordinary man.”

Today, rich Americans are similarly shielded from local issues. The outskirts Charlbury are more This Country than Country Life. Hidden beneath a veneer of wealth, some 30 families attend the local food bank, and Butler-Gallie tells me that the church helps pay for their school uniforms and heating bills. Charlbury once had a prosperous gloving industry, and was the center of a booming agricultural region. (I drove past more signs reading “STOP THE FAMILY FARM TAX” than telling Vance to leave). Now it has tourism and the silly rich. “Americans? I love them,” says Peter Cowley, an 85-year-old parking attendant at Diddly Squat farm shop. “They’re generous. They spend. They tip well.” They are necessary. In Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady, a chronicle of Americans in Europe, Ralph Touchett tells Isabel Archer that “there is no romance here but what you may have brought with you”. But in the Cotswolds there is: for it’s the romance that sells.

The mobile post office, then: everyone agrees that it is terrible that provision is down to one day a week in Godolphin Cross. I have lived in west Cornwall for seven years and I know the question doesn’t speak to the smallness of Cornish pride — Phoenicians came here for tin when London was mud — but, I think, the smallness of Cornish hope. West Cornwall is beautiful, isolated, and poor. It is a sump for competing fantasies, because beauty in landscape does that. It is a peninsula that feels like an island, its churches feel like pagan shrines. The local gentry are influential, the working classes are conservative — the castle from House of the Dragon looms over Mount’s Bay, after all — and, due to the Isles of Scilly, this constituency often declares last, which speaks to a spiritual, as well as logistical, truth. Because we are always late with the count. It is sunny half the year, and rainy half the year, like a clock.

The hustings drag on: one man has a long question about septic tanks, and a sheaf of notes, should he forget what he is so angry about. Everyone is polite, because west Cornwall is a village. If Andrew George allowed his daughter to live in a taxpayer funded flat when he was last in parliament, the Tory does not say so, though everyone knows it. If Partygate was a disaster, the Lib Dem does not say so, though everyone knows it. When I meet John Harris, the man who looks like a wizard — he is from the Common People Party, and he wants a universal basic income and underground cities, with a rewilded world above — he praises the mainstream candidates. He says Cornwall is time travel and this is, essentially, happening in 1974 — hence the courtesy — in a constituency with its back to the sea. “There’s nothing else beyond it,” he says. “You go back into prehistory as far as you like.”

The real issues — poverty, housing and low pay — are barely discussed today. We don’t hear, for instance, that emergency accommodation might be a caravan with mould slaked walls; that the inhabitant might be hospitalised for a lung complaint, and the landlord might say it is the occupier’s fault for not cleaning enough. We don’t hear that people compete to rent property by telling the landlord they are the deserving poor, or that women with a few hours of cleaning during school hours wait in the rain for a bus that never comes. Not in winter, anyway: the summer tourist buses always run.

The Lib Dem campaign has the most energy, but it is muted, because this is west Cornwall. There is none of the orange mania you find in Tory to Lib Dem swing seats further east. Still, there are vast orange signs on verges, and the candidate appears on bridges with small gaggles of supporters and poses for photographs on Newlyn beach. He is too well-known to be exciting, and people remember that his daughter stayed in his flat. Fishermen particularly mention it, but fishermen are Tories, now segueing to Reform.

The Tory campaign launch is at a hotel near Prussia Cove. Two supercars are parked outside: they look odd here, a cry for help. The Tories are ageing and dressed as farmers on Sundays, though there are two young men. They eat pasties, and grumble about central government, which is common: many Cornish people behave as if taxes go to Westminster in error. They are not sullen, but disappointed. Sunak came here two weeks ago, bought a bacon sandwich by the station, met railway workers, and headed east.

“This week’s been very difficult,” says the Party chair.  “One couple said to me, ‘my husband’s father was at D-Day, he was on the beaches, and he’s voted Tory all his life. He could never vote Tory again after what happened’. Nearly everyone I spoke to [agreed].” “At this point it seems like Rishi has given up,” says one of the young Tories. Another says: “It’s just so unfair. We had an 80-seat majority, and we pissed it away sucking up to old people and drinking like students. Pure self-indulgence. We could have built a million houses. Harold Macmillan did.” A woman tells me: “In spite of their appalling record of inaction I am still voting Conservative because they are the only party who have stood up for the reality of biological sex. Very feebly.” The next person says: “I’m voting for Derek because he’s a hard-working chap. I’m not a great fan of Rishi. I think he’s behaved appallingly quite honestly.” How so? “I think he stabbed Boris in the back.” I ask a final man: why are you voting Conservative? “Because I always vote Conservative,” he replies, surprised that I asked. “I wouldn’t vote anything else.”

Bill Johnson, a fisherman of the inshore fleet in Mousehole tells me that 75% of local fishermen voted for Brexit “on the promises that things would get better. None of them think things have got better. They have got a whole lot worse.” The six-mile limit hasn’t materialised yet, and over-regulation and bureaucracy is rife: they make elderly fishermen use Apps at sea, which baffles them. I saw one fisherman on the quay in Newlyn last autumn, paperwork falling from his pockets. He looked dismayed.  “Fishermen,” Johnson says, “have been pawns of political expediency.” He remembers the day the Brexit Flotilla called at Mousehole: he stood on the quay. But fisherman, he judges, will not go Labour (“they are city Socialists”) here. The unions never had a foothold. For him, the Liberal Democrats, “are like an echo in an empty room”. He is voting Tory still — he feels a personal loyalty to Thomas — but others are tempted by Reform, who “are uttering the right sort of words on immigration”.

We walk around Mousehole, and he points which houses are lived in full time: it’s quicker that way. The centre of the town is a miniaturised St Ives: 87% holiday lets and second homes now. Turn-out on Election Day will be low. Denied access to housing, young people live with their parents, or in sheds, or move out of county, hoping to return with London money. Tourism work is seasonal and low-paid. Six fishing boats sail out of Mousehole: in twenty years Johnson thinks there will be none. Even so, it’s so busy in summer that the bus cannot get through: once, in an appalling metaphor, I saw an Ocado lorry parked in the bus stop, as if it was the bus. Today there is a replica of a tenth-century ship on the beach. It smells of pitch. It came from Brittany, sailed into Mousehole, and is stranded on the beach until the tide is high enough to carry it away. Its sailors — medieval reenactors — sell common rustic goods at vast prices on the sand, and this meets the current Mousehole aesthetic: an awful pastiche.

Lynne Dyer has been feeding local people from the kitchen below her Growing Links office since 2014. The men in the tents on the prom, and in the woods by the Coombe River, and by the boating pond, come here each night for supper, or they walk from Mousehole, and their tents on the cliff. Dressed for mountaineering in a town, the most painful to see are the youthful, with their insistent courtesy. She feeds people who live in temporary accommodation — cheap hotels or those repulsive, mouldy caravans — where they aren’t allowed to cook, and families and the low-paid.

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The system isn’t broken, Dyer tells me. It’s worse than that. Rather: “It does not exist. This is like a fucking cowboy town. From mental health to rough sleeping and the housing problem and energy crisis. No money, no food, changes to Universal Credit. Oh my God, I could go on forever.”

“We were feeding over a thousand people who couldn’t afford to eat through the pandemic every week,” she says: fishermen were selling mackerel from boxes outside their doors. “Families who were starving; doctors who are referring people to us who’ve got malnutrition; mums who are feeding their children are not feeding themselves. I’ve never ever seen Mr Thomas ever. Andrew George was a volunteer for five years.”

This morning, she says, she drove back from Wales. “And I saw lots of flowers on the prom and then I’ve come into work and there’s flowers outside and I just thought, ‘fuck, who’s died?’” She starts to cry. “It’s a young man who killed himself outside The Lugger. He was constantly homeless and in addiction.”

“That’s what the Tories have done,” she says. “They killed that young man by taking away family services, by taking away social services. Everything preventative has been stripped from us. It’s young people’s lives who fall through the cracks. And they grow up and they anesthetise themselves with drugs and alcohol and,” — her voice flattens — “everyone hates them. That’s what the Tories have done. I hold them responsible for every young person who’s overdosed or killed themselves during this reign of terror on people.” She cannot wait for them to go. She counts the days. She thinks “Starmer might be a good Socialist. I want him to win. I will be voting Liberal Democrat for one less Tory seat: for Labour to get in.”

I walk to the boy’s memorial on the sea front: the wall across the road from The Lugger is decked with flowers and balloons. They fight the wind. It’s low tide on one of those June days when the water sparkles with the promise of a child’s eternal summer. When the tide is this low, you can see the petrified trees of the once great forest of Mount’s Bay. Again, and as ever, one Cornwall conceals another.

The state of the schools down here doesn’t help. In 2019, only 40% of disadvantaged pupils in the South West passed their English and Maths GCSE compared with almost 60% in Inner London. That same year, just 17% of disadvantaged students in the South West went on to university, compared with 45% in London. A University of Exeter report found that the South West “has the worst educational outcomes for disadvantaged young people in the country”.

As a local teacher born and bred in Dulverton, I find this assessment devastating. But it’s nothing new: my father’s decision to re-join the military when I was eight was motivated by the abysmal reputation of the local secondary schools in our catchment area — and the generous army school-fees grant. But I believe that the blame lies with the Government, not with our schools and teachers.

While the Conservative government has promised repeatedly to “Level Up” the North East, little attention has been paid to the woes of the South West. Perhaps this is because employment rates here are among the highest in the UK. Thanks to the thriving hospitality, construction and tourism industries, there is a lot of non-skilled work available here — as well as a willing workforce. The South West is a land of hard-working tradespeople: despite its sparse population, it is home to the third highest number of registered self-employed workers in the country.

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Yet this shouldn’t distract us from the region’s education crisis. The South West may be home to many employed people, but without educational qualifications they cannot hope to move from non-skilled work to higher-wage jobs. And I know just how valuable academic results are: I worked at bars and on yards for four years after university because I didn’t want to move away from my friends and family on Exmoor. However, because of my good A-level results, when I decided I wanted to earn more, I was able to apply to Teach First and move into a different, significantly more lucrative career. My classmates who left school with worse grades didn’t have this luxury.

It would be easy to blame the schools; to blame teachers for failing in their job. However, I believe the culprit is higher up the food chain. The Government continues to implement an unequal and austere system that will keep the future workforce of the South West poor. Not only has its budget for education in England fallen from 5.6% of national income in 2010-11 to 4.4% in 2022-23, but students in Cornwall, Devon and Somerset receive the lowest amount of funding in the UK by a staggering £460 per pupil. How can we expect students here to achieve good results when so much less is spent on their education?

Every week, I run into difficulties where the extra cash might have made all the difference. The other day, Jack*, a pupil in my year 10 class, revealed to the behavioural team that he was struggling to keep up in class following multiple suspensions from school. I looked up his test records and found that Jack — at the age of 15 — had a reading age of seven. How could he possibly be expected to get to grips with the class text, Macbeth, before his GCSEs in a year’s time? The best I could do to help him catch up, given I had 30 other children to teach, was slip him a graphic novel of Macbeth in the next lesson. On cue, a member of the Senior Leadership Team arrived and congratulated me for “doing so much” because the graphic novel ticks the box of being accessible, looking fun and combining visual and verbal information. Of course, we both knew that Jack would not catch up on half a term’s content because of one book — but we just don’t have the funding or staff capacity to make a more effective intervention.

However, funding isn’t the only problem. There is also the lack of vocational training. Postgraduate jobs in the rural South West are hard to come by unless you happen to be either a teacher or an engineer near Hinkley Point. So it’s understandable that not all students here might be motivated by A-levels and university prospects. But the alternative option — an apprenticeship — has become far harder to secure. While there is a high demand for skilled workers in public services and trades around here, the uptake of apprenticeships in England has fallen 31% since 2017.

Again, much of the blame lies with Westminster. In 2014/15, the Government made it compulsory to have an English and Maths GCSE to apply for a Level 2 apprenticeship, which defeated the entire point of the vocational Functional Skills exam. I teach a resit class myself and can feel the frustration of these capable, hard-working young people, who would probably make excellent chefs, plumbers, builders or nurses if only they could pass a GCSE English paper. Do they really need to be able to write an essay on Animal Farm or understand trigonometry in order to read their emails, send an invoice and file a tax return? In a climate where universities are oversubscribed and postgraduate jobs are increasingly scarce, surely we should be doing everything we can to promote alternative avenues of lucrative employment?

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It’s as if politicians don’t realise the transformative power of vocational courses. My own partner, for instance, was allowed to complete his plastering apprenticeship long before a GCSE in English and Maths became compulsory. He sat his functional skills paper, got his level 2 in plastering and now earns more than I can ever hope to match, despite my university education.

And while I am pleased to see Rishi Sunak pledge this week to create 20,000 more apprenticeships, I fear that he still won’t address the issue of entry requirements. Already, he is asking fish to climb trees, promising to make Maths compulsory until 18. And his party has so far failed to deliver on its previous promise to introduce more vocational study programmes. This tragedy is borne out at my local school, which lost their farming course — and on-site farm unit — among other vocational courses several years ago due to budget cuts.

These days, nobody expects much from the South West; a childhood spent exploring the moors is merely seen as an obstacle to success. Even universities have started adjusting their offers in line with the educational outcomes of the South West. When I applied for university, I received an unconditional offer from the University of Bristol. Why unconditional? Probably because of my South West postcode.

*This name has been changed to protect the child’s identity.

These days, the bloody-mindedness remains but has long since given up on the rebellious politics of 2016. Little has changed after Brexit. Westminster and anything associated with it — London, politicians, tourists, journalists — are despised. Alternatives such as Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish independence party, are seen as a joke. In fact, everything is a joke: spurning my predictable questions about life in the area, one gentleman does a 10-minute skit about how he’s been smuggling migrants from Calais on an old fishing boat and leaving them on the telegenic beaches for second-home owners to deal with.

Tourism has helped to create a sort of neo-feudalism in this era, warping the rental market for existing residents, and trapping locals in a seasonal economy of unreliable incomes and unresolved resentment. The prosperous parts of Cornwall have become “a giant theme park”, as one punter describes it, leaving Redruth as one of its many servile outhouses, lying beyond the gates of Poldark-cum-Surfing Land.

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In another age, Redruth was one of the wealthiest towns in the world, its copper playing a part in everything from the Industrial Revolution to Britain’s naval hegemony. That economy fell into decline in the late-19th century, long before the rest of Britain’s manufacturing base. The result is an eerie hodge-podge of industrial marvels, social deprivation and abandoned mining infrastructure. On the high street, next to some of the finest 18th-century architecture in the country, stands an abandoned Wilko.

But, in the last few years, an opportunity for recovery has presented itself. Now, it’s the area’s lithium, discovered in “globally significant” quantities in 2020, that could yet realise some of those visions of abundance and revival: the rare-earth element is essential to the production of batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Come 2026, Cornish Lithium will soon start extracting the gold of the green industrial revolution. The company estimates that 7,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) can be produced a year, alongside the 20,000 from 2028 provided by rival companies Imerys and British Lithium operating down the road in St Austell. This would, however, still leave Britain dependent on some of the world’s biggest producers in Australia, China and Chile, with such schemes only partially covering the 80,000 tonnes a year the UK is predicted to require by 2030.

Despite these deposits, both companies have had to jump through hoops merely to survive. But having previously relied on angel investors and crowdfunds, a package of £67 million announced in August from the UK’s Infrastructure Bank placed the project in the national interest. When Emmanuel Macron declared that “made in Europe” should be our continental motto, lamenting that a Europe without a serious industrial policy risked being left behind by the changing tides of globalisation, he was talking about the viability of quixotic projects such as lithium mining in Cornwall.

“I’m acutely aware of the sad state of the economy in the area and the potential to make a difference,” says Jeremy Wrathall, the founder of Cornish Lithium, when I speak to him the next day. Wrathall trained at Camborne School of Mining, now underwhelmingly known to the area as the “Pool Innovation Centre”. The name change is symbolic of some of the local cynicism about the project, a relic of the area’s previous attempted makeover from industry and mining to services and tourism.

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But Wrathall is well-rehearsed to shrug off such doubts about the return of mining to Cornwall. He laments the “inbuilt scepticism” towards the rejuvenation of the UK’s mining industries. Cornwall, unlike other sites in Europe being touted as potential sources of lithium, has a history of mining. One comparable site in Portugal is currently battling locals who fear the opencast mine will destroy the village. Wrathall’s method is slightly more benign. This is less mining, more extraction, pulling lithium-rich brine from the springs beneath the 280-million-year-old granite sheet Cornwall sits on. Beyond the usual suspects of rent-a-gob environmentalists and ardent Nimbies, it’s difficult to find anyone overtly opposed to the project.

But there are also factors beyond his control. For all the rhetoric about deglobalisation, the allure of cheaper lithium abroad will endure, particularly without a proper homegrown industry to sell to. While rhetoric about restoring Britain’s industrial capacity is in vogue politically, it is estimated that £100 billion would be needed to set up a sustainable electric-vehicle industry. BritishVolt, the most recent attempt to construct a domestic lithium battery factory went into administration in January. When I raise this with Wrathall, he falls back on the sort of quiet idealism that remains in pockets of the old mining country. “Our project transcends politics,” he confesses. “We don’t want to let people down.”

Here lies an almost mystical appeal to the project. Britain has a strange relationship with its mines. Dirty, exploitative, abundant — the petri dish for both our industrialisation and our first revolts against capitalist excess. From Conrad’s Nostromo to the post-Thatcher nostalgia for the demise of the coal industry, mines are a catalyst for the history-making seams that run through the nation: pride, self-sufficiency, rebellion. Romantic tosh, perhaps, but it’s a mood you can unearth quite easily when visiting an area where tourism, welfare and the faint promises of 2016 have been left to fester.

Nowhere can the faint glaze of revival be better felt than “Heartlands”, built on an old centre of Cornish mining at Robinsons Shaft. It’s a surreal non-place of conference meeting rooms, environmental hubs educating visitors on the woes of climate change, tourist tit-tat shops flogging Cornish language books, and a mining-themed tearoom. Were lithium extraction to start up just a stone’s throw away from the site, it could cast a welcome shadow over this failed offering for Cornwall’s future.

It’s a feeling suggested by many of the locals: “We’ve become a nation of numpties unable to make anything ourselves,” says a local businessman preparing for a drinks reception in one of Redruth’s reconverted buildings (ahead of a local arts festival which he describes as a “load of wank”). For all the regeneration that has taken place here, there are some wounds that Britain’s “creative” and “services” industries cannot heal.

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The return of mining, however, must rest on more than just symbolism. On the outskirts of Redruth, Stephen Barnes, the town’s mayor, reveals the stifling hold these old mining shafts still have, not just on the town, but on its visitors too. In the summer months, they lure in the tourists with plumes of dark smoke blown through the old chimneys. For a brief afternoon, the landscape is once again dotted by working satanic mills. Yet the new lithium mines offer not just an escape from England’s nostalgic doom loop, but a different socio-economic settlement. The jobs initially created would number only in their hundreds, but Barnes believes it would be a way of “restoring pride”, and make a start in lifting stagnating wages away from the exploitative grips of the tourism industry.

Back in Redruth high street, the potential tragedy of all this expectation materialises. At present, the hope of the UK setting up an electric-car industry to compete with the subsidised might of China and the US is a struggle, if not a fantasy. And so too is the idea that lithium mining alone might set the area on a path to abundance and innovation. That’s not to say the quiet longing is not there.

Next to the town’s landmark statue of a miner, a Metro station has appeared, like one of those AI-generated engineering marvels shared by dejected Anglo-futurists on the social-media doomscroll. A map shows a high-speed underground train traversing the old network of mining tunnels underneath us. It’s an art installation, erected for the festival that starts tomorrow. But for a moment, it’s also a flicker of belief under grey skies on a late Friday afternoon, as the pubs open their doors and the high street once again starts to empty.

So feudalism returns to save us from ourselves and, like feudalism, Nansledan has a wild charisma. There is a granite obelisk at the roundabout, by the kind of Art Deco building you might see on the finer parts of the North Circular. It is made of Bodmin granite, and it marks the King’s first visit to Nansledan in 2014. I spend three days here — I was trapped after one of Cornwall’s rare snow flurries — and I think I know a lot about the king from the village that walked out of his head. There is something sensitive and thwarted about him — his watercolours are idealistic, and fragile — and Nansledan mirrors this. There are bird nooks in the walls of cottages, a herd of cows browsing in a wildflower meadow, and solar panels on roofs designed to look like slate. The school looks like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining — it has stolen its roofline — but that is a rare mistake, and surely not his. Everyone remarks on his taste.

There is a master plan. It shows sector after sector rising over 25 years, courtesy of approved builders: Morrish Homes; Wainhomes; C G Fry and Son. Eventually it will have 4,000 homes, produce one job in Nansledan for every household, and will meet up with Newquay Orchard, another expression of the king’s preoccupations, across the valley. (A stone at the base of a tree in the orchard says, rather ruefully: “We are all growing.”) It has principles which summon a village of the past, but with pain scrubbed out. There is no typhoid or indentured servitude here, though people are appreciative of the king, and talk about him fondly: “You know he’s coming when people start sweeping things up, and finishing houses.” I pity the republicans here, who statistically must exist, but people will do a lot for good housing nowadays.

Everything is within walking distance to discourage cars. Small independent businesses are favoured, though a Little Waitrose made it into Queen Mother Square in Poundbury, possibly because it stocks Waitrose Duchy Organic. Apprenticeships of traditional crafts are promoted, as is renewable energy. Freeholders must sign a covenant agreeing to maintain their buildings according to duchy principles, and holiday lettings and the placing of whole buildings on Airbnb are banned. Of the housing, 30% is reserved for social housing, affordable housing, and shared ownership — a high proportion for Cornwall and for England — and it took a royal duchy to do it.

I have only lived in old houses and older towns, and nothing prepares me for the oddness of Nansledan. I’ve never seen a village like it: there are no road markings, no mature trees, no church, no pub and, for a village, very few people. Mothers with buggies flee past, out of the wind; young children scoot on pristine streets. There is a glut of parking, which is astonishing for Cornwall: Elysium.

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Art Deco is where the king’s clock stops. Otherwise, Nansledan winds its way from medieval through Queen Anne to neat Victorian cottages. They are painted in pastels, like that street in Notting Hill: pale pink, pale blue, pale green. Nansledan: meet Instagram. The impression is of a box of macaroons stranded on a hill, stamped with a crown: a Duchy Original village, and it is both addictive and curiously oppressive, due to the intensity of its vision. I have a fantasy that he lives here in an ice-blue Victorian pastiche cottage, sticking his nose out of his door, and sniffing his cherry trees. I think he should: it is his.

The house builders have their offices on the main road by the obelisk. Donna from Wainhomes takes me to the show home, a white oversized cottage on three storeys, with a cherry red front door. If the exterior aesthetic is disorientating, the interior is generic: it’s a show home clad in neutrals, well-designed and finely built. Perhaps it is a metaphor for monarchy itself: something ancient rebuilt with mod cons to stay pleasing, a common royal contortion in the shape of a house.

“It’s like a fishing village,” says Donna and it is, if you have never seen a fishing village. There are no fish, and no sea, and no Lidl, and no foodbank. Cornwall tends to divide itself into local and tourist aesthetic, and Nansledan has chosen the tourist aesthetic. This is not wrong — why should it be? — but it is new, and therefore odd.

In a parade of shops, I find life at the Methodist community space. I peer in, see two women and two dogs, and they wave me inside. I sense that Nansledan, which is isolated on its hill, is very like St Mary’s on the Isles of Scilly: in a few minutes everyone will know who I am, and why I am here. Clare Anderson is the Methodist minister in Newquay. She lives here because the Methodists were going to build a church at Nansledan, but costs spiralled, and they will build in Newquay instead: there will be no idealised church. She has lived here for four years.

“There’s a lovely sense of community apart from the keyboard warriors and the people who are a bit cliquey,” she says, when I ask what it is like living in a partially built ideal village. “Because the duchy has got a design code it’s almost a stick to beat people with.” No one will tell me explicitly about WhatsApp fights relating to hanging baskets — it’s too new and small a community to criticise the neighbours openly — but they don’t have to. I can sense them. They have sworn fealty to their village and its design code, and woe betide those who won’t conform.

“It’s a mixed environment,” Claire says, “but nonetheless it feels like a wealthy development and that brings its own prejudices and baggage. There are coffee shops where a cup of coffee is expensive. If you were living in affordable housing here it would be completely unobtainable.” She is a town councillor, and she knows the misery of the housing crisis — she says every local Facebook group is filled with pleas for housing as rentals are sold for Airbnbs. I ask her what Nansledan will achieve. “30% of these houses is just a drop in the ocean,” she says, looking about. “It’s not something Nansledan can solve.” At least, not alone, and so Nansledan functions partially as a rebuke, and partly as — and this is universal — something that others cannot have.

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I visit Newquay. There is nowhere to buy food in Nansledan when the cafes and the chocolate shop and the bakery close at dusk. Newquay is the same as most mid-sized Cornish towns, grand — the waves are vast, rolling in off the Atlantic — and rotting. It has none of the finesse of Nansledan, but it feels real nonetheless, and therefore comforting. I find a pasty in Warren’s, and the prototype for Nansledan: a small estate called Tregunnel Hill near the boating lake. Within Newquay, the duchy aesthetic feels less deranged than in Nansledan: that is, it looks like a piece of high Victorian Eastbourne, transplanted to Cornwall by people with time and leisure for good taste.

On the way back I stop in St Columb Minor, the closest village to Nansledan. Sometimes in winter Cornwall feels like a shoulder closed to the wind. A woman with a vast fur hood tells me she thought Nansledan was like Noddy’s Toytown when it emerged from the farmland. (There is a still a farmhouse. It is proudly unrenovated. It looks angry, for a house). She regards Nansledan in the same way that she might regard Asgard. “A hundred pounds for a cardigan,” she says, amazed, and says that Nansledan is not for her: too expensive. It is true that it is expensive for Newquay — an open-market three-bedroom house is £330,000 in Nansledan against £250,000 outside it — but as of last August 45% buyers of open-market homes were from Newquay, and 70% were from Cornwall. (This is down from 72% in May 2020.) There are a few second homeowners, but they keep their heads down, like women living among religious fundamentalists.

I visit the shops, which are offered at good rates to suitable businesses, which must go through a detailed application process. There are rules on signage colour, placing and font. Eventually there will be a vast marketplace but for now Nansledan sells pretty food and, above all, aesthetics, as if they sing to each other. There is a café called Shiva with an attached yoga studio, two homeware shops — one also sells clothes — a giftshop with a minimalist bucket and spade, two hairdressers and a boutique which I suspect is the source of the £100 cardigan slur. Nansledan is already a shopping destination. Local people come to the Ladyvale bakery to eat gluten-free cakes, admire the papery flowers on the ceiling and, above all, park their cars.

In Shiva I meet a young woman who used to lived here with her father over his blinds and awning shop: she has a baby, and she is as lovely as anything in Nansledan.  She has now bought a home here with her partner for 60% of market value under a section 106, which will remain affordable even if she sells it on: her previous home in Newquay has Airbnbs on both sides. “There were so many people who applied for our house,” she says. “They chose us!”  She adores Nansledan: “It’s like a movie set, it’s so perfect”. The Cornish relationship to affluence is complicated. It must be, in a relatively isolated and culturally feudal duchy with a thriving entrepreneur class on the one hand, and some of the poorest people — and housing — in western Europe on the other.

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But Nansledan admits no such tension openly: it is as smooth as icing sugar. This is the village of a perfectionist, who has lined up every Cornish element he can find. The street names are Cornish. The granite and slate are Cornish. The houses are Cornish-shaped; there is even a tiny replica of the ducal manor house at Restormel. The effect of all this Cornishness, of course, is to make Nansledan seem very un-Cornish. It is pastiche, and that is forgivable. If it isn’t Cornish, then neither is he, but he gifts his vision – his experience – of Cornwall to them, and they accept it happily.

I think the contradiction — the potential offence — of Nansledan is that something so fine has emerged from a feudal remnant and is likely to be fetishized for it; perhaps we will want more of it, since government and council cannot provide. It offends our far newer belief in democracy, which has not provided the housing people need: on the contrary, children are dying in mouldy homes due to the greed of landlords enabled by our insane planning laws. It takes a man who can afford not to be greedy, to show us the error of greed in house building, and I can’t think of anything more depressing, or more English.

Nansledan is not just an aesthetic marvel I am confused by, because it meddles with time and space. Above all, it is a failure of government, and so we look backwards for a solution, and establish an idealised village in less than a decade. I can laugh at the fishing village without fish or fishermen and the Waitrose magazine aesthetic fallen on the streets like snow, but the truth is I don’t have a friend in Cornwall who wouldn’t want an affordable home in Nansledan, and that is both cheering and pitiable.

Those who use the foodshare live at the top of the hill in the Penbeagle estate. It is run by the St Ives Community Orchard inside the St Ives Rugby Club, which donated their premises for free. They collect waste food from local supermarkets and give it away, so it doesn’t go into landfill. Unlike foodbanks, of which there are many in Cornwall, you do not need a referral from an agency, which will take your testimony and, if you are judged worthy, issue a chit. You just show up.

There are trestle tables covered with produce: a pile of potatoes and carrots (the only glut here, how British); a few onions; oranges, bananas, apples, and lemons; yesterday’s wilting pastries from the Co-op; four ham and cheese quiches; eight packets of miniature sausage rolls; one pack of noodles; four packets of mashed potatoes; three tins of vegetables; four rice puddings; five packets of crisps; one small box of salad.

Anyone who thinks this is mere bounty, something to be unconditionally celebrated, doesn’t understand food poverty, by which I mean poverty. This food is given with love and concern, and often collected by those who use it themselves. But it is remnants. There is no fresh meat except one packet of sliced beef; no fresh bread; one box of eggs and no butter, fish, green vegetables or milk. What is here is only what others do not want and cannot sell; at the end anything that is left is fed to pigs

I watch a man with two small children walk about, considering what to take; often people think they are not the most in need, and take too little. I see a girl, perhaps 11, with an empty carrier bag and an expression so defeated I am shocked to see it in a child and, later, I do cry, which shames me further. Tears are cheap, and I don’t cry after subsequent visits: immunity is easily caught here.

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The children are keen to help. Why wouldn’t they when their parents walk so heavily with their fear, as if carrying a great physical burden? But their chirping is stilled. Here there is no joy in the having; that is a fantasy for people who do not use these places. There is too much pain in the needing. Initially this foodshare was used by people who simply didn’t want to waste food. Increasingly it is used by people who could not survive without it.

No one smiles except the volunteers who grin brightly, for denial. It is quiet, speechless almost, like a deathbed. Just a murmur of thanks and a wave as they go out into the rain. Then a woman with three boys snaps at them as they say what they would like and ask her, too — what she would like? I recognise what I see: not an unloving mother, far from it, but a woman who can take no more. She chides them noisily, and her voice rises further to panic; but then she gathers herself, looks at them, touches them, praises them. She returns from her terror to herself. She smiles a small, tight smile and walks away with her bags, the children trotting with her.

If you are poor, landscape is only a taunt; a physical impediment even, for the hills around the harbour are steep. Those who live in Penbeagle would have lived on the harbour once, and seen seals and maybe dolphins from their windows, but the hunger of outsiders to own a second home, rather than stay in a hotel or caravan park has pushed them up the hill into a council estate that manages, with its pale uniformity, to deny its own Cornishness. “We all live up here now,” says Jo Chatterley, a volunteer, as I drive her to the orchard with what is now the pig food. “Some people don’t even go into the town in summer. They don’t feel welcome”.

The natives of St Ives can no longer afford the picturesque. They are no longer considered worthy of it. A local estate agent called St Ives, recently named the happiest place in Britain (in a survey conducted by another estate agent) — not a town, but a business. Where does that leave people? The old trades of fishing and mining are fetishised beyond the duchy in books and novels, but one is declining, and the other is gone. It is another way of mythologising Cornwall. To mythologise something is another way of not seeing it; and you can’t eat myths.

The orchard is picturesque, though, because only pigs live in orchards; that is, it doesn’t contain any holiday accommodation. The ground is lively and sodden; the apple trees are gnarled and expressive. There are bees; a fire-pit; a vegetable garden. This orchard exists for itself, which is rare in a town which is also a business, and to counter that other epidemic that thrives amid lack: depression. People come here for their mental health; subsistence farming is considered healing, and it is, but not by itself.

Cornwall pays a price for its insane beauty. The average house price is now £254,382; in St Ives it is £100,000 more. Living costs are as high as London, and sometimes higher (the price of a return bus ticket from Pendeen to Penzance is more than £5 and if you don’t have a car you are forced to pay it or risk your life on a bike across the moor that gathers fog, and many do). Parking in summer is £5 a day or more. Restaurants and clothing cost what they always do. But wages are two-thirds of the national average in St Ives, often for a combination of zero hours and split shifts, which mean, respectively, that you cannot take another job to supplement your income, or that you are paid for a part-time job but do a full-time job with a long lunch break.

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Before pandemic, Cornish employment was higher than the national average, and the Cornish worked longer hours than the average in “jobs”, I am told, “because there are almost no careers”. In 2019, this felt like a duchy that existed for people who do not live here; then pandemic came, and employment fell. Universal Credit claimants swelled by 135% and it is not enough to live on. Food is the obvious thing to cut back on. You won’t call a bailiff on yourself.

Usually, Jo says, in St Ives you have a seven-month holiday season in which to earn enough to keep yourself through winter. This year it was three months. “You have a lot of people living pretty much on the breadline and there’s a lot of people who aren’t usually over it anyway. People went from doing all right to absolutely nothing pretty much overnight. We are helping people who aren’t used to asking for help”. She knows a self-employed builder with four children and no work this year; when his wife developed breast cancer their income fell to nothing. She knows one family of seven adults existing on one wage.

Ten miles away, in Treneere, Penzance, Liz Sullivan runs Whole Again Communities (WAC). She sits in her office, her leg on the desk (she has hurt her ankle) and tells me how WAC exists to teach people how to cook healthy food – soups, hot pots, pasta sauces – from scratch on a budget. They distribute food, offer cooking classes – in pandemic these were online – and teach gardening, giving out compost and seeds. “We are a real community of making things and managing,” she says. “They don’t go around groaning and begging. They get used to managing. They are incredibly resilient. People are trying so unbelievabley hard and it’s still incredibly difficult. People live hand to mouth. Rent in Cornwall is so incredibly dear. Everything is more expensive down here”.

Owning is unaffordable and there is almost nothing to rent, due to the profusion of holiday cottages. A Rightmove search for Penzance brings up 11 properties, and only one is under £500 a month.

Liz explains what people will do to avoid the foodbank. One single mother (her partner is dead) took a full-time job as a carer, walked to work despite her ill-health (she had no car) and left her son with his grandmother, who is shielding: “She had to forgo seeing her son [during pandemic]. That is a typical story”. This girl wanted to be a baker – she is a gifted one – but she has no premises; caring is one of the few jobs you can get. It is the same for a girl who wants to be a beautician, she says: no premises, although many of the shops in Penzance are empty.  She tells me about a chef who left his job to care for his wife, who has complex health conditions, and their three children; they now need donations of food.

“Covid-19 is just one issue,” she says. “It’s not just all of sudden that food poverty has become an issue. It’s just the way it is, and some people cope better than others”. It has been worse since 2010, she says, when the coalition government came to power. “There is, she says, “the exhaustion of living a certain way. Some people, I believe,” she pauses, “people are where they feel they deserve to be”. That is perhaps the saddest part. She shows me a letter of thanks she received, from a woman with ill-health (two of her three children also have complex health conditions): “if we didn’t have the boxes [from you], we would have gone hungry. Tom is digging up the garden and planting the carrot and courgette seeds”.

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I meet Lynne Dyer at the Growing Links community garden nearby. She runs a community store cupboard, teaches gardening to children and adults and also runs the street food project, which provides hot meals to vulnerable residents each night. Lynne knows people who are making a loaf of bread last a full week. She knows families evicted from their rental accommodation in summer for the tourist season, who have to camp in fields. She knows a sick man denied his benefits because he could walk 15 yards left destitute for a year and a half. She knows a woman who lost her job under the first lockdown unable to manage on Universal Credit. “She was feeding her children and not feeding herself. These sound like stories from Victorian times, don’t they? One thing about the Victorians – they had the poor house, didn’t they?”

And that is it: in west Cornwall people are feeding their neighbours, and kindly though it is, it cannot be a substitute for a functioning state. It is flickers of light inside a catastrophe.

In St Ives yesterday, as she set out the Christmas Eve collection, Jo was anxious to tell me that she knows of only one family that has abused the foodshare scheme. I didn’t want to include that – incidentally, the proportions are identical to the benefit fraud numbers, which are negligible — but I feel I must, because the narrative that such places are run by the politically motivated for the idle and wicked is so widespread. I understand why. It is essential to believe that, because it is absolution for the rest of us: it allows us to avoid responsibility for a child with an empty carrier bag and an adult’s eyes.

This piece was nominated for the National Press Awards in 2021.

There are pale terraces selling cocktails to people wearing cashmere cardigans, private dentists and an estate agent (everything advertised in the window is sold). The Carbis Bay Hotel, which is hosting the G7 summit this week, long ago outgrew its placid Victorian villa and sprouted a parade of ugly beachside villas that rent for many thousands a week and are regarded, in Cornwall, as a bad joke. It exists for people from beyond, who travel with their own fantasies, which rarely involve Cornish reality.

If you are cynical, or truthful, you would call Cornwall a business, not a place; house prices rose 48% in St Mawes in the last 12 months. You buy a house, rent it out (but not to locals, that is unprofitable), and either enjoy the income or sell it on. This is normal.

Cornwall may be a land of myths – the Merry Maidens at Boleigh, Merlin’s cave at Tintagel, the giant’s heart on the mountain at Marazion — but they are now increasingly — and depressingly — financial. The duchy is squeezed as full of myths as people; spiritually it is beginning to resemble a cruise ship. There was Daphne Du Maurier and Manderley; Winston Graham and Nampara; now Boris Johnson and the G7 at the Carbis Bay Hotel.

Cornwall is interesting for itself and as a paradigm, squeezed into a granite finger on the edge. It’s an old story: rich and poor competing for the same space, which is why I think Cornwall, looking for anything that looked like autonomy, voted for Brexit. The G7, at least partially, is the unwanted consolation prize. But it is also here, and not in Manchester, because of security — and views.

There is only one road in to Carbis Bay and on it I find a sign, which I suspect will shortly be removed: “St Ives Foodbank Welcomes You (Food Poverty has Quadrupled Even in This Area)”.

Why the poverty? The two traditional industries – fishing and mining – have declined or disappeared: the only miner left at Geevor is a tour guide now, sitting in a mine shaft with a lamp telling tales to children. Few things have risen to replace them; there is no motorway in Cornwall, and the only airport, Newquay, is barely a hub. Tourism brings in 12% of GDP (though it is spun as higher) and at great cost. Living costs are high, but wages are low; work is often seasonal, zero hours and without benefits. If the average Cornish salary is less than the national average, housing costs are explosive. The average house now costs eight times the average salary: and prices are still rising.

It is normal to be evicted for the summer: people camp in fields or, if lucky, squat in campervans. One third of children under five live in insecure and privately rented accommodation, which is some of the worst maintained in Britain. A scandalous 36% of the children in St Ives, long considered a happy tale about the benevolence of tourism, live in poverty. That isn’t on the postcards.

St Ives, this week, is full: tourists are contemplating a shop window displaying a £275 teapot with driftwood handle. These shops are not for locals; they cannot afford to shop here, even if they wanted to. St Ives is not a wasteland, like Carbis Bay, but the narrative is similar: this is the phenomenon of a town existing for those who do not live here. Like Mousehole, the fishing village to the south-west cursed by its beauty, its heart has been removed, as if for punishment. The old cottages by the sea are rentals or second homes now; they have stupid names and stupid nautical décor — it really is cultural appropriation — and, sometimes QR codes by the gates: present your iPhone to book.

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Cornish people rarely live here; they are up the hill on the Penbeagle Estate, a pale and uniform collection of houses, from which they contemplate their own town from a distance. In summer they don’t come to the harbour – they feel there is no place for them – though they did in the wild days of the first lockdown, when pandemic acted as time travel, and returned St Ives to its natives. It took a catastrophe, an interruption to the natural order, to do it.

I drive up to Penbeagle. The G7 summit, they tell me, is not the problem, even if helicopters whirred the night before, frightening the pregnant horses; even if the spin that the summit is “Carbon Neutral” is obviously nonsense, one of Boris Johnson’s smaller lies. It is, superficially at least, an inconvenience; something to mock. The main road from the A30 will be closed for the summit and traffic will flow along the old coach road from Penzance, past a field rented to security and decorated, says a Penbeagle resident, “like the world’s worst music festival”.

Gulls are attacking police drones, news of which is greeted with laughter; the Carbis Bay Hotel has destroyed a portion of self-seeded woodland to build meeting rooms for the summit, despite planning permission being denied for the same site in 2018, and yet still preeningly calls itself an “Eco hotel”. Here, they call the destruction of the woodland “the legacy of the G7”. It’s not a joke.

But it does expose something, which is more than an inconvenience: it is closer to insolence. Cornwall is used to not being seen; rather, people impose their own fantasies on it.  (That comes with beauty, in landscape and in people.) The arrival of the “global elite”, who can travel, though most of us cannot, has closed off footpaths, taken hotel rooms from vulnerable homeless people – one woman with mental health issues was left by the road with her belongings in a bag – and shut St Ives School for three days. The settled trend of displacing locals for visitors accelerated under pandemic and here, in security fencing, is the final evidence: Cornwall is two duchies now, and the G7 is happening in one of them. We can see them: they cannot see us. It’s the Cornish condition, amplified.

I drive to the Carbis Bay Hotel. It’s a long, meandering road, filled with policemen and hotel employees gesturing at you to turn around, and go elsewhere. I feel a burst of pity for the blameless Tregenna Castle Hotel, which will also host the G7. Its pretty signage – “A warm welcome to all visitors” – is now a lie for, like Gandalf’s Balrog, we shall not pass. The view of St Ives and the wooded cove is perfect – few parts of Cornwall are wooded, which is why the loss of woodland to opportunistic development is so upsetting – but the beauty is only where the buildings are not.

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I drive to Treneere, an estate in Penzance: this, like Penbeagle, is the hidden, and more truthful, Cornwall. It is called one of the most deprived areas in Britain, a description locals hate, because it is a label segueing into a concealment. Call somewhere deprived and you can forget about it. My friend in Treneere tells me the housing shortage is so acute adult children are living in parents’ garden sheds.  People are inhabiting cottages with water running down the walls; or they are evicted so the home can be an Airbnb.

The only work, she says, is in care and hospitality, though I did see an advert for dismantling the G7 offering £10 an hour. (A wag said he would do it for nothing. I wonder if anyone will be cynical enough to exploit this.) On housing, she says, “I don’t know where to start.” On food banks: “They are normalised”. On employment: “It is never their first choice of job.” What frightens her most – in an area with a Conservative MP and county council – is a growing passivity: “this is our lot. There is a downtroddenness, an acceptance that we have less, and will manage better. It just feels oppressive”. She finds the rush to environmentalism “heartening”, but I wonder if this yet more evidence of Cornwall obsessing on landscape, having given up on people; on itself. Is it easier to save a tree than save a person? Today the Government announced £65 million for the local area, a gift for the G7. It won’t go far in Treneere.

She is not a melodramatic woman; she is doughty, practical. But still she says: “We might as go back to days of the poorhouse. It feels like that. There is opportunity for entrepreneurship. But what about…” – and her words seem to lengthen – “…lovely, ordinary people?” They have been obscured, I think, by lovely, extraordinary landscape, and the desire of others to possess it.

That is the battleground the G7 magnifies, with its fencing and security cordon. This battleground was there before the summit, and will endure beyond it: for space, and who has access to it. It’s no coincidence that the most famous novel about Cornwall – Rebecca – was really about a house.

It’s impossible, when observing the strange disorders of our current politics, not to feel we are trapped in an intervening period — between an old, discredited order and whatever follows it, for better or worse. It’s a crisis, as Gramsci famously wrote, which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” There is no popular faith still adhering to the old institutions — the political system, journalism, the church. And yet the alternatives rising up to succeed them — the political religions of the internet, the grifting hot-take economy — seem in many ways worse. Now, indeed, is the time of monsters.

In Edgelands, a new series of videos for UnHerd, I’ll explore the strange and unsettling manifestations of our new political era. Travelling across the country, and further afield, I’ll meet people on the edge of politics — conspiracy theorists, idealists, visionaries and eccentrics — who each in their own way encapsulate this political moment. Much of what we consider offbeat or kooky may have a wider appeal to ordinary people than the London media consensus realises. Perhaps, on the margins and in the hidden recesses of the internet, new political realities are being born which will come to shape all our lives.

For the first episode, I travel to the wild cliffs of Tintagel, on England’s mist-shrouded Atlantic fringe, to meet John Mappin, a scion of the Mappin & Webb jewellery dynasty whose engagement with the kookier fringes of American conservatism has raised eyebrows. A cloud of overwhelmingly negative headlines surrounds Mappin, mostly derived from his flying the flag of the QAnon conspiracy theory from the roof of his Cornish hotel, Camelot Castle.

QAnon adherents, followers of an American political religion birthed from the internet, believe that the world is run by a Deep State cabal of bloodthirsty paedophiles, against whom the saviour Donald Trump was locked in a secretly successful campaign. Representing American politics at its most alien and outlandish, through its overlap with anti-vaccine sentiment and Covid conspiracy theories, QAnon may have more reach in Europe than anyone at first expected.

But is Mappin really, as the headlines claim, the leader of Britain’s QAnon movement? Have the wilder reaches of American conservative politics taken root in Deep England? Or is Mappin a classic eccentric of a traditionally English type, the sort of utopian idealist that has always been drawn to the Celtic fringes, and to the blurry borderlands between myth and reality? Is he dangerous, as the headlines warn, or is he, in his own way, sincerely trying to build a better world?

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With more Twitter followers than the vast majority of journalists, and his own successful YouTube channel devoted to his worldview, Mappin is simultaneously a fringe figure and a genuine cultural phenomenon worthy of study. A product of the British establishment who has taken up the cause of anti-establishment populism, and whose beliefs are now shared by a discomforting number of people in Britain as well as America, Mappin is creating his own political reality from his clifftop castle.

Yet perhaps the standard response to this new politics — the recourse to the new breed of disinformation specialists and official fact checkers — is less productive than exploring these world views on their own terms, and trying to understand what drives them. Perhaps it’s only by exploring the fringes that we can fully understand the crisis of the centre, and discern the strange political futures taking shape within the mists. Welcome to Camelot Castle, and to Edgelands.

Those who use the foodshare live at the top of the hill in the Penbeagle estate. It is run by the St Ives Community Orchard inside the St Ives Rugby Club, which donated their premises for free. They collect waste food from local supermarkets and give it away, so it doesn’t go into landfill. Unlike foodbanks, of which there are many in Cornwall, you do not need a referral from an agency, which will take your testimony and, if you are judged worthy, issue a chit. You just show up.

There are trestle tables covered with produce: a pile of potatoes and carrots (the only glut here, how British); a few onions; oranges, bananas, apples, and lemons; yesterday’s wilting pastries from the Co-op; four ham and cheese quiches; eight packets of miniature sausage rolls; one pack of noodles; four packets of mashed potatoes; three tins of vegetables; four rice puddings; five packets of crisps; one small box of salad.

Anyone who thinks this is mere bounty, something to be unconditionally celebrated, doesn’t understand food poverty, by which I mean poverty. This food is given with love and concern, and often collected by those who use it themselves. But it is remnants. There is no fresh meat except one packet of sliced beef; no fresh bread; one box of eggs and no butter, fish, green vegetables or milk. What is here is only what others do not want and cannot sell; at the end anything that is left is fed to pigs

I watch a man with two small children walk about, considering what to take; often people think they are not the most in need, and take too little. I see a girl, perhaps 11, with an empty carrier bag and an expression so defeated I am shocked to see it in a child and, later, I do cry, which shames me further. Tears are cheap, and I don’t cry after subsequent visits: immunity is easily caught here.

Suggested reading

Stop making poverty the butt of jokes

By Gavandra Hodge

The children are keen to help. Why wouldn’t they when their parents walk so heavily with their fear, as if carrying a great physical burden? But their chirping is stilled. Here there is no joy in the having; that is a fantasy for people who do not use these places. There is too much pain in the needing. Initially this foodshare was used by people who simply didn’t want to waste food. Increasingly it is used by people who could not survive without it.

No one smiles except the volunteers who grin brightly, for denial. It is quiet, speechless almost, like a deathbed. Just a murmur of thanks and a wave as they go out into the rain. Then a woman with three boys snaps at them as they say what they would like and ask her, too — what she would like? I recognise what I see: not an unloving mother, far from it, but a woman who can take no more. She chides them noisily, and her voice rises further to panic; but then she gathers herself, looks at them, touches them, praises them. She returns from her terror to herself. She smiles a small, tight smile and walks away with her bags, the children trotting with her.

If you are poor, landscape is only a taunt; a physical impediment even, for the hills around the harbour are steep. Those who live in Penbeagle would have lived on the harbour once, and seen seals and maybe dolphins from their windows, but the hunger of outsiders to own a second home, rather than stay in a hotel or caravan park has pushed them up the hill into a council estate that manages, with its pale uniformity, to deny its own Cornishness. “We all live up here now,” says Jo Chatterley, a volunteer, as I drive her to the orchard with what is now the pig food. “Some people don’t even go into the town in summer. They don’t feel welcome”.

The natives of St Ives can no longer afford the picturesque. They are no longer considered worthy of it. A local estate agent called St Ives, recently named the happiest place in Britain (in a survey conducted by another estate agent) — not a town, but a business. Where does that leave people? The old trades of fishing and mining are fetishised beyond the duchy in books and novels, but one is declining, and the other is gone. It is another way of mythologising Cornwall. To mythologise something is another way of not seeing it; and you can’t eat myths.

The orchard is picturesque, though, because only pigs live in orchards; that is, it doesn’t contain any holiday accommodation. The ground is lively and sodden; the apple trees are gnarled and expressive. There are bees; a fire-pit; a vegetable garden. This orchard exists for itself, which is rare in a town which is also a business, and to counter that other epidemic that thrives amid lack: depression. People come here for their mental health; subsistence farming is considered healing, and it is, but not by itself.

Cornwall pays a price for its insane beauty. The average house price is now £254,382; in St Ives it is £100,000 more. Living costs are as high as London, and sometimes higher (the price of a return bus ticket from Pendeen to Penzance is more than £5 and if you don’t have a car you are forced to pay it or risk your life on a bike across the moor that gathers fog, and many do). Parking in summer is £5 a day or more. Restaurants and clothing cost what they always do. But wages are two-thirds of the national average in St Ives, often for a combination of zero hours and split shifts, which mean, respectively, that you cannot take another job to supplement your income, or that you are paid for a part-time job but do a full-time job with a long lunch break.

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Let food bank clients eat cake

By Matthew Sweet

Before pandemic, Cornish employment was higher than the national average, and the Cornish worked longer hours than the average in “jobs”, I am told, “because there are almost no careers”. In 2019, this felt like a duchy that existed for people who do not live here; then pandemic came, and employment fell. Universal Credit claimants swelled by 135% and it is not enough to live on. Food is the obvious thing to cut back on. You won’t call a bailiff on yourself.

Usually, Jo says, in St Ives you have a seven-month holiday season in which to earn enough to keep yourself through winter. This year it was three months. “You have a lot of people living pretty much on the breadline and there’s a lot of people who aren’t usually over it anyway. People went from doing all right to absolutely nothing pretty much overnight. We are helping people who aren’t used to asking for help”. She knows a self-employed builder with four children and no work this year; when his wife developed breast cancer their income fell to nothing. She knows one family of seven adults existing on one wage.

Ten miles away, in Treneere, Penzance, Liz Sullivan runs Whole Again Communities (WAC). She sits in her office, her leg on the desk (she has hurt her ankle) and tells me how WAC exists to teach people how to cook healthy food – soups, hot pots, pasta sauces – from scratch on a budget. They distribute food, offer cooking classes – in pandemic these were online – and teach gardening, giving out compost and seeds. “We are a real community of making things and managing,” she says. “They don’t go around groaning and begging. They get used to managing. They are incredibly resilient. People are trying so unbelievabley hard and it’s still incredibly difficult. People live hand to mouth. Rent in Cornwall is so incredibly dear. Everything is more expensive down here”.

Owning is unaffordable and there is almost nothing to rent, due to the profusion of holiday cottages. A Rightmove search for Penzance brings up 11 properties, and only one is under £500 a month.

Liz explains what people will do to avoid the foodbank. One single mother (her partner is dead) took a full-time job as a carer, walked to work despite her ill-health (she had no car) and left her son with his grandmother, who is shielding: “She had to forgo seeing her son [during pandemic]. That is a typical story”. This girl wanted to be a baker – she is a gifted one – but she has no premises; caring is one of the few jobs you can get. It is the same for a girl who wants to be a beautician, she says: no premises, although many of the shops in Penzance are empty.  She tells me about a chef who left his job to care for his wife, who has complex health conditions, and their three children; they now need donations of food.

“Covid-19 is just one issue,” she says. “It’s not just all of sudden that food poverty has become an issue. It’s just the way it is, and some people cope better than others”. It has been worse since 2010, she says, when the coalition government came to power. “There is, she says, “the exhaustion of living a certain way. Some people, I believe,” she pauses, “people are where they feel they deserve to be”. That is perhaps the saddest part. She shows me a letter of thanks she received, from a woman with ill-health (two of her three children also have complex health conditions): “if we didn’t have the boxes [from you], we would have gone hungry. Tom is digging up the garden and planting the carrot and courgette seeds”.

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Maybe Scrooge was right

By Giles

I meet Lynne Dyer at the Growing Links community garden nearby. She runs a community store cupboard, teaches gardening to children and adults and also runs the street food project, which provides hot meals to vulnerable residents each night. Lynne knows people who are making a loaf of bread last a full week. She knows families evicted from their rental accommodation in summer for the tourist season, who have to camp in fields. She knows a sick man denied his benefits because he could walk 15 yards left destitute for a year and a half. She knows a woman who lost her job under the first lockdown unable to manage on Universal Credit. “She was feeding her children and not feeding herself. These sound like stories from Victorian times, don’t they? One thing about the Victorians – they had the poor house, didn’t they?”

And that is it: in west Cornwall people are feeding their neighbours, and kindly though it is, it cannot be a substitute for a functioning state. It is flickers of light inside a catastrophe.

In St Ives yesterday, as she set out the Christmas Eve collection, Jo was anxious to tell me that she knows of only one family that has abused the foodshare scheme. I didn’t want to include that – incidentally, the proportions are identical to the benefit fraud numbers, which are negligible — but I feel I must, because the narrative that such places are run by the politically motivated for the idle and wicked is so widespread. I understand why. It is essential to believe that, because it is absolution for the rest of us: it allows us to avoid responsibility for a child with an empty carrier bag and an adult’s eyes.

Cornwall is a spit of land reaching far into the ocean. It is the only English county — or duchy for purists — that you can drive across in ten minutes, from Marazion to Hayle. To be remote is our burden, and our pleasure; the Cornish are phlegmatic like that. When the fishermen of Newlyn seek attention from government, they tend to sail to London and wait outside the Palace of Westminster on the river, waving signs detailing their wants.

The threat of the closure of Flybe, the regional airline based at Exeter, meant little to London readers, who can be in New York City within eight hours, Beijing in 12, and travel from Euston to Westminster in the time it takes to read this piece. They don’t need Flybe, which offers a mixture of holiday and business travel to the small Cornish elite, tourists and people who want to go to Spain. Transport means something different to those who live in great cities, who have such a glut of transport they come to hate it, and even watch horror films about it for pleasure.

But Cornwall needs it if it is not to be a Poldark dash Du Maurier dash pasty theme park filled with over-renovated holiday cottages and gruesome poverty. The average full-time salary is less than £25,000 a year. The average child will be priced out of its parents’ pretty village and consigned to a housing estate — if it is lucky. It is normal to work three jobs, or not at all, and the prosaic indicators of poverty — immobility, drug addiction, depression — are much discussed in the pages of The Cornishman.

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Why the Cornish must accept the tourists

By Tanya Gold

I have used Flybe only once, to fly from Newquay to a Rolls Royce press weekend in Speyside, but there are more serious people in Cornwall than I; if you do have to go to London and back in a day, then Flybe is your only answer, unless you are prepared to take the Sleeper train, on which you might have to share a berth with a Christian fundamentalist who might call the victim of the Cyprus gang rape “no better than a prostitute”. And, still, that is a luxury. The ordinary person cannot afford the £118 walk-on off-peak fare.

Transport is both expensive and irregular. When I lived in Carnyorth — you will not have heard of it — there was a bus every two hours on Sunday to Penzance for £5 return. Here, if you want to go anywhere, you must have a car. Even the committed activists of Extinction Rebellion have cars, or they could not call themselves activists, because they would be marooned at home. It’s an hour by car to Newquay, where Flybe flies, or three hours by public transport. The train from Penzance to Paddington is regular, but it takes five hours and 20 minutes to reach London.

At least the A30 is almost all dual carriageway now; but I fancy that is for the benefit of tourists. In my childhood, the journeys from London to Padstow could take ten hours or more, if you were caught behind the tractors. Cornwall has no motorway, but it is not alone. Neither does Dorset, Northumberland, Suffolk, Norfolk, East Sussex, Rutland, and the Isle of Wight.

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Left behind – life beyond the London bubble

By James Bloodworth

The weather isolates us further. It rules here; perhaps that is why paganism endures. At Christmas, so much rain fell that I couldn’t get across the Penwith Peninsula to St Just; even when it doesn’t rain, the fog hangs on the moor, and you have to drive at 20mph for self-preservation.

At night, it’s the most frightening journey I know: a series of sharp bends across a landscape so windswept there are no trees taller than six foot, and no structure taller than the engine houses of the old mines, which look like wizards’ towers. As it write, it is hailing in Newlyn, and the chimney stack is shaking. Sometimes the Coombe River rises to the top of the garden steps, but it hasn’t this year.

Wind closes the promenade in Penzance; the waves contain stones which can drop on your head. There was a famous flood in Newlyn on Valentine’s Day in 2014; further along the coast, in Dawlish, a 100-foot section of Brunel’s railway just fell into the sea and the whole duchy was cut off for months. When it snows — which is not often, but it did in 2018 — the text came instantly from the school: school is closed. Collect your child. I laughed at the time — I was an incomer — but now I know: if they had hesitated, the parents would not have made it to the school.

My friend, who lives high above Newlyn Harbour, saw the snow cloud approach the peninsula. It blotted out St Michael’s Mount. She says she dropped her coffee, grabbed the toddler, and sprinted to the car to rescue her schoolchild, as if in a film. Even so, some children were stranded until a farmer came to pick them up in a tractor. Chywoone Hill, the road to Lamorna, has a gradient of 12.4%. Cars were abandoned and children sledded down the hill instead.

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How Cornwall took back control

By Peter Franklin

It is worse for the Isles of Scilly, which can be cut off for weeks. Fog and wind stop the helicopters and the freight ship the Gry Maritha getting through. This constituency — St Ives — declared last in the general election of 2019, due to the weather and, later on the mainland, because the counting hall had to be cleared for badminton. The Isles of Scilly are feared by mariners. Four naval warships foundered in October 1707 on the Western Rocks, the Crim Rocks and Bishop’s Rock, killing almost 2000 sailors.

I don’t mean to romanticise Cornwall; there has been too much of that. It is, rather, that a culture has grown up around the isolation and the poverty: a culture of consolation, individualism and pride. We tell ourselves that we do not need a functional transport infrastructure; if we did, we would have to share Cornwall. But that is a romantic — a phlegmatic — view.

If we are to grow our economy after Brexit, we need a motorway, cheaper and more regular public transport, and we need some variant of the horribly named Flybe which the Government has saved, at least for now. Let people who are less close to poverty share the burden of reducing carbon emissions. It is easy to mock rural anxiety from London; but you know where such laughter has led before.

That’s the lesson I took from Tanya Gold’s bracingly unsentimental portrait of Cornwall for UnHerd. It is, she says, a “lovely but hard” place – the two qualities existing side-by-side, but experienced in differing proportions depending on whether you’re there for a holiday or to make a living.

Further reading

Why the Cornish must accept the tourists

By Tanya Gold

But what happens when the tourists don’t leave, but move in? Answer: house prices go up, even while local wages remain low. Property markets in some Cornish communities have been utterly distorted. According to The Economist, “at the last count, a quarter of the dwellings in St Ives were second homes or holiday lets”.

Gold says that fatalism is in the Cornish character. But if that’s true, then the people of St Ives are going against type:

“Locals worry that the town is becoming a playground for rich Londoners… So in May 2016 locals decided to do something about it, voting in a referendum to introduce a ‘principal-residence policy’, which stops newly built houses in the town from being used as second homes. The thinking went that by stopping holidaymakers from snapping up new-builds, housing would become more affordable to people who live in St Ives all year round.”

Three years on, has the policy worked? Yes, is the short answer:

“…official statistics suggest that excluding second-home buyers from the new-build market has removed a big source of demand. The price of new homes in the town is 13% below what it might have been if the previous growth rate had continued.”

We’re also told that “other Cornish towns have introduced their own versions of the policy”. However, there is a complication – the level of house building in St Ives has, apparently, “slumped”. The Economist describes this as an “unwelcome side effect”, suggesting that the outcome was both harmful and unintended.

Here’s an alternative interpretation: in some situations, deliberately slowing down the pace of development may be just what’s needed.

Obviously, this runs counter to the conventional wisdom – which rests on two fundamental assumptions: firstly, that the only way to solve the housing crisis is to build more houses; and, secondly, that property prices are a function of supply. Look more closely, however, and we can see that the first assumption is wrong and the second incomplete.

The housing crisis is first and foremost a crisis of affordability. The basic problem is that homes are too expensive, not that there too few of them. The basic solution, therefore, is to make them cheaper – or at least hold prices steady so that wages and savings can catch up.

Ah, but wouldn’t building more houses increase supply and therefore bring down prices? Not necessarily. Prices are a function of both supply and demand. If demand runs ahead of supply, then it doesn’t matter how much you build – prices will still go up. Because supply is physical (requiring bricks and mortar, workers and equipment) and demand is financial (requiring only the electronic transfer funds from one bank account to another) the latter always has the potential to outstrip the former. Never forget: money flows faster than concrete.

Further reading

Sun, sea, sand – and shooting up

By James Bloodworth

That’s why you see property markets overheating even during construction booms – or, rather, especially during construction booms. That’s because supply has a tendency to generate its own demand. In the context of housing, a building boom is its own best advert. It provides visible evidence of a thriving economy – and thus attracts further investor interest, which bankrolls more construction and so on and so forth.

It’s a process best served by the most noticeable kinds of development. Visibility may come from the architectural form of the buildings (the flashier the better) or the concentration of activity in certain hotspots or the already established prestige of certain locations. A measure of controversy also helps – there being no such thing as bad publicity.

Demand can be further enhanced by selling a development as a generic investment product – and not necessarily as a primary residence requiring a full time commitment by the purchaser. Hence the attraction to investors (and thus developers) of holiday homes, time shares, buy-to-let flats and so on.

When some or all of these factors align in a particular place it can be impossible to satisfy demand. Prices therefore keep rising – attracting even more speculative attention and making life ever more expensive for local people.

In these circumstances, it is entirely rational for the community to do what St Ives did and use the law to selectively curb demand – in this case by freezing out the second homers. By disrupting the circular relationship between development and speculation, prices have a chance to subside back to affordable levels.

The Economist, being a liberal publication, plainly doesn’t approve. And, to be fair, place-specific restrictions on second home ownership, buy-to-let landlords and other unwanted categories of demand do represent a barrier to the free movement of people and capital.

However, the right to free movement is not absolute. All liberals would uphold the right of individuals to restrict access to their own private property; and most liberals, apart from the ultras, believe that nations (or groups of nations like the EU) should be able to control their own borders.

And if such rights are justifiably exercised at the level of the individual and the nation, then why shouldn’t they also apply at the intermediate level – that of the community?

Further reading

Control mass immigration? Europe can’t even control mass tourism

By Peter Franklin

The contrast between the native – average income £20,602 – and the emmet – they shop at Waitrose so who knows? – is satirical. They lay waste to whole districts with Range Rovers (which are ant-coloured), occupying holiday cottages, which are decorated offensively in quasi-nautical style. It is nautical style for people who have never been on a boat; the fisherman I know decorate their boat-houses with discarded snack wrappings and tobacco leaves. There is an entire soliloquy about faux nautical soft furnishings in BAIT – Mark Jenkin’s forthcoming film about gentrification in fishing villages, a masterpiece that I fear only emmets will watch – and a short homage to Cornish cheese.

Even so, the decline of Cornish industry – fishing, agriculture, tin mining – is known, by the emmet, to be part of the duchy’s charm. What they consider, and fetishize, as the simple life, is really the kind of poverty that led Catrina Davies, author of the recent memoir Homesick, to live in a shed near Lands’ End, because she can afford nothing else. They will not admit it, but they find the contrast between poverty and affluence charming.

Suggested reading

Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

The decline is everywhere. Only a few boats fish out of the cove of Porthgwarra, where Poldark flashed his arse; instead, the Poldark tours come to gawp at the patch of water where the arse was flashed. The loveliest houses at Porthgwarra – owned by the St Aubyn family, who live at Michael’s Mount – are holiday cottages now. Mousehole is no longer a fishing village, even if it is still called that. It is a holiday park, and in winter – but not at Christmas – every window along the harbourside is dark.

The famous story of Mousehole is of Tom Bawcock, who went to sea in a winter storm with his cat to feed the village children. Now there would be no lights to bring him home. He would die, and the cat would die, and the children would die.

The tin mine at Geevor closed in 1990. A few miners remain to tell tales to tourists, who like to frighten themselves by going down the mines. In St Ives, tourists complain about fishermen – those who survive – driving to work across the beach. It spoils the view.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

If the only sensible course is to be grateful – what else is there for Cornwall now? – August is a month of moaning. We moan about the traffic jams to Porthcurno, which were 90 minutes long last year because the emmets do not know how to use passing places. It requires good manners, and fatalism to use a passing place – fatalism is the Cornish inheritance, for no help is coming.

Emmets do not know how to park either, and clog up the lanes. They impale themselves on granite walls disguised with wild flowers, which are very Cornish: lovely but hard. The local buses are expensive and irregular; on Sundays in winter, they feel like imaginary, or even mythical, buses.

Newlyn, where I live, is newly-gentrified because the housing bubble at Mousehole –£850,000 for a semi-detached cottage in an area where most people work three minimum wage jobs – can grow no bigger. We have an arthouse cinema, a wine bar and two famous sea-food restaurants. It is a truism that, in emmet season, you cannot park near your own home.

The children’s playground in Marazion, an emmet village, is a fairyland. The one in Newlyn, used by locals, is shabby. It feels offensive, but if you hate the emmet pound, you are worse than them. You would have Cornwall be poorer; you would fetishize the Cornish past more than they do.

Suggested reading

Daphne du Maurier's Brexit fantasy

By Sneha Alexander

At least the summer tourists leave at the end of August. They go back to Muswell Hill. The affluent retirees, who own holiday cottages or worse, motor homes, do not leave.

The affluent retiree loves the west country; the population has increased by almost 50,000 in twenty years. He has, then, almost by himself, reversed the trend that emptied Cornwall of people, who left to seek work elsewhere, and seems determined to make you conscious of his happiness. He hounds you with his presence. He follows you. He is always seeking your company – for teas, coffees, suppers and matinees.

Among other things, he upholds the late-flowering career of Judi Dench all by himself. She has a holiday home at Zennor, from which she opposed the building of a mobile telephone mast which would have benefitted the locals. (Typical emmet behaviour: gild the myth, ignore the living). He turns up at your gate, just as you are sitting down to work. He is a time thief, because, at least subconsciously, he knows he has none.

The Cornish retiree is competing for space with young children. Retirees and young children like very similar things: cream teas; sand; good service; dogs. (Dogs will approve anything).

Last summer I went to a performance of Peter and the Wolf at a local church. The retirees arrived early – so early I wondered if they had been there all night. The natives arrived either on time, or, if in possession of more than two children, late. It would never occur to the retiree to move so a person only three feet high could see over them, and so I watched a concert for children at which none of the children could see anything, because the stage was obscured by retirees, who presumably long for children to be cultured, and yet, given the chance, will literally block them from culture with their own bodies.

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Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

The young mothers of Newlyn – doughty, sweary, and fiercely tattooed – fear no one. And yet, as they curse their lovers over morning coffee, they are almost drowned out by a chorus of retirees tutting at their language. The tut is, essentially, their whole speech; they have an arsenal of tuts, and money.

They are a monstrous force of conservatism, policing good manners in areas of outstanding natural beauty while showing very few themselves. They hold up the patriarchy almost by themselves, stuffed into Leave rallies and church pews and the car parks at garden centres (they like flowers because they are obedient). They also hold up traffic, with their ponderous motor homes that signal, though obliviously, the retiree world view, which tends towards Lebensraum: everywhere is their home.

But the mature truth is, he that hates the emmet, hates Cornwall. We must accept. Fatalism, the Cornish inheritance, remains useful.