Carbis Bay isn’t really a place: it’s a tourist resort. A generic, if bejewelled, suburbia, dependent on its close neighbour St Ives for culture.
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)”.
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