St Ives is a British seaside resort like no other. It has sandy beaches, the paradisal kind Brits dream of all winter and habitually get on aeroplanes for. This old fishing town in western Cornwall has not one, but five of them, and on these pebble-free playgrounds you will find retro cafes and chi-chi, cocktail-shaking restaurants. It has utilitarian shops, too, selling buckets and spades and Tupperware, and fancy ones. You can buy jewellery and in one lifestyle boutique you can pick up anything from a nature book to a designer beanie.
There is something for everyone on the food front, too. There are more than 110 places to eat in this far-flung spot. You’ve got seaside staples, including fish and chips, ice-cream, burgers and pasty outlets, some with a modern twist. Take the pasty, the miners’ lunchbox staple. The Cornish Bakery does a cosmopolitan Travelling Empanada and even a sweet potato and feta version. But thin-crust traditionalists can default to a cheese and onion from SH Ferell & Son, the tiny family-run bakery on the corner of historic Fore Street.
Ice-cream lovers can get a timeless 99 or organic clotted-cream concoctions from Moomaid of Zennor. Be warned, though. The seagulls are on to Moomaid. When I came out of the ice-cream shack with a double cone of Shipwreck (dulce de leche caramel and honeycomb, oh the bliss) one swooped down and had its beak in it before I could cry Daphne du Maurier.
Kids, meanwhile, can go to a children’s theatre show, take a boat to see seals or a drop-in art workshop, or go on a ghost trail.
Appealing, you might say, but no different to any other British seaside resort that combines nostalgia and stylish consumerism. I’m thinking of Rock, further east along the north Cornish coast, Southwold in Suffolk or Whitstable in Kent – just without the sandy beaches.
But what no other seaside destination can match is the range of artistic and cultural offerings of St Ives, which is not a shrine to art but a dynamic, creative hub. We spotted real live artists drinking in the 16th-century Sloop Inn on the harbour after a hard day in the studio. Sand, surf and culture, that’s St Ives’s unique offering. Kids can get their bucket and spade fix and teenagers can sunbathe or surf.
The curious or creative can throw a pot at the famous Leach Pottery or drop into a life-drawing class at the St Ives School of Painting. Or do what we did, and admire the work of St Ives artists, from Ben Nicholson to Naum Gabo and Patrick Heron; their work is now on permanent display in the new Tate St Ives extension. Our trip was prompted by the Patrick Heron retrospective showing there. Heron is a sort of God in this westerly artists’ colony, and during our short visit my husband and I encountered him in all kinds of ways.
Heron was all about intensity, sometimes joy and always colour. His paintings are an invitation to engage. “The picture is not the vehicle of meaning,” he once said, “the picture is the meaning.” Heron’s work is not hung chronologically in Tate St Ives, because, according to the curator Andrew Wilson, it was formally consistent. For the visitor, this is liberating: there is no pressure to be clever, or to spot the development of his artistic practice. Just enjoy the work, experience it, Wilson seems to be saying.
There are many locals who seem touched by Heron’s zest for life. One of them, Tamsin Thompson, runs the SILCo Sea Rooms, an all-day tapas and cocktail and gastrobar that feels like a ship’s cabin. Sit up at the window seats overlooking the harbour, and you feel like you are on the prow of a ship. Thompson’s three sons are the local producers of the first-rate St Ives gin, served with a slice of grapefruit as a counterpoint to the sweet botanicals, including Bladderwrack, a local seaweed and a splendid word. Thompson is a contemporary of Heron’s daughters, who I met at the exhibition, and she used to play at Eagle’s Nest, Heron’s home for 40 years in the village of Zennor further along the West Penwith peninsula, as a child. He was always laughing, she tells me, and wore purple shirts.
There was more colour in work by local artists hanging on the walls at Pedn Olva hotel, a retro gem with modern flourishes that presides from a granite rockface over St Ives Bay. It’s the place to go for a fresh lobster and prawn roll, or a sundowner in either the rooftop bar or the terrace bar. The views have fused into a single memory of diffused light and strips of sea-sky-sand. The views got me in a pickle. Our shower had a big window, also overlooking the Celtic sea which, each afternoon, was choppy. In the morning, it was crashing against the rocks. I spent a long time staring out of that window, which I could have spent eating more scones and Cornish clotted cream. It’s true what they say about the light here: it is soft, and mesmerising. It makes you yearn for something, and made me wish I could paint.
But then we went to Barbara Hepworth’s studio, and I wished I could sculpt. There is a permanent installation of her monumental sculptures in the subtropical garden. One of the Heron daughters told me there is a new head gardener there, and that he has revived Hepworth’s original planting plans. The space is meditative and energising.
It is impossible to get your fill of light and sky and sea in St Ives. The trick is to find different ways to experience it. One way is to ride the St Ives Bay Line that hugs the craggy coast. We took the broad gauge train for all of three-minutes from St Ives up the track to Carbis Bay, where we disembarked for the airy and stylish Boskerris Hotel. We toasted more light and sky and sea with a glass of wine on the luxe deck overlooking the Bay. Fortified, we walked back across the beach and down a winding, shaded path that hugged the coast to take those scones and clotted cream in the café overlooking Porthmeor beach. Surfers love it here. Sand-averse sybarites can repair to the buzzing Porthmeor beach café, which does interesting tapas and seafood and – a glam touch this – boasts heated eating pods complete with blanket for chilly knees.
Walk on this beach, and you’ll want to keep walking, as we did, setting off on the South West Coast Path. It was a five-mile, reputedly demanding, walk to Zennor, where Heron lived until his death in 1999. I’d heard the name Zennor so many times by now, it had cast a sort of spell. There is a pub there, the Tinners Arms, recommended by an artist we met in Helston, a rather more self-effacing artists’ hub 30 miles inland, which is home to studios and a world-class initiative called CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust) featuring international artists whose work is currently on show in diverse and wonderful locations throughout Cornwall.
We didn’t get to Zennor, because we had a talk to get to about Patrick Heron in Mousehole, a painting-perfect harbour town that is home to the Newlyn Art School. You can do art courses here, should you fancy it. There’s a pub called the Ship Inn, where, from the deck of the garden, you can admire the light, again. Then go back to St Ives and have a look at Heron’s “Mousehole, 1946”. His daughters told me that he only went to Mousehole once, and the fishing village didn’t have happy memories for him. But it made an impression, for personal reasons, as St Ives, and Heron, will on you.
Way to go
Accommodation provided by Pedn Olva (doubles from £215 per night) and at the Boskerris hotel (doubles from £160 per night). Patrick Heron is showing at Tate St Ives until 30 September. For art classes, see St Ives School of Painting and Newlyn School of Art. Groundwork, a series of exhibitions and events featuring international artists, takes places across Cornwall until September 2018 as part of CAST. See c-a-s-t.org.uk for venues. Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.
