Chris. 58. Doctor.
The house I live in used to be the original surgery in the village. I’m a 5th generation doctor here, my brother lives one door away from me, I see lots of people around that I know. I think a lot of us are very proud of our community and work very hard to keep it going with all the occasions, societies and clubs. Things like the carnival, which was a couple of weeks ago – a lot of effort goes into that. Men’s pasty-making competitions, flower shows, the surf club at the beach, The Quay Fisherman’s Association. There’s a fishing competition once a year, carols around the Christmas tree in the winter, all of those sorts of things that…each of them wouldn’t necessarily be greatly missed if you stopped it, but the combination of all of those things make us, I think, a community that’s still got something special about it.
There are some places that still have a community feel, but a lot of places have lost it. As places get bigger it gets different, and obviously, with coastal villages, you have the problem of second homes. But we seem to have enough organisations and clubs going on that are keeping things ticking. It certainly isn’t unique, but it’s becoming more unusual I think. I think Perranporth is not quite the same; I don’t think Newquay’s got much heart anymore. You hear about some villages on the south coast where no-one’s living there in the winter at all. I don’t know whether they’ve still got a community but people say in St Mawes, there’s hardly anyone living there in winter. I know quite a few people from St Ives and they say most of them live in Carbis Bay now, so the actual heart of St Ives has gone to some extent.
Both sides of my family come from St Agnes, going back for generations, so I know I could go anywhere in the world and work for 30 or 40 years – well, I couldn’t anymore, I’d be dead then – but I would always have been coming home. One of my brothers lives in Lymington in Hampshire and has done for 30 years or so, but he still comes home. A couple of my aunts and uncles lived abroad, some in America, some in Italy and so on, and they were always coming home. And I feel the same: this would always be my home, wherever I chose to live. And I don’t think that aspect has changed. There have been changes in Cornwall, and not all for the best, but you accept that: life changes. Has my relationship changed? I don’t think so, not particularly. My children have all gone away for college and there are no immediate signs of them being able to come back here, but they all still feel the same: they’ve all got their sense of identity. This is where their roots are, this is where their roots will always be, whether they live here or not.
Growing up here was fantastic. I’ve got 4 brothers, and the fields out here were our playground. We played sports all day every day in the fields with various friends – a couple who lived in that house, a couple who lived over there. We went down the beach an awful lot in the summer. My brothers, the 5 of us, range in age. There must be 8 years between us, but we formed sports teams, we went camping, we went fishing… You know, just all outdoors sorts of things. It was very outdoorsy. Life was different then; we went around and did things without our parents which children don’t seem to be able to do now. Our parents just let us go out and roam around and do our thing. We had a whole lot of fun.
There was a bit more for younger people then I guess. There used to be occasional discos in the church hall. Once we were a little bit older, there was normally a disco at The Driftwood on a Friday night. As we were growing up and getting a little bit older, sometimes there might be a disco over at Porthtowan in one of the pubs. Once we were 18 – I was away at university then, but at home over the holidays – the pubs were frequented as well. Our whole life really was focused here; I went to school in Truro, but our nightlife was based here. When my children were growing up, they would go to Falmouth for evenings and I’d think, “jeez, I’ve never done that.” It was certainly a bit more isolated, but with great freedom.
Tourism is massively, massively different. Just the numbers of people here, the number of holiday homes, the number of people who come down for a few weeks each year. There’s always been mass tourism, but the numbers now are so much greater. In August, you walk around and just think, ‘where have all these people come from?’. It’s not just that 6 or 8 weeks now. We’ve got a holiday rental here, and people are looking for places in February, and you go to St Ives in winter and there’s always people wandering around down there, whereas 30 years ago there was no-one there in winter. So tourism is massive, and much more all-year than it ever was. This summer, the peak period has been just crazy.
I think it can barely cope, at times. In the summer, in that peak period, we’ve hardly got the infrastructure for it. Personally I don’t think we want any more. The beaches are full. I think to some extent, the more people you cram in, the more you’re going to kill the golden goose. We need to be really careful about that. You look at somewhere like Newquay and think they’ve not had that thought, they just want to pour more and more people in. It will just… It will ruin it. It does need some kind of thinking, you know, of enough’s enough. You look at the Perranporth beach in the summer, and it is nuts. You look at St Agnes at the moment with the restaurant closing up the road; there’s hardly enough places to feed people at night. Can we cope? Not much more I don’t think.
I think with Cornish culture it’s a big sense of identity. I know myself and my brothers, we all feel very Cornish. In my life I’ve played a lot of sport, and all the people there identify with being Cornish very much. I’ve particularly had a lot to do with rugby and there’s a great pride in people from Cornwall who have gone on to play for England. A big part of it is just having that identity of who you are, feeling that we are a little bit different from the English. The roots of having a different language and that sort of Celtic identity make you identify to some extent with other Celtic regions of Britain and Europe. I went to a school that was a Methodist school, and that’s again an unusual thing. We share a lot of that with Wales. The things we eat, the things we do, stuff like that. Just being a little bit different.
At school we had learned a few rudimentary Cornish words, and when I was a teenager I got some books and I was trying to learn. I’m not a natural linguist and so that got lost along the way, and each year now I think, “I must, I must start to learn”; I’ve got various resources upstairs but I never quite get into it. Just knowing about it and knowing a few words, I think it’s just part of that identity. Little things like when you’re on the bus now, the Park and Ride bus going into Truro, there are signs that are popping up in Cornish, you’re seeing it on street names, and whilst it’s not something that you’ll hear even on an occasional basis, the embers are glowing. It’s a little bit more accepted that there is something out there, even if not many people know it or try to learn it. But I think there’s a greater acceptance that it is there, and part of our history.
The Cornish accent is much less common than it was. I grew up playing rugby in Redruth where everyone was obviously very Cornish, there was no doubt about that. Some of the mines were still working. There’s obviously been a lot of people who have moved into Cornwall, but interestingly I think a lot of people who move in really identify with the Cornish identity. Which is great, it’s great that people have grown up with that identity. But it’s changed greatly, it was perhaps less thought about then. You didn’t have to think about it, it’s just who you were. Things change, identity changes, what people do changes. On Christmas Day you’d get a couple of people going to the beach, whereas now you get about 500 people charging into the sea together. On Easter, going and picking some limpets to eat and so on; that isn’t really done now. Little traditions change.
It’s lifestyle that has made me happy here. I can do the things that I like doing. I’m very water based, so I can go fishing, go boating, go swimming, go diving. Those are the things that I really enjoy doing: outside stuff, running on the cliffs and so on. I’m not a big cultural animal so I’m not missing out on galleries, performances, music… They’re not things that fire me up in the same way. For me, it’s got everything that I want to make me happy. You’re a long way from London, which I take as a good thing. If you want to go abroad, you’ve got an extra day on your travel because you’ve got to get to London. It's a minor inconvenience. The upside is that it’s a long way for them to come here.
I’d like people to know just that Cornwall is not a playground. People live here, people work here. Our wages aren’t what their wages are. There’s not a lot of money. I guess just, you know, people live here. It’s a real place. It’s a problem for local people to find somewhere to live now. St Agnes prices are incredible, so if you’re a working person, unless you’ve got help from parents, some people are going to really struggle with getting a house here. My brother’s daughter is just facing… She can’t afford anything in St Agnes, so she’ll be at the back of Porthtowan. For people who are wanting to stay in their own village, it’s getting difficult.
Property is our biggest problem. Jobs, economy and so on, and protecting our environment. Not overloading it, not building too many houses, keeping what we’ve got. To be honest, that’s my wish for the world, not just Cornwall. We’ve got to protect our environment and not destroy it. There needs to be some thought given to how many houses you build, where we build them, what sort of houses we build, and who we build them for. It’s all got to be environmentally friendly. With cutting down on greenhouse gasses, every house that’s built should have solar panels. It’s nuts that they don’t. Every house that they build should have solar panels. Every development that’s made should have a certain proportion of social housing, and quite a large proportion of social housing. There’s got to be some regulation of second homes. And if people are building houses, there’s got to be some provision with that as to how they fund schools, how they fund health facilities, because our facilities are creaking. If the population’s going to grow, there has to be investment into those areas from the people who are building or making money from the houses. Property is a big thing. The developers only want to build whoppers that they can sell at a huge price, but a huge amount has got to be social housing. It’s got to be.
I’m 58, nearly 59. I’ll be retiring over the next few years. Personally, I want to be able to do all the things I’ve been able to do up to now. I’d like to be able to catch fish still because they’ve not all been caught. I’d like to be able to swim in unpolluted seas. I’d like to be able to go swimming and surfing without endless people around me. That’s my hope. And obviously, as a part of being here, I would very much like to still live in a place that’s got a sense of community and a sense of Cornishness. I don’t want us to be London-by-the-Sea. That’s my wishlist.