I had been to Port Isaac before. I know this because my partner told me yesterday. “We parked on the beach,” she said, all matter-of-factly. The best I could manage was a “Did we?” because I had zero recollection of it. I didn’t have the nerve to suggest it might have been somewhere else we went, probably well over 30 years ago. How does someone who has no clue argue with someone who knows for sure?
We’re out in the sticks on the North Cornwall/North Devon border and yesterday we decided to revisit (!) Port Isaac. It was about a 45 minute drive along the wonderfully named Atlantic Highway, a road that sounds like an album by Bruce Springsteen, perhaps the follow-up to Atlantic City.
A lot has changed since we first came here in 1990. There were no mobile phones, no SatNav devices, you paid for things with something called cash (ask your grandparents, kids). A lot hasn’t changed.
Despite the new-fangled digital radio in the car, the signal is always terrible, often non-existent. One moment you’re singing along to something you love, the next there’s nothing. 56 years ago we put a man on the moon. Today, you still can’t listen to the radio properly and you have no idea why the signal has dropped out.
As for Port Isaac, you’d be hard pushed to drive onto the beach these days now that it’s become internationally famous following the success of TV’s Doc Martin and the sea shanty men Fisherman’s Friends. It’s picture postcard perfect, as you edge gently down on foot from the car park. It’s like stepping back in time to a kinder, gentler, quieter place, until you realise just why it’s so quiet. Hardly anyone lives there.
Because of grockles, like me, almost every house has a key safe on the door, meaning that the only people you see are tourists. Affluent ‘outsiders’, as one person described them to me, buy up local properties, bumping up house prices so much that local people can’t afford to live in them. In summer, places like Port Isaac are rammed while in winter they are dead. In the hell hole for locals that is St Ives, the invasion is an all round affair.
We had a lovely walk around late winter Port Isaac, visiting Doc Martin’s house and surgery, also a rental property, and admiring the Platt (harbour) where the mighty Fisherman’s Friends started singing, for the hell of it. Several of the shops belong to Jon Cleave of the FFs and his family. I have to say we loved the place but when you think that the school Doc Martin’s wife worked at is now a hotel, you get the idea of how the place is going. The beauty of Port Isaac remains, but the heart? I am not so sure now.
What appears to have happened in relatively nearby Bude is that new estates have appeared on the outskirts of town and that’s mainly where local people live. Maybe in the long term that’s how things will evolve, with rich folk buying up the seaside towns and everyone else living in nearby new towns, some serving the better off in said seaside towns, as already happens in St Ives.
Where we are, roughly between Bude and Hartland, it’s a real village, with just a handful of rental properties. And our little cabin has essentially been built at the end of someone’s garden so at least this time we’re not contributing to the housing crises in the south west, at least not this time.
It is so sad to visit places where tourism has exorcised the local population. We first saw it in a visit to Cawsand and Kingsand in east Cornwall, gorgeous little places but with a tiny population of residents. But the truth is that it’s everywhere, including and especially cities like my own, Bristol, the march of rich house-owners and the gentrification of whole areas has had the same effect on locals as as happened down here.
Anyway, time to set aside my guilt because someone, somewhere nearby has baked a pasty that has my name on it and I have a local economy to support. And what fun it will be when my partner informs me that wherever we go today, we’ll have been there before. “We have?” I’ll ask.
