If you're from Cornwall, how do you personally feel about tourists and second home owners?

[Beerlovingwalker]

Genuinely curious really, as an outsider that loves Cornwall.

On the one hand, it must be nice to know that so many people love the beauty of your county and I'm sure it's nice to share it. However, it also must be difficult to adjust from living fairly quietly in the Autumn/winter months, to suddenly have to share your space with so many million tourists and second home owners in the summer.

Why the hell would anyone assume Londoners pushing up property prices "up North" would "bridge the north south divide". It would just fuck up "Up North" like its fucked up Cornwall surely?

Yeah probably but at least the north could have a few years of having their buildings gentrified before collapsing under the weight house prices, SUV’s driven between private school and the home office and of hordes of cyclists cutting the countryside off.

Our Independent is retiring so we're guaranteed a new councillor. So far I've had 3 leaflets from the new Independent and 2 from the Tory. Lib Dem and Labour haven't bothered but as nobody usually bothers putting anything through our door that isn't surprising.

For those that are saying our culture doesn't matter, this link may be of interest www.cornwall.gov.uk/people-and-communities/equality-and-diversity/cornish-national-minority/

Did you maybe misread? Pretty sure person was suggesting iRelanders. But too lazy to go back and check.

I did go back and check (I'm on a computer): you were right and I need to go to SpecSavers!

Thanks for answering my question, OrangeSamphire - interesting to hear your thoughts on it

Why did Nina get involved in the first place

Sorry wrong thread

I just described the content of this thread to DH, who laughed and said he must be racist because there was an Asian lady sitting in her car on a side road in an industrial estate, and he assumed she was lost or broken down and asked if she needed help. She chuckled and said she was waiting for the car wash to open. As a PP noted, Cornwall is 98% white, so we do assume POC are lost tourists, but because most of us are quite kind and helpful, we generally stop to ask if everything is okay. The presumption is of racism, but the intention isn't.

Walking my dog, I see walkers trying to make sense of the appalling map provided free to our local area, and I always stop to ask to ask where they need to go next. It's just called being helpful, surely.

It is without a shadow of a doubt a problem. To be fair though, the average Cornish young family are not in the market for the sort of houses that second home owners go for and it’s often other Cornish people who are selling to them at these inflated prices.
The real issue, as it is across the UK, is woeful lack of investment in decent social and affordable housing for decades under every shade of Government.

For those that are saying our culture doesn't matter, this link may be of interest
www.cornwall.gov.uk/people-and-communities/equality-and-diversity/cornish-national-minority/

Interesting. What defines whose Cornish - Is it residency?

The sort of houses bought by people looking to make a profit from air B&B include the woman who has bought the house I used to live in 27 years ago, and the house next door (which was lived in by another larger family). We are talking about terraced houses without gardens, where the front door opened onto the road (no pavement). Exactly the sort of house that we sold to a childless young couple, with a dog, as their first home. We sold it for £10k less than we paid and put a weathertight roof on it (which it didn't have when we bought it-- we were too stupid or innocent to realise). The buyers moved 10 miles.

I don’t know @Ifailed although at the moment I would say it’s based on heritage and bloodlines.

It’s an interesting question - what defines a person as being a certain nationality.

I for example don’t really know what nationality I am although I have citizenship for two countries and have lived in three, or four (if you count Cornwall as its own country).

If I stay here long enough and if Cornwall ever becomes independent, maybe I could apply for citizenship. Would i then be Cornish? I still don’t think so!

Students should have to pay council tax and holiday home owners business rates.

Right. I am Cornish. My family are Cornish. There as many different ideas of being Cornish as there are family members, there's not one single identity.

I live in London now. Have done for 20 years. Am I cornish? Who's deciding? Can I move back and buy a house or am I (and most of the people I went to school with- I guess we're economic migrants) now 'one of those Londoners'?

I don't buy the 'linguistic minority'. Cornish is only spoken by about 500 people and the ability and time to learn it is the preserve of the privileged. Learn it if you like but don't pretend that the majority of Cornish people have any interest in it.

But it is in a pretty village on a tidal estuary, which the developer is busily talking up on social media. She just plans to sell the houses she bought cheap for several times what she paid. And that is the inequity of the Cornish property market.

I'm not very Cornish, other than having possibly a great grandma who came from Looe. But I came here when I was six, went to school here and left for university and a career. By chance, I came back at 35 and have been here since, and I am now 64. Parts of Cornwall, like Helford, Rock and St Mawes, have been regarded as Knightsbridge-on-Sea since the 60s,sailing and ocean racing, yah. But the creeping suburbification of the county makes me heave. When DS finishes uni, we're gone.

DH and I are both Cornish, born and bred. Lived all our lives in a town known for being extremely deprived and went to the same state school etc. DH even went to uni here. We have decent careers and our income is pretty good (70k+). We are not alone in this, many of our friends are the same. It pisses me off when people automatically think everybody here is backward and unable to have a decent life!

As for tourists I absolutely accept why people would want to come here as some areas are breathtakingly stunning and everyone should be able to enjoy that. I don't appreciate the extra traffic on my daily commute though but that's me being selfish.

The roads are too busy at the weekend. And it is too far from the rest of our family in the Midlands.

We are both right, @ShrekandDonkey, just in different ways.

Just out of interest, @ShrekandDonkey, are you and your DH both in the public sector?

Xing (I can't seem to tag on the app) I do indeed work in the public sector (NHS) but DH doesn't and never has. He is the higher earner too.

We have done the family tree on my maternal side and had ancestors in my home town (that I can't afford to live in) back to the 1730s.

We are both high earners too and have been able to do that in Cornwall.

I set up a business that does well, and now also creates work opportunities for other people. And DH has always worked remotely and travelled abroad, wherever we have lived in the U.K. so that didn’t change when we moved here.

Neither of us are public sector (although I did dip in for a short time, and dipped out again rather fast!). We’re also not reliant on tourism.

We are however reliant on good broadband, which we were surprised how fast it was when we moved here a decade ago, thanks to the Superfast Cornwall investment. And looking forward to gigabit speeds in the next round of broadband investment now being rolled out here.

We’re also not reliant on tourism.

But might you not be reliant on tourism indirectly? What if Person A is your client, who had the money to pay you from their trade with Person B, who mended the drains of Person C, who made some curtains for Person D.......... and, further down the chain, Person H (not the one from Line Of Duty!) had the money to kick things off because of their direct income from their souvenir shop?

As I said earlier, I'm in the Midlands and surrounded by motorways. We don't get 'tourists' as such in my town, but I presume the motorways that we all use are partly funded by the income from the service stations; or, to look at it from another perspective, the motorways are much more feasible for everybody to use because of the presence of the SSs.

Who is it using and funding the service stations and thus keeping them viable and open for everybody, as well as providing work for locals? It's not the people who live within 25 miles of them - a great deal of their use and income will come from people travelling long distances, many of whom will be tourists, even if only passing through.

Yes; you seem to think otherwise.