Cornwall!!

[P0larexpress]

why do people pay stupid amounts to holiday here?
I nearly spat my coffee out in work today. A co worker has paid £1600 for a week in st Ives, last week of June!

she showed me it! It’s a pretty basic, one bedroomed cottage. Wtf!!

i have booked flights and an Airbnb in greece for just over £1000. I’ll admit I never holiday in the uk, because it just doesn’t feel like a proper holiday to me, but if I do it’s always a deal/ bargain Airbnb type thing.

what’s the attraction of Cornwall?
By all accounts it’s overcrowded cost a fortune to park , and eat out, and a pretty mediocre experience all round!

I live in Cornwall and run a business here. Like every other business I've spoken to were having a noticeably quiet spring. There are lots of reasons, but one of them is the greed of the accommodation sector over the last two years. It's affected everyone adversely.

No it's not as PPs say.

You can use the loos, you just need to pay. The locals already pay for them through their council tax, and the council is utterly strapped for cash.

Apparently you load a card with credit and swipe.

Not saying it's a great idea, but rumours saying "tourists can't use the loos" are wrong.

Yep, I agree. The scenery is lovely in Cornwall, but in my opinion not as beautiful as coastal scenery in Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia, Donegal or Northumberland. It's also twice as expensive as those places, and twice as crowded. We went once and had a nice time but didn't particularly want to go again and have enjoyed other places much more. There was a lot of driving round car parks for 30 mins trying to find a space, visiting a beach-side cafe and then spending £25 on a crab sandwich with little crab in it, and being surrounded by braying Londoners (we're Londoners too!). The only thing Cornwall has going for it over those other places is that the weather tends to be a bit better.

#Lameasahorse - there are plenty of towns in Cornwall which have everything on their doorstep, so you 'absolutely ' don't need a car, but even if you did, you can hire them, or use buses, or use trains to get around Cornwall

From a different angle, we have lived in Cornwall long term. I've been here 45/65 years, and we are ready to leave. The traffic, the people. It's fabulous country, with superb food, hotels and accommodation, but it is (for us) a bit too successful. We are keen to move to a nice rural area north of the M5 corridor.

Which will simultaneously take us within two hours of our family, and that cuts 4 hours off travel time on a 200 mile journey. It was do-able at 40 and 50, but it gets much less appealing once you turn 65 or 70. So my beautiful house and eye-poppingly awesome view will be sold to the highest bidder once DMIL is no more. We'll buy a smaller house, give our DC a lump sum as a deposit and set about making a new life.

I loved my holidays in Cornwall as a child, and have lived here for nearly 30 years, although in SE Cornwall, not in the very touristy bits further south.

I agree that the popular areas are ridiculously over priced and can get crazily busy at the height of the season. When DS had a girlfriend to stay a couple of years ago we took her for a day out to Padstow. About an hours journey there, place was rammed we couldn't find a single place to park so came home again!

For holidays we go to Brittany, overnight ferry from Plymouth, much better value, weather and food!

I think Cornwall is beautiful (went to the Minack theatre a few years ago-stunning) and had many a happy family holiday when our DC were little (ie before they started school so not too crowded or too expensive).

Parts of Dorset and Devon are gorgeous too.

We went to Anglesey last year and it was absolutely breathtaking. Not crowded and stunning beaches.

We are going to Northumberland this year and I'm really looking forward to seeing what that has to offer

As I said, I don't know exactly how it'll work, but I imagine the plans involve some kind of dissemination of information, rather than just saying to people as they arrive "you can't come in".

Or maybe not, who knows?

Actually reading this it looks as though it'll work the other way round. Visitors will pay using contactless, and locals will be able to register somehow.

Just writing this before I set off to pick the dcs up from a concert at Eden. Not Cornish but have lived here a while and travelled all over and it is really bloody gorgeous and I've never found Cornish people to be anything other than lovely, warm, straightforward folk. I've witnessed some truly awful entitlement and rudeness towards locals from visitors. I think that's the bit people don't see.

There are plenty of places to go which aren't on the beaten track. We have about 10 beaches within 5 miles of us and many are pretty empty. August is traditionally dreadful weather and I'd never come here then. We tend to enjoy it now - the flowers are all out and it's stunning - and go elsewhere for the summer holidays.

I'd agree about August - generally its a fifty- fifty split of two weeks awful and two weeks ok weather.

Some people don't like flying might be part of the reason (airport poor management especially because of the Borders Agency being useless), others do not like certain levels of heat.

I paid nowhere near the OPs colleague for a week in September and had a lovely week.

I just can’t agree on the beautiful beaches thing. I go to Greece (a Greek island) and Cornwall every year and yes the beaches in Greece are lovely, but they are small and shallow and honestly, if it wasn’t sunny they’d be nothing to write home about.

Some of the beaches in the U.K., especially West Wales and Cornwall are beautiful. Long, beautiful, deep beaches. If the U.K. was a hot country people would look at our beaches differently. If you take away the weather and just compare like for like, I have to say, U.K. beaches are better.

This is why I smile when people who don't live here say earnestly that Cornwall has a subtropical climate and is warmer than the rest of the UK. It really isn't. It's more temperate because it's surrounded by sea, which means far fewer frosts in the winter which means that some subtropical plants can grow here.

However much of the time the weather is worse than the rest of the UK, particular the east side of the country. You can usually count on one hand the number of times it gets over about 23 degrees during a summer, there is more rain, MUCH more wind, far more grey mizzly days when the sea seems to rise up and hover a few inches above the ground. Any kind of media hype which squeaks about "Spanish plumes" etc make your average West Cornwall person's heart sink, because they know it means that all that lovely warm air coming over the Bay of Biscay just sucks up a load of fog and low cloud into the air and dumps it over the nearest land it finds - Cornwall. Ok, it might be 0.2 degrees warmer than normal.....

And yes, August is mostly shit.

@HesterShaw1

I'm not sure you know how bad the weather is in some parts of the UK.

On my brother's wedding photos you can tell who lives in Devon and Cornwall and those of us who travelled south just by the sun tans.

😱

I disagree, it’s beautiful all year. Go and look at Heligan on a rainy day, the colours are amazing!
Obviously if you are scared of getting wet it’s not great.

What an odd thing to say. Yes we do have sun here, and people get suntans . Of course I know what the weather is like in other parts of the UK. I have been further than the Tamar, you know.

However the weather is generally cooler, rainier and windier than it is further east. These are meteorological facts - we are further west and surrounded on three sides by the sea, so we are notably cooler than say Herfordshire or Suffolk. (the flip side being we are generally milder in the winter). Plymouth and Truro get considerably more rain than Newcastle, London, Oxford or Edinburgh. West Cornwall is one of the windiest places in Europe.

People who say we have a "subtropical climate" because there are palm trees and other exotic plants are just wrong. Palm trees grow in Plockton in Argyll - the west of Scotland doesn't have a subtropical climate either! Like Cornwall, they have the North Atlantic Drift which means frosts at sea level are unusual.

You don't need hot sun to get a suntan.

Anyway....

I don't mind Cornwall or Devon but I do find that the locals shout a lot in my vicinity about how they're from there and all their family are too when I really couldn't give a shiny shit

Really? I live in Somerset & visit Devon frequently & have never heard anyone do this unless you happen to be talking to them about where they're from??

Really? @wheredoesitallbegin I have a friend from the east end who is forever telling me 'you can take the girl out of Bow but you can't take Bow out of the girl'. But none of my Cornish friends ever say anything similar!
'You can take the girl out of Camborne but you can't take Camborne out of the girl'.
Imagine!

Miserable. Overpriced, overfilled and often rains in August. We won't go back. Biggest waste of a holiday ever.

Excellent!
Tbh we only want people holidaying here who want to be here! Anyone else tends to be proper grumpy