To detest people that think they own beautiful parts of the world?

[Bumpitybumper]

I grew up in a very ugly and undesirable part of the country and now live in a tourist hotspot. I am becoming increasingly frustrated by people that are born and raised here trying to restrict tourism or stop 'outsiders' moving here. The houses are expensive here because it's such a lovely place to live but there isn't much employment except for from tourism. Despite this many locals that I know feel that tourism should be restricted as it makes the town extremely busy in high season. They also think housing should be subsidised for locals.

I feel that there are only so many beautiful places and those lucky enough to be born in them are no more entitled to live and enjoy them than the rest of us who by luck were born elsewhere. This would effectively condemn future people like me to live and visit only the less desirable of areas whilst my children could stay in this lovely area and be subsidised for doing so. It just feels incredibly unfair!

i think it’s different to have properly planned holiday homes at a specific density on a circumscribed site than when the existing built fabric of a town or village is bought up and scarcely used. It’s why when some ‘dying’ towns in Italy offer cheap houses it’s on condition that people actually move there and build a life there.

It’s all in the planning and the regulatory structure around it, and while being from somewhere might be a blunt instrument as per the OP’s original gripe, at least it recognises that planning affects more than the physical environment but also the longer term social and cultural one.

Lol, well yeah - having to secure your belongings is a strong indicator of how likely a population believes there are to be untrustworthy people about! I don't think that's controversial 🤔

But it's not the only marker by any means, is the point

Thank you!
Christ, some people would argue with a balloon on a stick with eyes drawn on.

I'd say it definitely isn't

You are the one who ha chosen to take issue with my point, I'm just standing my ground.

Yet nobody has offered a better indicator of high trust.

OK, I'll repeat another poster's point: 'But it's not the only marker by any means, is the point'.

Well, I offer one, which you refute but without saying how/why. I would be interested in seeing the metric by which this is officially measured, or something that says my criteria don't count.

You said some people help each other. That's the bare minimum for any community surely? But you all still lock your front doors. A high trust community is one where nobody feels the need to. It's a much better indicator, and you know it.

The UK is the most densely-populated large country in Europe. If a German family have a lodge in Bavaria it has much less of an impact.

But it is no measure of how much you trust your community unless your community is fully protected from outsiders as anyone can drive into the loveliest of communities to rob them - so locking doors does not mean they don't trust their neighbours or village.

Basically, every settlement needs to have an economic point (or stop existing).

The choices, for coastal and lakeside areas, are:

1. Go in for something other than tourism (for example, build a fish farm and fish processing factory instead). That will make all the holiday home owners go away, and will provide income and jobs from other sources. That will, however, probably involve a lot more intrusive building on a lot more land than tourism will.
2. Go in for tourism, which means that both the tourists and the locals (who are needed, to actually work in the tourist industry) will need places to live or to stay. This means you either need to:

a) Build outwards, by building more houses with gardens (both as holiday homes and for locals) and accept that this means some green space will get built on; or
b) Build upwards, by allowing taller buildings - a shift towards a higher rate of living in flats for locals, more hotel tourism for tourists. Like, if the UK is all "We are a densely populated country! This isn't Germany!" then fine, but maybe start acting like a densely populated country and building upwards?

Because the current situation - long term residents in pretty areas living in ramshackle caravans or moving away altogether, while holidaymakers say "Dear me! It's impossible to find anyone to clean or cut the grass! The local restaurant is barely open these days and there's a sign up saying they can't get the staff. Gee, it's such a mystery! Why aren't there local people available to work in this tourist industry that they're supposed to have in this part of the world??" is dysfunctional and makes no sense.

At the bottom of this lies the need for hard conversations and talk about the dreaded "trade offs."

As I said in a previous post, I'm sympathetic to the inhabitants of Cornwall, the Lakes and so on, but I think it's also fair to point out that the residents can be their own worst enemies sometimes, and are often extremely reluctant to admit that there are trade offs in life.

If you want your settlement to exist, it has to have means of providing jobs and incomes.

If you don't want to do tourism you have to do something else; that also requires building 21st century stuff like infrastructure, roads and factories. That won't be pretty and people complain when this happens.

If you want to preserve more of a charming fishing village etc. feel, tourism can be a good industry, but you still need to build enough accommodation for the people to stay in.

Accommodation takes up space. I see people in these areas getting angry about any building on greenfield sites, but also getting the rage about any building more than a couple of storeys high. Accommodation has to go somewhere!

It's possible to restrict cars (there are some "ultra-low-car villages" in Europe where cars are mostly garaged on the peripheries and motor vehicles within the village are mostly prohibited other than the odd genuinely unavoidable journey, which makes it far easier to handle tourists), but that means residents will have to abide by these rules too. Are they willing to do this?

If an area is serious about "doing tourism," it needs to ensure that jobs and incomes are provided year round by creating year-round facilities (eateries, spas, indoor pools etc.), yet I see residents in these areas getting the rage about facilities, swanky restaurants and the like: "Why can't people just be contented with what's here naturally?" Well, if you refuse to allow anything to be built and insist that "tourists should just be contented with what is here naturally," don't turn round and complain when tourists only come in the summer and the place clears out in the winter.

Not really, yes in theory. But in practice it doesn't really happen as neighbours notice the presence of outsiders and often these places have one road in and one road out so the police would very quickly catch up with anyone daft enough to not realise this. House burglaries and car theft are unheard of in most areas around me.

You make it sound as if locals have all the say in what's developed, but they don't. Areas of outstanding beauty have management plans that are usually against development in accordance with the NFPP.

To an extent, but the UK planning system tends to give a lot of weight to locals' opinion - it is relatively easy for residents to block things they don't like. I have no doubt that the systemic aspects need reform, mind you.

Up here it's the Cheshire Set.
https://x.com/setcheshire

In AONB the charge is to preserve the landscape at all costs

I can understand the Cornish getting completely fucked off by all the tourists blocking up the tiny roads and Londoners buying up all the property so I can understand where the irritation comes from

I repeat - those buying up second homes in the West Country do not all come from London! I doubt even a majority do.

You don't need to be Cornish to get fed up about the roads - I get fed up with all the people heading for Cornwall on the A303. Can they please be banned so those of us trying to get to Devon (not for holidays) and other destinations don't have to sit in queues behind all the people going to Cornwall.

Dear everyone - there are other places in the UK that are equally nice to visit and don't involve blocking up the A303 for the rest of us. Thanks.

I've got an idea. Lots of office blocks are being converted for residential use.

Lets make them holiday homes instead and leave the actual houses for residential use.

Cornwall's railways; Beeching branch line closures (cornwallheritage.com) Cornwall used to have a network of railway lines. If the UK had had more foresight, it would have maintained these and upgraded one or two of the lines to high-speed ones.

As it is, dear old Dr. Beeching decided to close most of them down, so Cornwall's tiny roads are clogged in traffic. You'd think that would have occurred to Beeching, but....

There are still quite a few branch lines left though- St Erth- St Ives, Truro- Falmouth, Par- Newquay and Lostwithiel- Looe. They are all very well used (the St Ives one is rammed in the summer, they encourage people to park and ride from Lelant).

But I agree upgrades are needed- it would be great if the mainline could be high speed, and capacity could be increased everywhere. There are currently plans for a Mid Cornwall Metro- basically, through trains from Falmouth- Newquay.

This is only part of the problem though- IMO every popular beach could do with a shuttle bus and a park and ride, and beach car parks should be blue badge only.

The assumption that you can just drive everywhere in Cornwall should be challenged- I wince every time some muppet on here bangs on about neeeeeding their massive Range Rover because they drive down to Cornwall twice a year and have to fit in their excessive piles of stuff, because these are invariably the ones you see blocking the lanes, rigid with stress, unable to reverse or manoeuvre in their planet killing behemoths...🙄

I agree. My parents moved to coastal region (after having lived in a rubbish town most of their/my life)
To listen to them rant on about tourists, when five years ago they were one of the very people they now detest...urgh

Did you grow up in Britain as although it is a very good idea in today's heavily populated Britain, I suspect the roads of Cornwall in the 1960s were not very busy and he couldn't have imagined the population growth and car ownership numbers that we see today. I grew up in West London and my Dad regularly drove us around central London in the late 1980s, it just wasn't as busy.