Moving to St Ives, Cornwall

[qwentin]

DH and I are thinking of relocating to St Ives, in Cornwall. Currently we live in London and have fortunately made a lot of money on our current house. So we are thinking of selling up, and buying a 3-4 bedroom house with sea views.

What's it like to live there full time?

Is that because no one local could possibly buy a holiday let ?

Of course you are pricing local people out of the market. I'm not going to argue whether that is right or wrong. But you should at least own it and not try to weakly convince yourself you aren't.

I couldn't move there for fear of the seagulls 😱

I thought St Ives had restrictions now on who can buy houses, because locals were being priced out.

Just checked Rightmove again, as that didn't feel right, and I had a weird filter on! You'll be lucky to get a 2 bed flat in St Ives with that budget. You'll need a lot more money for an actual house.

I wouldn't want to live there, straight from London. Would be a huge shock in not having everything on doorstep. So overcrowded in summer. With that big a move, I'd rent locally first.

Whilst Cornwall is definitely part of Great Britain and also the United Kingdom it is most definitely not part of England.

Cornwall is also legally a territorial and constitutional Duchy and not a county of England, and has never been formally incorporated into England via an Act of Union.

www.gov.uk/government/news/cornish-granted-minority-status-within-the-uk

Actually Mebyon Kernow was and still is as policy against Brexit.

Yes the majority of people in Cornwall voted for Brexit which was pretty dumb considering how the EU gave £600 million a year in grants to Cornwall (£1,000 per person). But this had nothing to do with MK.

Also describing it as Cornish independence is also misleading. Independence for Cornwall is completely unrealistic and with a population of 595k is too small and no one not even MK is suggesting independence.

Instead what a large number of Cornish people want is greater devolved powers to help with the housing crisis, massive number of holiday lets and second homes and to stop the place effectively becoming a theme park.

Agree with those saying rent for a year first.

But won’t you need to be near a secondary school if your DH wants to go on teaching maths? Shouldn’t that be the basis of your search?

st Ives is a long way from everywhere else. Where do your family live? Also where is the nearest hospital? Friends retired to Dartmouth and then discovered the ambulance station was in Totnes. An hour a way.

I love St Ives and have been visiting it for twenty years. I would love to make the move to Cornwall but I wouldn’t buy in St Ives for all of the reasons listed above. With your budget you could get a fantastic property with amazing views further out and still scratch your St Ives itch with regular visits.

I live in Cornwall, in a fishing village and I just don't get people saying its bleak. Its not.

I absolutely love St Ives and it's busy in winter too. And beautiful. I'd probably pick Carbis Bay to live though.

I had a small holiday let in St Ives, and loved it down there, and thought of moving down there to retire. However we decided against and have sold the property there (mainly to pay for a lease extension on our London flat but that's another story!)

St Ives is very, very pretty and the beaches are second to none. In the summer when the weather is good there's no beating Cornwall generally for a holiday. The pubs, restaurants etc are great.

However, so many of the properties are second homes and holiday lets. Initially i was of the mindset that as a holiday let owner we were helping the tourist industry but eventually my social conscience got the better of me. I often felt guilty about it when locals were unable to get on the ladder, and if asked in a pub etc would lie and say we were staying in a holiday let rather than owning one. For a while we let it out as a residential let but when our tenants moved out we sold. We didn't make a lot on it when we sold because it was recent and the rise in interest rates and the CoL crisis meant we had to reduce the price.

Also, we felt it was so far away from the rest of the country, several hours from London for instance and my husband is from N Ireland and its very difficult to get there from St Ives.

Obviously your situation is different because you're not going for a holiday let.

We are still planning to move out of London but have decided we'd like to live in Frome in Somerset.

Actually I meant to say about this. My understanding is that new builds must be offered to locals first.

With regards work, there is inevitable secondary school in St Ives but obviously in Camborne, Redruth and Penzance there are more.

I also agree about health care which you need to figure in asyou get older. The main hospital is in Truro which is an hour away. I know they really struggled during the pandemic.

Inevitable? Don't know how that got there! There is one secondary school in St Ives.

Did you move to St Ives @qwentin ?

I know someone who has a holiday home there, but he said he would never want to live there full time. The crime rate is high and has a high level of poverty as well as drugs problem. He also found the locals unpleasant.

The crime stats published online are low???