Michael Gove’s restrictions on Airbnb are too late for Mousehole, the next village along. It mirrors Dull-on-Sea in The Pirates Next Door: ‘Too busy in the summer and in winter it shuts down’. Last year there was so much traffic in Mousehole that the bus couldn’t get through, and it dumped trippers at the top of the hill. Down by the harbour, at the bus stop, I saw a Sainsbury’s van instead. And that, to paraphrase Niall Ferguson, is how empires fall.
‘What about my view?’ is their worldview. My husband calls them coffin dodgers
Any analysis of the impact of Airbnb on Cornwall must include the question: what happened to staying in hotels? As a child I stayed at the Treyarnon Bay Hotel near Padstow. It had warm shabby corridors, picture windows, and a dining room that smelt of toast. It seemed to me, at four years old, a palace of incalculable glamour, but it was bulldozed, and the repulsive Ocean Blue Luxury Self-Catering rose instead. (Cost in high season: £2,195 a week for two people, or one fifteenth of the average Cornish wage. And the ocean isn’t blue!) The fashion for staying in coastal hotels has gone, a victim to the cult of individualism and that-kitchen’s-mine-now. Why do British holidaymakers need so much privacy?
If owners want to Airbnb for more than 90 days they will need consent, holiday let conversions will require planning permission, and there will be a national register. The changes aren’t retrospective, and they will not clip the wings of tourists seeking those existing mod-conned nooks within walking distance of delis (Mousehole has two delis now, and three gift shops). Why aren’t the rules retrospective? ‘Because otherwise it’s expropriation and that’s communist,’ says a Tory friend, when I ask what is conservative about schoolteachers living in mouldy caravans with their children. We will await enforcement, which is everything, but it won’t affect the second homeowners, locally considered a lesser evil than the Airbnbers because they skulk and cower, while Airbnbers laugh and shout. People will still buy up housing stock, even if council tax and stamp duty is increased. They will just be richer second homeowners: fresh hell.
It’s welcome, of course. People won’t find it so easy to expel tenants for Airbnb, or buy property for Airbnb. I do like the tourists, despite the shouting. I just wish they would stay in hotels. I have liked them since I went to the Isles of Scilly and a very grumpy woman sold me a piece of driftwood for £10, and snarled at me as she wrapped it. I had just returned from visiting the extermination camps of Poland, and I took my driftwood and thought: you’re an amateur. You only live here due to the beneficence of the British taxpayer anyway. Take that away, and you’d be living in the 8th century.
But anyone who thinks that restricting Airbnb will solve the Cornish housing crisis is mad. I fret that it is political marketing, so the real problem – what new housing? – can be ignored. Vast new estates are listed for sale outside Cornwall, with only a small number of affordable or social housing units. (The Prince of Wales made headlines this week with his 24 units for the homeless at Nansledan. You would do that – for us?) We are building less social housing than ever, and non-social housing is too expensive. When there is a development suggestion, people run around screaming that it will add two and half minutes to their commute to Penzance. Or they say there are no GPs to service these selfish theoretical people. (And there won’t be without new housing I want to say back with my fist).
Wealthy retirees are particularly guilty of this. When they aren’t taking the best seats at plays for children – I saw you at Peter and the Wolf, you hag! – they have time and resources to bully the council. ‘What about my view?’ is their worldview. My husband calls them coffin dodgers, and dreams of concreting over their woods and bluebell dells. Except they aren’t bluebell dells, he adds, the hags imagined them. It’s the site of a council works depot.
It makes for an odd atmosphere. On the whole, blown-ins like me are touchier than the settled Cornish. I met a woman I had seen sanding a boat in Mousehole during the pandemic down at Newlyn Green. ‘You wrote about me in The Spectator,’ she said. ‘You wrote that I scowled at you.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said weakly. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I did scowl at you.’ It was a memorable day: Mousehole residents did everything but police the harbour walls with machine guns. My infant and I were told off for paddling, and a woman called the coastguard on us. We saw them as we cycled out of the village, and they waved.
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