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
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