Travel Special – Cornwall: From Pasties to parmigiano

Back in the 1970s, pasties were what Cornwall was all about. I spent my childhood sitting in a howling gale on a Cornish beach eating a soggy pasty behind a striped wind break, retrieving Auntie K’s straw hat every few minutes when it flew like a drunken Frisbee towards the sea. The weather might not have changed much in the last 40 years, but the food and culture has. Cornwall, has morphed from a county of caravans and pies into a British Babylon.

The renaissance happened in the 1990s when culture started to arrive in Cornwall. The Tate kicked it off — a glittering gallery reflecting the surf of St Ives; intellectuals and aesthetes paying homage to Alfred Wallace, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Then an outspoken and energetic Dutch record producer masterminded the renovation of the Lost Gardens of Heligan, and everyone remembered that Cornwall was stuffed with the most spectacular gardens in the country, complete with a microclimate for growing all sorts of exotica.