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What the golden car park of St Ives says about the UK's hourglass society



Inequality of opportunity and prosperity means many places are only for the rich and the poor - and no one in between
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The five parking spaces on Barnoon Terrance in St Ives, Cornwall, which have been sold at auction for a combined total in excess of £160,000. Photograph: Ryan Hooper/PA


Don't know if you spotted it, but five parking spots in the Cornish resort of St Ives were sold or bid for at sums between £50,000 and £60,000 apiece this week in a town where the average local salary is £22,000 and part-time, seasonal working is rife. This seems to sum up the polarised way Britain is going and it isn't healthy.

Yes, we know all this. The FT ran an analysis of the UK labour market the other day, one which it described as acquiring the structure of an hour glass – good jobs for some near the top of the glass, plenty of low-paid jobs (3 million people would like to work more hours, it was reported yesterday) at the bottom. But all sorts of middling jobs disappearing for all sorts of reasons. Not that St Ives – fishing, farming, tourism and tin – ever had too many of them.

You probably know where the golden mini-car park is, even though you may think you don't. It's on Barnoon Terrace, just above the Tate St Ives gallery, an institution which loves to insult casual visitors by staging deeply obscure and second rate exhibitions at peak holiday periods. Never mind, the handsome gallery's presence has prolonged the visitor season, raised hotel and restaurant standards (the only way to go in cold northern Europe), so the town puts up with its elitism.


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The corrosive effect of outside money is something else, as local councillor, Bert Biscoe, explains in the Guardian's account here. Like most things in life it's all about balance. Some injections of outside money is always welcome in poor but gorgeous places like St Ives. It helps the shops, maintains the fabric of a town, which is on the receiving end of the mighty Atlantic ocean 365 days a year and provides some work alongside some housing problems.

But, as with posh parts of any town or city, the very qualities that attract outsiders – between the wars social diversity made shabby Chelsea attractive to bohemian members of the upper classes, as parts of east London do today - is often destroyed as the incomers take over completely and strangle the vitality of the place.

This can't happen to St Ives. It's just too far from the City or the West End for a commute and a bit far for an easy weekenders' habit – by road, rail or air. I've tried them all. But retirees and second homes are now a problem, as they are in many beautiful places; in Cornwall, parts of Devon, the Lake District, in nearby St Just in Penwith, the old mining community which now has a flourishing artistic scene, refugees from expensive St Ives, I wouldn't wonder.

I have to declare a small interest here, though it may already be obvious. I've known St Ives all my life and three of my grandparents are buried in Barnoon cemetery, just west of the Tate and below Barnoon car park, which is a much-needed money spinner for the council in the season.

We have just one cousin left in the town now, but my siblings and I, our children and grandchildren, assorted cousins and friends have been meeting up there in rented flats and cottages over Easter week for over 30 years. There can be 50 of us on a good day.

There's always been tension between the town and the outsiders, of course there has. The artists discovered the peninsula's wonderful white light over 100 years ago. And it's many years since I heard my aunt, Gertrude Major, wistfully say: "That was the last shop on Tregenna Hill owned by a local family."

Even Hart's ice cream parlour, next to the Sloop Inn (founded 1312) on the wharf and famous for always closing on the Sabbath, is another pie, pasty and pizza place now – quite a good one too, I admit.

And there were always visitors, even second home types, including Sir Leslie Stephen, whose novelist daughter, Virginia, may well have been inspired by Godrevy lighthouse which she would have seen from her Victorian bedroom window. Come to think of it, there's a lucrative car park in the garden of the old Stephens house nowadays.

It goes without saying that the Golden Mini-Car-Park of Barnoon Terrace is owned by an investor from outside. Apparently, he bought a nearby house – great views of the bay at that height and away from the narrow, tourist-engulfed streets of the town – for £400,000 (probably a three-storey Victorian, we once stayed in that terrace) and carved out a car park, thereby raising £271,000 with which to do it up.

In the City they'd call the car park manoeuvre sweating the assets. Pretty slick, huh? There's always demand for parking from Easter to October and they tell me New Year's Eve is pretty lively in St Ives these days, though I'm happy to take their word for it. But it can't but make local residents think hard, and rightly so.

It may just be a coincidence, but we felt uneasily last Easter that the delicate balance of forces was getting unstuck. Here's why. As the visitor drives into the town he/she sees a new block of flats pointing into the sea above Porthminster beach (the boring one, in White family lore) and the station which has (miracle) survived decades of cuts and still links the town to the Paddington-Penzance line at St Erth via a lovely estuary route.

The Peninsula apartments block – you can catch the details here – made some concessions to local vernacular architecture, those Victorian homes and boarding houses above the old fishing quarters. But there was also a lot of steel and glass, balconies which would have been draughty on Salford Keys (miles from Atlantic gales!) and the prices started at an eyewatering £480,000.

That's over half a million if you add fees and taxes! In St Ives, for heaven's sake. Should we be surprised? Not really. A house above Porthmeor Beach (that's what the Whites call a proper beach, one on which I spent childhood holidays) sold a couple of years back for a million, and a quick glance at the Zoopla website shows one round the corner in Carbis Bay on sale for £2.25m.

Wow! What's more, from our rented flat last April we could see what looked like a very ambitious development taking place – more plate glass and steel – below the Malakoff where the buses turn. A restaurant (Gordon Ramsay's name has been mentioned) or a night club? We couldn't find an answer and I can't online today. But it looked a very alien presence.

That story can be repeated in many communities, villages, towns like St Ives and, of course, big cities where a quarter like Spitalfields, just outside the old City boundaries of London, contains nowadays what are beautifully restored 17th-century Huguenot houses close to some tough and poor territory, much of it now Bangladeshi.

But it's especially acute in small, remote places where outsiders with money for restaurants are always conspicuous. No point in me saying: "Look, we come from around here, my granny's in the cemetery,"; we're outsiders too now. But at least we're aware there's a problem and one not confined to Cornwall: inequality of opportunity and prosperity in which places like St Ives are in danger of becoming like Manhattan – somewhere only for the rich and the poor.

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