Monday 9 February 2015

Monday: A Visit to My Old Seaside Home

The sun shines and the cold wind drops. At last I start to unwrap layers of clothing. Time to get out there before us older people do lose the use of our legs.
Struck dumb by a property advert for a flat (£395,000 Edit: £369,000) in the tiny crescent of sea-facing bungalows where I lived whilst a schoolgirl... we strike out to gawp at it.

Carbis Bay is next to St Ives and was a holiday resort of a genteel kind since Edwardian days. Shortly after we moved there in the early 1960s, the cauliflower fields (oops! "Broccoli fields" in Cornwall) between our bungalows and the main road started to be replaced by housing. Still, I never imagined that our outskirt settlement of St.Ives would have developed its own Tesco superstore... which it did, quite some time ago. Let alone ... until this morning... what an apartment-stuffed, suburb of St. Ives my old "home town" would become.

The building with the £395,000 (Edit: £369,000) flat stands on a corner plot of our tiny crescent. Admittedly it looks like a large house rather than an apartment block. Our old bungalow is still there... flanked by other survivors. Its name has been changed to protect its dowdy dignity... made dowdier by Mum's flowers and shrubs, patiently reared from purloined cuttings, having been replaced by a layer of concrete.
A lot of the surrounding buildings... the seaside hotels for instance... have been demolished and re-instituted as.... "blocks of luxury apartments". The area is unrecognisable and actually...... unbelievable.  Does this mean that these plots.... once long-term businesses.... are now prime second/holiday homes? I suppose so. The fact that the immediate approach into St Ives itself has become a terraced pile of towering hotel/apartment complexes says enough. Just try Googling "St. Ives development" to get an idea of the ongoing race. And there are articles about St. Ives' attempts to control it all.. like this one in the Guardian Nov 2014....

Alright, already, I am not a St Ives fan but I am sad about this .... and when guests say they think they will pop along to St Ives and the Tate St. Ives? My eyes roll up into my head. Give me a bucket.

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