Andrew Watts

A second home in Cornwall is nothing to be proud of

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Last week there was a public toilet for sale on the coast of Cornwall. The Kent-based auctioneer called it ‘an exciting and rare opportunity’, although its video tour of the property did not even undo the padlock on the security door. It was on the market for £20,000, which was a bargain — the last exciting and rare toilet block to be auctioned in Cornwall went for five times its asking price, even though it didn’t have as nice a view. It did, however, have windows.

It’s undeniable that the property market in Cornwall is overheating. The backlash to the toilet auction was such that it was withdrawn from sale, but house prices in parts of the county are increasing at double the national average. Property searches have gone up 140 per cent in two years, and last month a bungalow in Port Isaac sold within five minutes of the listing going online.

Some of this bubble is the result of movement out of cities. But the part that causes resentment is second homes. Cornwall has 1 per cent of England’s population and 17 per cent of its second homes; in some towns, second homes are the majority. Already the signs are going up in the south-west: ‘No more second homes, our village is dying.’

‘I’ll never understand the rules of the game!’

The withholding of planning consent for new builds unless they are guaranteed not to become holiday homes is well-intentioned, but merely intensifies the problem within the existing housing stock, and villages such as Mousehole are becoming as empty over winter as they are overrun during summer. My son, like every schoolchild in Cornwall, loves the story of The Mousehole Cat — in which Tom Bawcock goes fishing in a storm so that the village children will not starve — and he pretends not to see Daddy crying when we get to the bit about the villagers standing with lights on the quay to guide the boat back in to port.

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