Michael Gove’s restrictions on Airbnb are too late for St Ives or Mousehole which now mirror 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 in high season: £2,195 a week for two people, or one fifteenth of the average Cornish wage. And the ocean isn’t blue!) The fashion for staying in coastal hotels has gone, a victim to the cult of individualism and that-kitchen’s-mine-now. Why do British holidaymakers need so much privacy?

If owners want to Airbnb for more than 90 days they will need consent, holiday let conversions will also require planning permission, and there will be a national register. The changes aren’t retrospective, meaning they will not clip the wings of tourists seeking those existing mod-conned nooks within walking distance of delis (Mousehole has two delis now, and three gift shops). Why aren’t the rules retrospective? ‘Because otherwise it’s expropriation and that’s communist,’ says a Tory friend, when I ask what is conservative about schoolteachers living in mouldy caravans with their children. We

QOSHE - Rent asunder / Airbnb has ruined Cornwall - Tanya Gold
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Rent asunder / Airbnb has ruined Cornwall

9 10
23.02.2024

Michael Gove’s restrictions on Airbnb are too late for St Ives or Mousehole which now mirror 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........

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