St Ives

The ferry from the mainland doesn’t go to St Ives. You arrive by a branch-line train that hugs the coast for the last four miles, the Atlantic suddenly appearing on your left like someone has just pulled back a curtain, and by the time you step out at the station you’ve already understood something about this place. St Ives doesn’t ease you in. It announces itself.

I arrived on an October Tuesday — the best possible timing, as it turned out. The summer visitors had gone. The harbor was working again, a few lobster boats unloading, an old man in oilskins coiling rope on the quayside with the particular patience of someone who has done it ten thousand times. The light was doing something extraordinary: low and amber, hitting the water at an angle that made everything look like a painting, which is exactly how this place has been described for a hundred years, and the description is accurate.

Tate St Ives is the reason many people make the journey, and it earns its reputation. The building itself — concrete and glass and curved like a wave — sits above Porthmeor Beach and the galleries inside rotate exhibitions of the St Ives School artists, the painters and sculptors who came here in the 1940s and 50s drawn by the same impossible light. Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron — they understood something about what this peninsula does to perception. The Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden a five-minute walk away is one of the quieter miracles of British art: a walled garden where bronze figures stand among subtropical plants, and the gaps between the sculptures feel as considered as the sculptures themselves.

But I spend most of my time in St Ives down in the Digey and the Fore Street, the narrow lanes where independent shops sell ceramics and pasties and locally cured fish. Saffron cake from one of the bakeries, still warm and slightly sticky, eaten on a bench above the harbor. The Sloop Inn, one of the oldest pubs in Cornwall, where I drank Cornish Tribute ale and listened to two fishermen argue about football with the focused intensity of people who have been having the same argument for forty years. The cobblestones in the old town are worn smooth by centuries of fishing boots and they catch the rain in a way that makes walking them feel like walking on polished silver.

When to go: September and October are the months I keep coming back to — warm enough to swim, quiet enough to breathe, and the light does that low amber thing that photographers have been chasing since the Newlyn School painters first arrived. Avoid July and August unless you genuinely enjoy queuing for parking.