Art, e-bikes and Spads: what the G7 leaders can expect from St Ives this week

My attempt to infiltrate the venue of the forthcoming G7 summit is not a success.

At the bottom of the narrow, twisty, suburban road leading to the Carbis Bay Hotel and Estate, the property hosting the G7, I encounter a cross between a construction site and the MI6 HQ. Several men in hi-vis jackets make urgent “TURN AROUND NOW” gestures.

Over their shoulders I get a glimpse of a pristine beach and the brand new sea-view suites being constructed for the leaders of the free world as they convene for the summit later this week.

The hotel dates back to 1894, but I guess planning permission for the modernist, minimalist suite-pods wasn’t an issue.

I do a tricky three-point turn and imagine my number plate and flustered face being flashed around the world’s secret service networks.

As I get back to the ordinariness of Carbis Hill village, I reflect how great being a world leader must be.

Advisor: It’s our turn to host the G7, PM – any ideas? Boris: I know – let’s go to Granny’s place!

Boris Johnson’s father (Stanley) was nearly born in Carbis Bay. His mother, “Granny Butter”, went into labour in Trevose View, the villa the family owned a short stroll from the G7 hotel. But they managed to get her to Penzance, where Johnson pere emerged, allowing his offspring to claim the honour of becoming Britain’s first half-Cornish PM decades later.

The Johnson clan continued to holiday in West Cornwall. I love the idea of Boris strolling around with his fellow leaders saying, “look, Mr President – that’s where the seagull nicked Rachel’s Mivvi” or “here, Frau Merkel, is where Jo hit me on the bonce with a plastic spade”.

The Johnson clan no longer own the house. But two of the G7 Wags, Mrs Biden and Signora Draghi, may be keen to visit Trevose View if the PM can wangle it. English literature professors both, they will doubtless be aware of novelist Virginia Woolf’s connection with this part of Cornwall. In fact, Virginia and her sister, the future Vanessa Bell, stayed in the future Johnsonian holiday home in 1905.

There can’t be many places where Bloomsbury and Brexit have cohabited. Not that the sisters were very impressed.

“This house is new and hideous and the furniture is of the worst lodging house description,” wrote Vanessa, while Virginia called it “a little lodging house, of the most glaring description”.

But there was a compensation. Virginia added that it had “the divinest view in Europe”.

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You’ll have to wait until the summit lockdown is over to enjoy that view. I manage to get on the coastal path just before the “G7 EVENT THIS FOOTPATH WILL BE CLOSED” signs go up. The divinest view? Perhaps not, but on a sunny day, there are fewer finer seaside outlooks in England.

To the east, towards Hayle: tufty deep green and ochre dunes, pale sands and emerald green waters. To the west: a line of lichened slate roofs bending towards the harbour and a strand of whitewashed Georgian houses with the medieval chapel of St Nicholas standing aloof and austere on a green hill above it all.

For all the changes St Ives has been through, seen from Carbis Bay, it takes you straight back to the kind of innocent, bucket-and-spade holidays you had (or imagined you had) as a child. You feel as if you’ve walked into an old jigsaw puzzle.

Putting on his serious face, the PM said the main agenda at the G7 is “to help the world to build back better and greener”. Cornwall, he added, has long been a leader in green technology and thinking. Newquay – yes, Newquay – is also the chosen site for the UK spaceport.

I try to do my bit by forgoing the car – and electricity – for the duration of my stay. I stay up the hill in the Wildflower Wood campsite – okay, glampsite – up past the hamlet of Lelant. My “Landpod” may not be as swish as the Leader of the Free World pods in the  Carbis Bay Hotel. But it’s peaceful and isolated: no Spads or wonks knocking on your door wanting a view on global tax regimes.

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Wildflower is one vision of Cornwall’s touristic future. Less than 100 metres from the front gate of the farm, Una St Ives is another.  It is already a swish collection of apartments and understatedly bijoux villas. Now it is readying a new generation of villas that the owners think will make it Cornwall’s most premium – and possibly its largest – resort.

From Wildflower Wood I use the park and ride train to commute from St Erth’s station. It’s no hardship: the short and jolly ride across the estuary is designed to lift the most world- and Covid-weary spirits. Unlike the car park at St Ives station: it’s packed with red-faced motorists vainly looking for a vacant spot.

Cars are the curse of St Ives, choking every inch of its tight and winding streets. The town has an earlier generation of policymakers to blame for that. Thanks to the Beeching review of Britain’s railways in the 1960s, the station at St Ives was demolished to make way for – the car park.

It’s a relief to escape the teeming harbourside and climb up to the Tate Gallery.

This glorious architectural essay in white concrete looks like a cross between an art deco cinema and a Georgian temple. Its opening in 1993 changed the game for St Ives and, arguably,  for the West Country seaside as a whole. The artists had been here for decades (Dame Barbara Hepworth’s studio is just up the hill). But they were a bohemian curiosity among the olde tea shoppes and amusement arcades. The Tate’s opening coincided with one of our dear country’s more unlikely cultural volte faces. The British fell in love with contemporary art. The luxe apartments, boutique hotels, and chic shops selling candles and £10 body lotions inevitably followed. Now Damien Hirst has taken root up the coast in Ilfracombe at a spot some wit called “Half-Shark Bay”.

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It’s widely rumoured that the new Mrs Johnson will lead a party of the Wags on a private tour of the Tate. I felt a momentary pang that Melania Trump won’t be there to discuss the current exhibition by South Korean artist Haegue Yang with Carrie, focusing as it does on “unexpected structures towards which chaotic systems tend to evolve”.

Linda Taylor, the Conservative leader of Cornwall council, is aware that her public are not overly enthusiastic about the G7 lot taking over during their busiest summer on record. Somewhat desperately, she urged visitors to explore lesser-known areas of the county.

So off I go. Wildflower Wood has e-bikes, so I spend a happy few hours exploring the green lanes, chapels and moorland of the hinterland.  I’d highly recommend the experience to the G7 delegates, especially the North American ones: it’s not as if they can cycle from north to south coast in an hour or so back home. Nor do they have many places like The Tinners Arms, a granite outcrop of a pub that breathes “smugglers” from every stone.

On my last night, I set off along the ancient St Michael’s Way, a rediscovered pilgrim route that runs from coast to coast. Over a stile outside Bersheeba, it’s clearly signposted: fine. Minutes later, I am standing in a field with various bulls making protective sounds in front of a herd of cows. St Michael’s Way has disappeared. I make an inelegant retreat over a rickety gate, fall into a hawthorn hedge, nearly get sideswiped by caravans on the main road, and eventually find my way to the standing stones above Bowl Rock.

On the way back, I walk straight into someone’s garden, and he helpfully points out the fabled Way: a weed-entangled path you’d never spot in a year.

If Linda Taylor wants us to explore lesser known parts of the county, she could start by urging the landowners to make life a little easier for ramblers with a handy sign or two and the application of the council strimmer.

It’s a feeling the G7 lot will be familiar with. You set off with noble intentions. But reality has a way of intruding and you end up standing in a cow pat.

Mark Jones stayed at Wildflower Wood at Beersheeba Farm, while Una St Ives is the luxury resort overlooking St Ives and Carbis Bay. For other camping/glamping sites in Cornwall, go to Farm Stay. 

For information on visiting Cornwall and St Michael’s Way, see www.visitcornwall.com/things-to-do/walking/west-cornwall/hayle/st-michaels-way

Best food: Porthminster Beach Cafe and Restaurant.

Funky alternative: Lula Shack in fast-regenerating Hayle.

Best Poldarkian pub: The Tinners Arms.