Qualla: St Ives, Cornwall

St Ives, Cornwall: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vdemedina, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is a quality of light in St Ives that painters argue about. Some say it comes from the bay's three open sides, water on the north, west, and east bouncing reflections back at the granite cliffs. Some credit the proximity to the Atlantic, which keeps the sky stripped of haze for days at a time. Virginia Woolf, who summered here as a child between 1882 and 1894, simply called the months at the family's Talland House 'the best beginning to life imaginable'. She would write Godrevy lighthouse, visible across the bay from her bedroom window, into To the Lighthouse forty years later. The four kinds of people who come to St Ives — artists, surfers, holiday-makers, and the literary pilgrims — each show up looking for something different, and the town has spent two hundred years politely letting all of them think they found it.

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Image: Vdemedina | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Ives, Cornwall: The pilchard town

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EvaK, CC BY-SA 2.5. Long before the painters, St Ives was a working fishing port, one of the busiest on the north Cornish coast. Between 1747 and 1756 the four principal Cornish ports — Falmouth, Fowey, Penzance, and St Ives — together shipped some thirty thousand hogsheads of cured pilchards every ...

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Image: EvaK | CC BY-SA 2.5

St Ives, Cornwall: The first wave: artists

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit QuentinUK (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. J. M. W. Turner came in 1811. Whistler and Walter Sickert followed in 1884, riding the new railway that had reached St Ives in 1877 and broken open the western tip of Cornwall to anyone with a return fare from Paddington. In 1920 the potter Bernard Leach set up the Leach Pottery ...

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Image: QuentinUK (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Ives, Cornwall: The second wave: holiday-makers and surfers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rarb, CC BY 3.0. The railway brought Victorian seaside tourists, and the seaside tourists brought everyone else. By the late twentieth century Porthmeor beach on the town's seaward side had become one of England's most reliable surf breaks, big enough to host UK championships, sheltered enough fo...

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Image: Rarb | CC BY 3.0

St Ives, Cornwall: The third wave: Tate St Ives

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Tate St Ives opened in June 1993 on the site of an old gasworks above Porthmeor beach, designed by Eldred Evans and David Shalev in a curved cliff-coloured shell that quotes the gasworks it replaced. The gallery exists to show the modern British artists who worked in or near the ...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Ives, Cornwall: Three Februaries and a steeple

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (aeropagitica), Public domain. St Ives keeps two festivals nobody quite explains to outsiders. The Knill Ceremony, devised in 1797 by an eccentric former mayor and customs officer named John Knill, takes place every five years on 25 July. Ten girls — the original instructions require 'daughters of fishermen, t...

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Image: (aeropagitica) | Public domain