Discover St Ives

A fishing town that became an art colony without stopping being a fishing town

St Ives occupies a small peninsula on Cornwall's north coast, its granite streets wrapped around a working harbour on one side and the open Atlantic on the other. The town divides, in local usage, into "Downalong", the dense knot of cottages, net lofts and narrow courts between the harbour and Porthmeor Beach where fishing families lived, and "Upalong", the rest of the parish historically home to mining families; the two communities intermarried rarely enough that the distinction is still remembered. Fishing built the town, pilchards especially, landed and salted by the thousand tonne through the nineteenth century, and the industry's slow decline through the twentieth century left cheap studio space and extraordinary coastal light behind it.

That light is what drew the artists. Painters had been visiting since the 1880s, but the town's identity as a modernist centre dates to the arrival of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in 1939, followed by potter Bernard Leach, who had already founded his pottery on the edge of town in 1920 with the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada. Hepworth lived and worked at Trewyn Studio, now the Barbara Hepworth Museum, from 1949 until her death in 1975, and Tate St Ives opened on the site of a former gasworks above Porthmeor Beach in 1993 to hold and show that legacy. The result is a town that still fishes, still hurls a silver ball down its main street every February for the Feast, and still, four galleries deep on some streets, takes its art seriously rather than decoratively.