St Ives, Cornwall, wealthy holiday seaside town, buffeted by Atlantic winds, artists on each corner and cliff top, selling work to tourists from galleries and exhibitions at every opportunity. A little gem of a place - a barnacled brush stroke, attracting property developers from other counties, buying up holiday lets around the area and rented at high prices through comfortable looking sunny companies - their properties displaying sun, sea and sun decks in vast quantities. Last year there was a proposition that only residents of St Ives should be allowed to buy property there as so many people from other areas were buying up holiday homes in the vicinity.
Cornwall has also been popularised by the re-emergence of the Poldark series on TV. Yet I was reading that at the other end of the scale,there is heavy unemployment in Cornwall and that some children living on landlocked social housing estates in northern Cornwall have never even seen the sea as their parents cannot afford bus fare to the nearby coast!
At the other end of the scale Jaywick, in Essex, featured on TV in various 'real life' fly on the wall shows, portrayed how a town of holiday chalets built in the earlier Art Deco part of the 20th century,
had fallen in to a town of slums, albeit slums with a great deal of character, after the demise of the holiday industry in the 1970's.
I came across this 1993 fanzine featuring bands from Jaywick and nearby Clacton-On-Sea, last year. I thought it complimented the St Ives tourist tea towel. The Pippins (also featured) loved the idea.
