About St Ives town, Cornwall.

St Ives has something for everybody, making it the ideal place for families, couples and small groups to do things together or follow their noses and their own interests.

At a time when much of traditional Cornwall is changing, St Ives retains much of the character and appearance that attracted streams of artists to the town a hundred years ago, yet is also a vibrant and cosmopolitan town with good quality restaurants, shops and galleries.

Although the fishing fleets of seiners and luggers that once filled the harbour and Porthminster beach have gone the way of the huge catches of pilchards that brought prosperity to the town, much of life in St Ives still revolves around the harbour. Today it is lined with some of the best waterside cafes, bars and restaurants in Cornwall, where you can sit outside and watch the tide and the boats and the people come and go.

The town has five beaches within a few minutes walk of your accommodation at secretspot. Porthminster is a gently sloping sandy beach, ideal for small children to bodyboard, swim or paddle. In the summer the shallows are alive with the silvery flash of shoals of sand eels and small fish. The rocks at the Porthminster end of the beach are a great, safe place to try  snorkelling for the first time, with a vast array of technicolour sealife just yards from the beach. The award-winning Porthminster Beach Café, made famous by the TV series and a string of recommendations in the national press is right on the beach, and a short walk from your accommodation at secret spot, through quaint, traffic free narrow streets and along a palm fringed beach. A great place to watch the sun set and a romantic barefoot stroll back along the beach, especially under a big full moon! 

The town’s harbour beach dries out at low tide, and is a great place for kids to scavenge for shells and crabs while you can keep an eye on them whilst relaxing over a coffee outside one of the many wharfside pavement cafes. The typical Cornish harbour will be familiar from Michael Foreman’s many books in which it has featured. Just the other side of Smeaton’s pier, with its lighthouse, is another narrow beach, only accessible at low tide, with a jetty that extends out into St Ives Bay, from which seals, dolphins and basking sharks can frequently be seen at the right time of year. Descendents of the seal which featured in Michael Foreman’s book Seal Surfer can still be seen at dusk in the harbour, following fishing boats in on the high tide.

Bamaluz is a small, secluded rocky beach by the harbour wall, worth knowing because it is the only beach in St Ives that is open to dogs between Easter and October. Porthgwidden is a steeply shelving beach, popular with families, with beach chalets for hire, a beach café and terrace restaurant.  The Island – a rocky outcrop from which there are great views of the bay, Godrevy lighthouse and over the town itself – separates Porthgwidden from Porthmeor. Porthmeor means ‘big beach’ in Cornish, and it is just what it says on the tin, a vast, clean sandy expanse with rock pools exposed at each end at low tide full of obliging blennies and crabs for the kids to pester. One of the UK’s finest beach breaks on its day, Porthmeor is St Ives’ surfing beach. There is a beach café with terrace restaurant from which you can watch the action, or take yourself up to the terrace of the Tate Gallery, overlooking Porthmeor, for a grandstand view and the best crab sandwich in Cornwall. The art’s not bad either.

The town has a history as an artists colony, and this has left a legacy of galleries and artists studios around the town. Many of the artists studios are open to the public. Since the opening of the Tate Gallery in 1993, the town has attracted a number of upmarket independent design, lifestyle and clothing shops, which rub shoulders with specialist bakers, delicatessens, bookshops and surf shops, such as those on Fore Street, St Ives’ traffic free main shopping street.

St Ives is well known for its narrow maze like streets and alleyways of downalong, the old fishing quarter around the harbour. Other hidden gems include the sub tropical gardens of Trewyn, next to your accommodation at secretspot-stives, and the secluded sculpture garden of the Barbara Hepworth Gallery.

The refurbished Leach Pottery is due to open in 2007, putting your accommodation at secretspot stives right in the middle of a linear gallery trail that will leads from the Tate to the Barbara Hepworth Museum to the Leach Pottery, with all three major galleries within a few minutes walk.