Sea Change: Cornwall by Mark Jolly

What's the first thing you think of when you hear the following four words: Chic English Seaside Vacation? You might be forgiven for assuming that this is some sort of trick question. Until recently, even the Brits themselves would have thought you were having a laugh - at the expense of a time-honored tradition of dreary bed-and-breakfasts, soggy fish-and-chips, and trashy bucket-and-spade shops. But not anymore. Cornwall, that serrated spit of southwest England, still earmarked by the European Union as among its poorest regions, has, in just a few brief years, redrawn the map of British tourism.

The dramatic changes that have swept this ancient Celtic peninsula come into sharp focus the moment I confront the Eden Project, a futuristic conservatory near St. Austell that has become England's fastest-growing tourist attraction. What floors me as I wander out of the parking lot and gaze down into a galactic crater embracing two massive domed greenhouses is the utter un-Englishness of their presence - the sheer audacity of their scale. (The structure is, in fact, the largest freestanding scaffold on the planet.)

“I wanted to do something that was big, really big,” says founder Tim Smit, a spirited Anglo-Dutchman who talks with a sort of infomercial gusto, except that he means what he says and believes in his dreams. “I like big - ironically for an environmentalist, because they all say, ‘Small is beautiful.’ But with Eden I wanted to create that sense of romance and plenty. I wanted the place to look like a civilization. Something that communicated that Jesus Christ, in-your-face element. Something that would make a cynic's jaw drop."

Eden's mammoth interconnecting bubbles rose from an abandoned china clay pit, breathing life into one of the glummest wastelands in this part of Britain. Inaugurated in 2001 - the year of foot-and-mouth and 9/11 - Eden defied the worst tourism downturn in decades. In its six-month soft opening, during the wettest Cornish winter since 1776 (it poured for one hundred days straight, very nearly destroying the project before its official birth), half a million paying visitors came to gawk at the creation-under-construction. A registered charity, the Eden Project now receives two million visitors a year and brings in $250 million.

“To be honest, we don't want any more visitors,” Smit says, expressing a widely held sentiment among the Cornish, who have grown increasingly wary of their compatriots to the north - whom they call Emmets, a local word meaning “ants.” Why ants? “Because,” says my friend Kirsten, who spent her first eighteen years in Cornwall, “there's thousands and thousands of them, and they get everywhere.”

Gleefully trumpeted by Fleet Street as the new English Riviera, the Cornish coast now claims some of the finest designer retreats in the land -- places such as the Tresanton, which counts Prince Charles and Pierce Brosnan among its repeat guests, and the Nare, which turned away Tony Blair and his entourage rather than give them a discount. Other names from the English celebrity gentry - Hugh Grant, Kate Moss, Jeremy Irons - have simply done the tasteful thing and bought their own Cornish hideaways.

And then there's Cornwall's bumper crop of A-list restaurateurs, at the vanguard of a national epicurean fetish that has been fueled largely by the star wattage of TV chefs such as Rick Stein - whose Seafood Restaurant, in the small fishing village of Padstow, has probably the hardest-to-book tables outside London. Amid this culinary and hotel revolution has emerged an active lust for the surfing life, championed by a litter of new water-sports centers offering everything from wave skiing to coasteering (hold that thought); a major new home for contemporary art (namely, the Tate St. Ives, which may well qualify as the coolest midsized art museum in Europe); and, of course, the Eden Project, which Tim Smit calls the Eighth Wonder of the World “because it is.”

Cornwall's charm lies in its power to pull you far, far away from the cheerless homogeneity of high-street Britain. And so I begin my adventures, some six hours' drive from London, in the remote recesses of the Roseland Peninsula. This south-coast haven within a haven is a bucolic patchwork of sleepy fishing hamlets and impossibly narrow lanes banked by towering, beguiling hedgerows.

The Roseland also harbors the handsomest cluster of reincarnated properties in Cornwall, the crown jewel of which is unequivocally the Tresanton, in St. Mawes. Purchased in 1998 by interiors guru Olga Polizzi, the hotel has virtually reinvented the English weekend by introducing luxury, service, and chic - not to mention steep rack rates - to country-house accommodations. “Our accountant said, ‘Look, nobody has ever made any money from a hotel in Cornwall,’ ” says Polizzi, who ploughed nearly three million dollars of her own money into the place and painstakingly handpicked almost every object in every room. “But I was tired of listening to accountants, managing directors, salespeople. I would lie awake at night in hotel bedrooms thinking, Oh, God, why on earth did they do that? It's so ghastly.”

For sixteen years, Polizzi has helmed design and refurbishments for the hotel empire of her father, Lord Forte. Her projects have been splashy, such as her latest makeover, with her brother, Rocco Forte, of the fabled Browns hotel in London. The Tresanton, however, is very much Polizzi's baby: twenty-six rooms, each individually designed with uncluttered elegance; a brilliantly conceived split-level dining terrace overlooking St. Anthony's Head; and an assiduously trained staff of sixty-four (one of whom was kind enough to lug in a replacement tank of butane gas and refit the deck heater when the winds started kicking up during dinner).

Less than an hour's drive from the Tresanton are several of the most arresting gardens in the British Isles - no small claim in a land so famously obsessed by the country life. One standout is Trebah, a magical subtropical valley that descends to a pebble beach on the Helford River, decimating every image you've ever had of a formal English garden. There are no clipped hedges, no manicured lawns, no keep-off-the-grass signs. Just an impassioned invitation to let loose -- realized most brilliantly in the Gunnera Passage, where you can wander beneath the science-fiction fantasy of giant rhubarb stalks rising thirteen feet high, their leaves fanning out to ten-foot spans.

Originally laid out as a pleasure garden in the 1830s, Trebah had long ago fallen into neglect when it was bought in 1981 by Major Tony Hibbert. “We were totally worn out, but at least we had no work worries,” says the Major, who had planned to retire there with his wife. "We thought we'd found a place where in the mornings we could sip gin on the terrace and in the afternoons do a spot of yachting.” Instead, at the age of sixty-four, he learned how to climb a tree with a chainsaw. Unbeknownst to him - until the Cornwall Garden Society came knocking - Hibbert had taken on one of the forgotten horticultural gems of Europe.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall's other great jungled wonderland, was unearthed and restored in the early 1990s. Overgrown beyond all recognition, the sprawling Victorian estate had fallen into a deep seventy-year sleep. Heligan's owner, John Willis, and his neighbor had to hack their way in with machetes, and even then they could barely see the tops of the palms. The neighbor, a music producer who had recently relocated to Cornwall, was Tim Smit.

Having turned Heligan into the most visited private garden in Britain - and having decided “to give up the music business in forty-five minutes” - Smit soon set about envisioning Eden with evangelical zeal. What he and his architects eventually fashioned, after battling three years to secure $120 million in lottery and private funding, was a series of biomes that would tell the story of man's relationship with the natural world.

Not only has Smit succeeded in building the world's largest conservatory - comprising a hundred thousand plants from five thousand different species - but he has also made the environment decisively cool. Rockers Moby, Pulp, and PJ Harvey have performed here; Damien Hirst has showed off his longboard designs here (inspired by the threat of coastal pollution); and a multitude of offers have come in, from as far away as Japan and the United Arab Emirates, to replicate Eden as a franchise. All such offers were rejected. “This isn't Disney," Smit says bluntly. "Eden is about an attitude.”

Frankly, I found it hard not to feel a sense of awe for the place - not just because of the botanical journey through a global garden that includes Malaysian rain forests and Mediterranean orchards but also because of the architectural luminosity and the playful iconography of it all. I loved not having to see a single corporate logo anywhere on site (a strict Eden no-no). And I loved how this living, growing theater was able to move and tickle, as well as educate: one minute I was reading a plaque telling me that the world will produce a billion more rice consumers in the next twenty years, and the next I was listening to a British-Indian child gleefully yelling to her mother in the cocoa plantation: "Look, Mum. It's a chocolate tree!"

Eden demands a lot from its visitors, and certainly too much to digest on a single visit. Its triumph is that unlike London’s ill-fated Millennium Dome -- which racked up costs of $1.2 billion yet failed to spark public interest -- Eden was founded on an idea. The danger is that with such overwhelming visitor numbers (and congestion and pollution), this very idea may already be on the way to becoming a victim of its own success. After all, what kind of serenity can be found in the arms of Mother Nature amid twelve thousand other paying customers (the average number on a summer weekday)? To ease congestion, Smit and his team are constructing another enormous biome, which will house the waterless regions of the world.

There are those who contend that you're not truly in Cornwall until you reach Penwith, the enchanted extremity of the county’s finger that runs west from St. Ives and finally falls off into the sea at Land's End. It is a strangely seductive region, whose regeneration owes much to a growing cluster of swish restaurants and lodgings. Among them is the Abbey, whose restaurant garnered the first of Cornwall's three Michelin stars and which happens to be David Bowie's and Nick Cave's hotel of choice when they visit Penzance.

Amid the glamour Penwith is littered with old smugglers’ coves. It is also haunted by the presence of derelict tin-mine buildings and pagan stone circles that have lain unchanged for several thousand years. It is where local witches are quoted, without irony, in the local newspaper. And where, midway into World War One, DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda were kicked out for singing German songs at the tops of their voices (which put the kibosh on his plans for founding a free-love commune).

Here you'll also find the Tate St. Ives, a principal player in Cornwall's renaissance. Built in 1993 to celebrate those pioneering painters who started coming here in the late 1800s, the Tate now champions emerging British contemporary artists. A remarkable whitewashed structure sunk into the cliff face, the museum seems to float above the crystalline waters of Porthmeor Beach and the bustling harbor of St. Ives. At its rooftop café, you get the feeling that you're looking out to sea from the deck of a ship.

The roof is where the magic enfolds me. It is the location of my appointment with Partou Zia, a British-Iranian painter and the Tate's first artist-in-residence. We get to talking about the light of Penwith's prehistoric landscape -- the light that brought Sickert and Whistler, and then sculptor Barbara Hepworth (whose name is inextricably linked to St. Ives and whose work is on permanent display at Trewyn Studio, where she lived until 1975, when she died in a fire there), and, of course, Zia herself.

She describes it as “an intimate white light, a wonderful disconnectedness.” As that same light dances off the bay beneath us, it hits me: the Tate St. Ives is more than an au courant art destination; it is more than a beacon for artists heading west. It is a space that perfectly captures Cornwall's newfound balancing act between tradition and modernity.

There are several moments during my eight-day odyssey - and crisscrossing one's way through a swath of land stuffed with such names as Feock, Gweek, and Readymoney can only be called an odyssey - when my effort to get a grip on the new Cornwall becomes almost overwhelming. But there are also moments that transcend the dizzying landscape of hot new hotels and restaurants, gardens and galleries, surf centers and movie sets (my visit is wedged between shoots for Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ladies in Lavender, with superdames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench).

Most of these moments come to me on one of my long walks along the county's coastal footpath, which follows the entire shoreline. I'm especially inspired when I take on the wild tract that runs from the village of Rock to Rumps Point - a north-coast showstopper of craggy moorland and pounding surf, Iron Age cliff castles sculpted into the headlands 2,500 years ago to ward off the Celts, and immense white-sand bays that kiss sapphire seas. This latter image is so startling - particularly to an Englishman who has never been to Cornwall and who has only heard about such fabled vistas and not quite believed in them - that it can trick you into thinking you must be somewhere outside England.

“I'm from Naples,” says Ciro Zaino, proprietor and chef of the Summer House, an inviting B&B in Penzance. “But growing up in Italy, I never saw the colors of the sea like the colors I see here. For that we would have had to go to Sardinia.” In fact, the way Cornwall denizens talk, you might as well be somewhere else - anywhere else - besides the British Isles. “You feel it every time you cross the Taymar River,” says Peggy Jones, a Londoner who seeks weekend refuge here. “You really do feel as if you're leaving England.”

Cornwall's fierce sense of itself goes back a long way - well before the Mappa Mundi, a thirteenth-century scroll that shows the four constituent parts of Britain as England, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. Largely untouched by the Roman occupation and the Anglo-Saxon settlements, the county today still bears its colors proudly - even with its mining industry dead and its fishing and farming communities up against the wall. There's barely a pub in the peninsula that doesn't hoist the black-and-white Cornish flag. The slumbering Cornish language, spoken before the arrival of English, has recently been reintroduced into the school curriculum. And the Cornish pasty (England's answer to the empanada, it's packed with potato, swede, onion, and often-unnegotiable wedges of beef) is still considered an epicure's repast.

As for Cornwall's natural assets, they are, to be sure, unique within the United Kingdom. It boasts not only the most stunning and variegated coastline but also more of it than any other county - 250 miles’ worth. Put another way, in Cornwall you are never more than sixteen miles from the sea. Remote enough to have escaped the post-war development that swallowed the rest of the south coast, the shoreline here remains staunchly protected.

Best of all - and this is the bit you’ll want to read carefully - Cornwall is blessed with a subtropical microclimate more in line with Portugal than with the rest of England. Sure, the Gulf Stream blows its fair share of wind and rain into these parts, but it also ushers in a good number of winters that rarely see frost, much less snow: winters where you take your tea under the palm trees in the garden. Or where you jump from the edge of cliffs into the crashing swells below.

This is the art of coasteering, as practiced in several parts of Wales and Cornwall, including Rinsey, a wondrously ragged stretch between Penzance and Lizard Point (the southern tip of mainland Britain). It is at Rinsey that I tempt fate under the tutelage of Phil Stocker, who runs an adventure sports outfit with his partner, Steve Phillips. Equipped with protective gear - helmet, wet suit, buoyancy aid - and the disquieting knowledge that Steve is unable to join us today on account of having broken both of his legs in a motorcycle accident, I scramble up one jagged rock face after another, then hurl myself into the sea.

At first it is child's play, plunging from platforms less than ten feet from the surf. But it soon turns gonzo. With foam spewing at each rocky inlet, my only way of gauging the water's depth is by letting Phil leap first and waiting restively for him to bob back up. Even so, looking down from thirty-five feet - the highest I am prepared to go - gives me the royal willies. Strangely, I keep begging him for just one more jump. And by the telling grin on his face, I know he knows I’m hooked.

Cornwall's true water sports frontier - indeed the United Kingdom's - is Newquay, on the battered shores of the peninsula's north coast. Tilted perfectly toward the restless North Atlantic, the vast, sweeping beaches here have been a natural surf magnet forever. “People come to Cornwall for the same reasons they've been coming to Cornwall year after year,” says Henry Ashworth, director of the Extreme Academy, the ambitious new adrenaline destination at Watergate Bay, just north of Newquay. “All we've done is make the beach more accessible.”

Accessible, that is, in terms of establishing Britain’s first center for kitesurfing (among other sports), and annexing a bright and funky joint called the Beach Hut Café, which serves the best seafood in the Newquay area. Ashworth bills Extreme Academy as “a ski resort on a beach,” which at first sounds plain silly since clearly you don’t come to Cornwall to ski. But, dude, it turns out he’s referring to a vibe, because Newquay - as most everybody in Britain knows -- is all about living life to the max.

If those funsters at E! Television were ever to scout locations for Wild on Britain, Newquay would lead the pack. Every weekend, its charmless city center pulls in legions of braless bachelorettes and teenage lager louts. At one time, however, Newquay was the poshest place to holiday in all of Cornwall. Ashworth's grandmother ran the legendary Edgecombe Hotel, and in the 1920s, his great-granduncle built a series of beach huts at Tolcarne Bay - which perhaps more than any other place represents the juxtaposition of old and new in today's Cornwall.

It is here, just a few beaches on from Watergate Bay, that I find Morris and Dafney Hewitt, a septuagenarian couple, sitting outside their beach hut, which Dafney's family has rented since the 1940s - or “since the plague,” as Morris prefers to put it. Those were the days when the Great Western Railway (GWR), which opened Cornwall up to mass tourism, was known as God’s Wonderful Railway. “Our mother would make us wear silk socks every time we came,” says Dafney.

“And it was strictly black tie at the Bristol,” adds Morris, referring to the frayed hotel above the rocks. “Today if you go in and see a man wearing a black tie, it's because it was once white and he got dirt on it.”

But the area's fortunes are changing: plans are afoot to build a ten-million-dollar artificial reef just off Tolcarne Bay, while this spring, construction began on a restaurant-café that will open right on the beach, alongside the terraced beach huts. The project will be part of a five-million-dollar reconstruction of the Rocklands Hotel, transforming it into Newquay's first boutique property, replete with a cliffside elevator to transport visitors from the hotel to the beach café.

The man with the plan is Rick Stein, who is credited, perhaps more than anyone else, with raising Britain's gastronomic bar over the past decade. Beyond a slew of books and TV shows, he is famed for the Seafood Restaurant, which after nearly thirty years still draws hordes of pilgrims from the capital, people who are inspired to drive six hours west in quest of no-nonsense, freshly prepared local fish.

Stein's empire currently extends to three small hotels, a bistro, a café, a delicatessen, a patisserie, and a cooking school - all in Padstow, all ragingly popular. Indeed, the superchef's ubiquity in the tiny harbor town is such that some locals have taken to renaming it Padstein. This partly explains his foray fifteen minutes south into Newquay, where he faces a blank canvas on which to imprint his fabulous dream.

The analogy Stein likes to use is Miami in the 1970s, before Madonna and Versace moved in and the whole town got glammed up. “If you'd told me then what Miami would be now, I would have said you were joking,” he says. “Well, that's the kind of potential I see for Newquay.” Cornwall's largest coast town may not have Miami's architectural wealth or unremitting sunshine, but it does have a roaring, if wayward, energy and a string of spectacular beaches that now haul in millions of surfing dollars a year. It also has multiple daily flights to and from London on two domestic carriers.

Stein's mission to transform Newquay is, he admits, an attempt to be all things to all people: to bring in the beautiful crowd and yet preserve an English seaside tradition - beach huts and fish fingers and mugs of tea. And why not? Cornwall today, Stein maintains, “is a bit like the early days of people going out west in America. It sort of feels like the New World -- like you can do whatever you like, and within the confines of this small island, it still feels foreign.” He should take heart. Britain's first purpose-built movie studio since 1923 is soon to open for business just south of Newquay, in St. Agnes. Cornwall, you're ready for your close-up.