St Ives

St Ives Cornwall

A captivating and picturesque Cornish fishing town, St Ives is a magnate for many seeking a sense of utopian distraction and natural inspiration.

Tate St Ives

St Ives harbours a curious combination of visitors and inhabitants along its labyrinth of narrow steep cobbled streets, from tourists, pleasure boaters, fishermen, surfers and artists, bustling in and out of the many small art galleries, craft shops, alternative cafes, restaurants, Cornish pasty shops and salty sea dog haunts.

Once a considerable but close-knit fishing community, St Ives has been more or less eclipsed by artistic settlers following in the footsteps of Whistler, Sickert and Turner who since the 1800s have been drawn to this serene coastal inlet of St Ives Bay. In the 1920s the St Ives Society of Artists was established and in 1993 the famous Tate St Ives opened up as a branch of the famous London based gallery. This modernly appointed building over looking Porthmeor Beach features works from locally based artists such as Alfred Wallis, Barbara Hepworth and Terry Frost as well as Turner Prize winning artists from the more modern schools. St Ives also houses the Barbara Hepworth Museum, the artist who settled here and formed a new movement of Abstract art in Europe.

The island st ives

Squeezed between the old harbour and Portheor Beach is the headland know in St Ives as the Island, lined with a tight network of white washed, slate roofed old fisherman’s cottages along winding alley ways with names like Teetotal Street, a reminder of the town’s Methodist heritage. The tiny parish church dating from the 15th Century is dedicated to St Peter and St Andrew, the fishermen-Apostles a legacy of St Ives’ fishing heritage.