Watch Inside Out on BBC1 tonight at 7.30 for an in-depth look at this story.
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After five years of trying, Helford fishermen including Chris Bean (Lady Hamilton), have still to move forward in their plans to have a landing quay and small road built to allow for a safer working environment . Many 'local' residents have written to object to the construction work. A significant percentage of the objections come from second home owners who have property in the tiny village.
Cornwall is what it is and owes much of its culture, heritage and financial dependence to commercial and leisure maritime activities, which includes fishing.
What is considered 'quaint' by many visitors is, in fact, the activities of very real working lives and the fabric of many communities where people are actively engaged in fishing for a living - these people and their way of life must be allowed to evolve as their have thier ancestors before them - no one should be able to halt progress and 'preserve' the past as a living edifice by means of privilege, money or other means and deprive these artisnal workers of living their lives as their needs dictate - especially people like Chris Bean who looks to the future and goes to great lengths to fish for and market the very highest quality fish - much of which is supplied to sushi chefs 'up country'. London Town, where many second-home owners live or work is home to many an ancient monument offering an indication of life in the past; the significance of St Paul's Cathedral is no less diminished in being surrounded by modernity - the two co-exist. If these people wanted control over 'their' plot they should have bought a much larger little bit of England (or Cornwall) sans neighbours - as it is, they have bought into the village of Helford and should therefore accept all that that entails - it is not a living museum or heritage site for those permanent residents who live in and around the village.
In this year that celebrates the bi-centennial of Darwin's birth and his book, Origin of the Species, this incident represents a far more serious interruption in the natural evolution of our working environment than resident who recently complained bitterly about the noise emanating from some boats landing fish in Newlyn Harbour during the night!
See the full story here.
1 comment:
We had a similar situation some years back when London folk bought a second home in West Wales to be "in the country" and then phoned the dairy farm nearby to complain about the cows mooing early one morning. They didn't last long, sold up and went back to city life.
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