'Brighton of the West' surfs a new wave Jeremy Seal discovers how the traditional charms of Bude have been complemented by a modern makeover Daily Telegraph 5/7/2008
‘Did I read that right?’ I asked my wife, turning back to check the
pavement blackboard on Bude’s Lansdown Road. Sure enough, a café called
Scrummies was offering half a lobster, caught in Bude Bay, with new
potatoes and salad, for £7.99. Local shellfish, simply cooked, and at a
steal would have added up to a real find almost anywhere. On the West
Country’s north coast, with its decidedly all-or-nothing culinary
culture - seared monkfish and tiger prawns with a fennel butter
vinaigrette at Padstow, or Ginster’s at Westward Ho! - it felt like a
minor miracle.
Something like Bude itself, in fact, a seaside town which proved every bit as authentic, unaffected and plain good value as the lobster meal at Scrummies. Bude was in the tourism business long before Cornish come-latelies like Padstow and Newquay claimed the holiday high ground. Robert Hawker, visionary poet-vicar of neighbouring Morwenstow, was calling it ‘the Brighton of the West’ back in the 1830s. The early Victorians, Alfred Tennyson among them, came for the sea cliffs, some of the highest in Britain, and for perhaps the best town beaches in all of the West Country.
Magnificent strands and setting are permanent, of course, but the vagaries of taste mean that gastro glamour tends to eclipse such assets these days. Which is why Padstow (Rick Stein), Newquay (Jamie Oliver) and Ilfracombe (Damien Hirst) have been attracting column inches and crowds alike while Bude (er, Scrummies proprietor and local fisherman-cum-fishmonger Cliff Bowden) has gone largely unremarked. The fact is Bude has been experiencing a revival all of its own. It has done so (in keeping with the fancy-free seafood) by attending to a more practical holiday requirement than the provision of telly-chef cuisine; quality self-catering accommodation. Local agency Breakwater, founded in 2003 by Bude couple Will and Suzie Daniels, has overseen the restoration of period and modern properties in and around the town, and launched them as impressively appointed holiday lets.
Our home for the week was a handsome Victorian terraced house perched beside parkland about 50 metres above Crooklets, most northerly of Bude’s three beaches. This former shrine to 1970s makeshift – chipboard, formica, swirly carpets - had been transformed into a delightful seven-bedroom holiday villa with the uniform Breakwater look. What the agency’s website described as ‘contemporary modern’ turned out to be altogether more cosy and family-friendly than we had suspected; huge American-style fridges and comprehensively equipped kitchens, bathrooms with roll-top baths, power showers and generous towel supplies, CD players and wide-screen TVs. The colour scheme was neutral, with maximum amounts of natural light. Nick, Breakwater’s capable manager, was readily available to advise on surfing lessons, to help arrange the delivery of a home-cooked ready meal or, if the urge to splurge overcame us, even an at-home chef and serving staff for the evening. Not that all Bude had scrubbed up so.
The town has certainly had its dowdy moments, decades actually, and was still to shed much of its doss house and pebbledash crust. Permanent eyesores included the concrete car parks which had been plonked on the extensive foreshore dunes. Hulking hotels, heyday long gone, dominated the skyline. Even so, the beaches proved perfect, combining as one rock-strewn, golden mega-strand at most stages of the tide. It was on this beach, with its Edwardian lido-style sea pool and handsome saddle-backed breakwater, that the first British surf life-savers were trained in the 1950s. ‘This beach is so many things,’ explained local life-saver Ted who was putting the next generation of wet-suited local heroes through their paces. ‘It’s excellent for surfing and kayaking, rock pooling and building sandcastles, for beach cricket and sunbathing.’
All of which meant happy families. I, however, was drawn to the beach’s rich and quirky working heritage. Not only did it function as a haven, drying at low tide, for the town’s fleet of dinky fishing boats, but was once a fertiliser quarry, providing the the region’s fields with a lime-rich top dressing. Most intriguing of all was the canal, an engineering marvel originally designed to ship the sand inland, which ended behind lock gates half-way down the beach. It was this same canal Tennyson fell into en route to Arthurian musings at nearby Tintagel, a humiliation which may explain why Bude never developed literary associations to compare with nearby Morwenstow (Robert Hawker) or Boscastle (Thomas Hardy). Instead, the town sought industrial distinction, with the canal envisaged as a Cornish Suez, connecting the Bristol and English Channels via the navigable River Tamar to save the slog round Land’s End. The dream had failed. An hour in a hired rowing boat (£8) sufficed to see us along the little that remained, the two-mile stretch of charmingly reed-choked, coot-haunted inland waterway to Helebridge which had recently won a £3 million restoration grant.
They had already refurbished the former home of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, engineering inventor of the miner’s lamp, who must vie with England rugby captain Phil Vickery as the town’s most famous son. This nineteenth-century castle opened last summer as shop, art gallery, restaurant, and a state of the art heritage centre housing the collections from the old canal-side museum. Nothing had changed, meanwhile, at Zumajay’s, one of Britain’s earliest surf shops which occupied its original premises on a Bude back alley. Champion surfers like Ben Holland, Nat Young and Taylor Knox had scrawled their names across the ceiling, along with surfer exhortations to ‘Rip It Up’. Rookies all, we doubted our family group would be doing any such thing. Where, I asked the friendly assistant who kitted us out, did Bude stand in surfing circles?
‘Oh, Bude’s actually for surfing,’ he explained from beneath bleached eyebrows. ‘Newquay’s for drinking. As for Polzeath,’ and this with undisguised disdain, ‘Polzeath’s for showing off.’
We spent much of the week surfing, but also found time to walk the coastal path, fit in some riding, wander this appealingly unpretentious town, and fall for the home-made pasties at Pengella’s. One afternoon, after a particularly gruelling family session of falling off boards had stoked the appetites, we repaired to Life’s A Beach, a café overlooking the shore. ‘Burger,’ said one child, smacking its lips at the menu. ‘Chips,’ said another. ‘The special,’ said I. Which was freshly caught mackerel, grilled, with salad and a roll. For £6.
Jeremy Seal’s family were guests of Breakwater Holidays (01288 321964, www.breakwater-holidays.co.uk) where weekly rentals of Crooklets View, which can sleep up to 14, ranges from £750 to £3,250 per week.
Further information: www.visitbude.info 01288 354240.
FADED RESORTS ON THE UP.
1 Ventnor, Isle of Wight
With a sheltered location on its Undercliff, balmy Ventnor was the choice of Victorian consumptives as well as literary figures like Dickens, Turgenev and Thackeray. Striking hillside architecture, palm trees, a botanic garden, and neighbouring, wooded Bonchurch have ended the economic flat-lining of recent decades with a bang. There’s now a thriving seafood scene and an annual jazz festival. Best of the new hotels, both for style and restaurant, is the seven-room Hambrough (01983 856333, www.thehambrough.com, from £129 per double B&B) in a converted townhouse facing the sea. Winterbourne House at Bonchurch (01983 852535, www.winterbournehouse.co.uk, from £55 per person per night B&B), where Dickens wrote much of David Copperfield, has recently opened as a superior, seven-room B&B.
2. Hastings/St Leonards on Sea, Sussex
Once the last word in dole-on-sea culture, Hastings has recently found its feet with a tarted-up seafront and a thriving old quarter of half-timbered facades and Cornish-style fishermen’s cottages. A beach-launched fishing fleet, the largest in Europe, rockpools and even wrecks on the lowest tides make for great exploring. There’s good seafood to be had at St Clement’s Restaurant (01424 200355). Accommodation options have also been transformed. Recent openings include Le Chateau Japonais (01424 719813, www.le-chateau-japonais, from £93 ppn inc dinner and breakfast), a Japanese guesthouse in a Victorian terraced house, complete with traditional rotenburo (spa pool). Zanzibar International Hotel (01424 460109, www.zanzibarhotel.co.uk) is a stylish boutique hotel where each of the eight rooms bears a distinct national style from Egypt to Bali. From £99 for two persons including champagne breakfast.
3. Aberystwyth, Wales
With its two beaches, its prom and pier, its hilltop funicular, narrow-gauge railway and Wales’ National Library, Aberystwyth was never short of attractions. The problem was finding somewhere decent to stay. Over the last eighteen months, however, two new townhouse establishments have opened on Marine Terrace to transform the town’s accommodation prospects. Gwesty Cymru (01970 612252, www.gwestycymru.com, from £60 ppn B&B) calls itself a 5-star restaurant with rooms. The eight rooms are impressively equipped with bespoke Welsh furniture, walk-in showers and fancy toiletries. There’s a cellar bar and the terrace restaurant overy Belgrave House (01970 630553; www.tybelgravehouse.co.uk, doubles from £75 B&B) has nine en-suite rooms and offers lavish breakfasts.
Something like Bude itself, in fact, a seaside town which proved every bit as authentic, unaffected and plain good value as the lobster meal at Scrummies. Bude was in the tourism business long before Cornish come-latelies like Padstow and Newquay claimed the holiday high ground. Robert Hawker, visionary poet-vicar of neighbouring Morwenstow, was calling it ‘the Brighton of the West’ back in the 1830s. The early Victorians, Alfred Tennyson among them, came for the sea cliffs, some of the highest in Britain, and for perhaps the best town beaches in all of the West Country.
Magnificent strands and setting are permanent, of course, but the vagaries of taste mean that gastro glamour tends to eclipse such assets these days. Which is why Padstow (Rick Stein), Newquay (Jamie Oliver) and Ilfracombe (Damien Hirst) have been attracting column inches and crowds alike while Bude (er, Scrummies proprietor and local fisherman-cum-fishmonger Cliff Bowden) has gone largely unremarked. The fact is Bude has been experiencing a revival all of its own. It has done so (in keeping with the fancy-free seafood) by attending to a more practical holiday requirement than the provision of telly-chef cuisine; quality self-catering accommodation. Local agency Breakwater, founded in 2003 by Bude couple Will and Suzie Daniels, has overseen the restoration of period and modern properties in and around the town, and launched them as impressively appointed holiday lets.
Our home for the week was a handsome Victorian terraced house perched beside parkland about 50 metres above Crooklets, most northerly of Bude’s three beaches. This former shrine to 1970s makeshift – chipboard, formica, swirly carpets - had been transformed into a delightful seven-bedroom holiday villa with the uniform Breakwater look. What the agency’s website described as ‘contemporary modern’ turned out to be altogether more cosy and family-friendly than we had suspected; huge American-style fridges and comprehensively equipped kitchens, bathrooms with roll-top baths, power showers and generous towel supplies, CD players and wide-screen TVs. The colour scheme was neutral, with maximum amounts of natural light. Nick, Breakwater’s capable manager, was readily available to advise on surfing lessons, to help arrange the delivery of a home-cooked ready meal or, if the urge to splurge overcame us, even an at-home chef and serving staff for the evening. Not that all Bude had scrubbed up so.
The town has certainly had its dowdy moments, decades actually, and was still to shed much of its doss house and pebbledash crust. Permanent eyesores included the concrete car parks which had been plonked on the extensive foreshore dunes. Hulking hotels, heyday long gone, dominated the skyline. Even so, the beaches proved perfect, combining as one rock-strewn, golden mega-strand at most stages of the tide. It was on this beach, with its Edwardian lido-style sea pool and handsome saddle-backed breakwater, that the first British surf life-savers were trained in the 1950s. ‘This beach is so many things,’ explained local life-saver Ted who was putting the next generation of wet-suited local heroes through their paces. ‘It’s excellent for surfing and kayaking, rock pooling and building sandcastles, for beach cricket and sunbathing.’
All of which meant happy families. I, however, was drawn to the beach’s rich and quirky working heritage. Not only did it function as a haven, drying at low tide, for the town’s fleet of dinky fishing boats, but was once a fertiliser quarry, providing the the region’s fields with a lime-rich top dressing. Most intriguing of all was the canal, an engineering marvel originally designed to ship the sand inland, which ended behind lock gates half-way down the beach. It was this same canal Tennyson fell into en route to Arthurian musings at nearby Tintagel, a humiliation which may explain why Bude never developed literary associations to compare with nearby Morwenstow (Robert Hawker) or Boscastle (Thomas Hardy). Instead, the town sought industrial distinction, with the canal envisaged as a Cornish Suez, connecting the Bristol and English Channels via the navigable River Tamar to save the slog round Land’s End. The dream had failed. An hour in a hired rowing boat (£8) sufficed to see us along the little that remained, the two-mile stretch of charmingly reed-choked, coot-haunted inland waterway to Helebridge which had recently won a £3 million restoration grant.
They had already refurbished the former home of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, engineering inventor of the miner’s lamp, who must vie with England rugby captain Phil Vickery as the town’s most famous son. This nineteenth-century castle opened last summer as shop, art gallery, restaurant, and a state of the art heritage centre housing the collections from the old canal-side museum. Nothing had changed, meanwhile, at Zumajay’s, one of Britain’s earliest surf shops which occupied its original premises on a Bude back alley. Champion surfers like Ben Holland, Nat Young and Taylor Knox had scrawled their names across the ceiling, along with surfer exhortations to ‘Rip It Up’. Rookies all, we doubted our family group would be doing any such thing. Where, I asked the friendly assistant who kitted us out, did Bude stand in surfing circles?
‘Oh, Bude’s actually for surfing,’ he explained from beneath bleached eyebrows. ‘Newquay’s for drinking. As for Polzeath,’ and this with undisguised disdain, ‘Polzeath’s for showing off.’
We spent much of the week surfing, but also found time to walk the coastal path, fit in some riding, wander this appealingly unpretentious town, and fall for the home-made pasties at Pengella’s. One afternoon, after a particularly gruelling family session of falling off boards had stoked the appetites, we repaired to Life’s A Beach, a café overlooking the shore. ‘Burger,’ said one child, smacking its lips at the menu. ‘Chips,’ said another. ‘The special,’ said I. Which was freshly caught mackerel, grilled, with salad and a roll. For £6.
Jeremy Seal’s family were guests of Breakwater Holidays (01288 321964, www.breakwater-holidays.co.uk) where weekly rentals of Crooklets View, which can sleep up to 14, ranges from £750 to £3,250 per week.
Further information: www.visitbude.info 01288 354240.
FADED RESORTS ON THE UP.
1 Ventnor, Isle of Wight
With a sheltered location on its Undercliff, balmy Ventnor was the choice of Victorian consumptives as well as literary figures like Dickens, Turgenev and Thackeray. Striking hillside architecture, palm trees, a botanic garden, and neighbouring, wooded Bonchurch have ended the economic flat-lining of recent decades with a bang. There’s now a thriving seafood scene and an annual jazz festival. Best of the new hotels, both for style and restaurant, is the seven-room Hambrough (01983 856333, www.thehambrough.com, from £129 per double B&B) in a converted townhouse facing the sea. Winterbourne House at Bonchurch (01983 852535, www.winterbournehouse.co.uk, from £55 per person per night B&B), where Dickens wrote much of David Copperfield, has recently opened as a superior, seven-room B&B.
2. Hastings/St Leonards on Sea, Sussex
Once the last word in dole-on-sea culture, Hastings has recently found its feet with a tarted-up seafront and a thriving old quarter of half-timbered facades and Cornish-style fishermen’s cottages. A beach-launched fishing fleet, the largest in Europe, rockpools and even wrecks on the lowest tides make for great exploring. There’s good seafood to be had at St Clement’s Restaurant (01424 200355). Accommodation options have also been transformed. Recent openings include Le Chateau Japonais (01424 719813, www.le-chateau-japonais, from £93 ppn inc dinner and breakfast), a Japanese guesthouse in a Victorian terraced house, complete with traditional rotenburo (spa pool). Zanzibar International Hotel (01424 460109, www.zanzibarhotel.co.uk) is a stylish boutique hotel where each of the eight rooms bears a distinct national style from Egypt to Bali. From £99 for two persons including champagne breakfast.
3. Aberystwyth, Wales
With its two beaches, its prom and pier, its hilltop funicular, narrow-gauge railway and Wales’ National Library, Aberystwyth was never short of attractions. The problem was finding somewhere decent to stay. Over the last eighteen months, however, two new townhouse establishments have opened on Marine Terrace to transform the town’s accommodation prospects. Gwesty Cymru (01970 612252, www.gwestycymru.com, from £60 ppn B&B) calls itself a 5-star restaurant with rooms. The eight rooms are impressively equipped with bespoke Welsh furniture, walk-in showers and fancy toiletries. There’s a cellar bar and the terrace restaurant overy Belgrave House (01970 630553; www.tybelgravehouse.co.uk, doubles from £75 B&B) has nine en-suite rooms and offers lavish breakfasts.
