As the Cornwall & Devon coastline gentrifies, what’s left at UK surfing’s spiritual home?

The wind is bitter as the sun melts the frosted tips off Bantham’s sand dunes. Seaweed floods the air while aquatic plant matter is pushed ashore by the imperfect grey-green waves, lining the beach like a tide mark. On a good day, Bantham – located in South Devon – is one of the English southwest’s best beach breaks. On any other, it asks nothing of you except that you show up – no membership, no pass, no postcode that qualifies you. Just a board, a wetsuit and the willingness to be cold and humbled.

The lineup was one of the last truly free spaces for British surfers – hostile enough to filter out the uncommitted, open enough to take anyone willing. That idea is now being sold back to the very people it once belonged to, at a premium rate.

Patrick Renaud has been teaching people to surf at Bantham for 17 years. He knows the bay as well as anyone – the rip, the sandbars, the way the swell wraps around Burgh Island before hitting the beach. He’s watched the community shift and groms grow up. Many of his fellow instructors, he says, can no longer afford to stay in the area, priced out by short-term holiday properties.

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“Local surf communities will always suffer unless you are fortunate enough to have parents that own a house locally,” says Renaud. ​“Many who regularly surf at Bantham are opting to surf other locations due to easier access and cheaper accommodation.” Car parking fees, he adds, are a signal of something bigger: that access to the water is becoming a premium.

A season ticket now runs to around £200 per car. When Ben Howey was a kid, his family paid a nominal fee and the guy on the gate ​“just knew” which families had paid. Nowadays there are hundreds of cars in summer and that’s not possible. Friends of his have stopped going to Bantham altogether because the daily charge isn’t worth it for an hour in the water. 

Howey, a British longboard champion who has represented England at the International Surfing Association World Longboard Games, grew up down the road from Bantham, and started surfing at the age of five on a bodyboard with his brothers and sister. He was one of five kids in the local nipper lifesaving club. ​“It didn’t feel like it was labelled as a community,” he says. ​“It was just a group of families that enjoyed the same lifestyle.”

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Similarly, Oz Denham-Cole, 31, taught surf lessons with Renaud for many years and experienced being priced out of the coastline he works on first hand. He’s now had to move back in with his mum because local house prices are ​“way too expensive”. Hope Cove, he explains – a nearby coastal village that now predominantly consists of holiday homes – is empty through the offseason. ​“Walking through in winter is a sad sight, there are maybe five lights on across the whole village,” he says. 

A few miles up the coast, Salcombe swings from roughly 2,000 residents in winter to 25,000 in summer. Shops close because the numbers don’t work in January. In July you can’t move for traffic and everything is priced for London wages.

With soaring property prices in coastal areas, the face of surfing in the UK, particularly in the southwest, is changing. What was once a sport rooted in counterculture and radical living – all that was needed was a board and a shore break – is increasingly a culture of luxury and inaccessibility. Two hours from Bantham down the A30 in Cornwall – British surfing’s spiritual home – people are experiencing the same problem. 

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Chris Nelson is one of Europe’s leading writers on surf culture and has been embedded in the scene since the mid-’90s – publishing multiple books and co-founding the London Surf / Film Festival. Having lived in St Agnes on Cornwall’s north coast since the early 2000s, Nelson has been inside the surf industry long enough to have watched it devour itself from within. 

“Brands in the late ​’90s and early 2000s were making more money than they knew what to do with,” he says. Then came the push for growth – the rebranding of the ASP (Association of Surfing Professionals) to the WSL (World Surf League), the drive toward the Olympics and the mainstream. ​“Surfing has been its own worst enemy,” he says. The rebellion became a product. ​“There are still surfers who are counterculture,” Nelson says, ​“but there’s definitely a vein of surfers now who see surfing more like a sport similar to tennis or golf.”

The freedom of surfing travelled well and became an aesthetic. Boards on roof racks, wet wetsuits hung up to dry and a weekend away from the office became a lifestyle sold and bought in equal measure – and now many who bought into it have second homes that sit dark through January. 

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The average house price in Cornwall sits at £274,000. The average salary: £36,600. A median-wage Cornish resident would need 7.4 years of gross salary to buy a median-priced home. In the South Hams, where surf culture runs just as deep, average house prices hit £345,000 and average salaries £43,000, stretching that number to eight years.

Short-term rental properties have accelerated this. Cornwall has around 12,800 active Airbnb listings as of January 2026 – among the highest density in the UK. Landlords convert long-term lets into holiday properties overnight, chasing returns the local rental market can’t match. And with people being priced out from living along the coast, many are forced to travel from further inland to catch shore breaks, which itself is increasingly becoming a luxury as fuel costs rise.

Tourism pumps roughly £2 billion into Cornwall’s economy annually. Surf schools, cafés and hire shops exist almost entirely to serve people who drive down to escape the city for a weekend. Every year these industries face the same brutal seasonality – three months of income then nine months of silence.

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As of April 2025, both Cornwall and the South Hams have introduced a 100% council tax premium on second homes, effectively doubling the standard rate. Generation Rent, which campaigns nationally on behalf of private renters, published analysis last year that suggests the premium is having some effect – second home numbers are falling in parts of coastal Devon. 

But in Cornwall and South Hams, where the problem is most acute, the numbers haven’t moved. ​“It is early days,” says Daniel Wilson Craw, Generation Rent’s deputy chief executive. England also has no licensing system for holiday lets – unlike Scotland, which has had one for years, giving councils the power to cap numbers in a given area rather than just tax them. ​“A national register of holiday lets has been on the cards for a long time, but still hasn’t come into force,” he says.

Regardless, the tide keeps doing what it always does: falling out of the bay, refining the power of the waves as they dump onto the sandbars. Ever-changing crews still make it out into the ripbowl, wetsuits on, riding waves and being humbled in equal measure. ​“I think there will always be a core of surfers that will surf no matter what and will find a way to make it work,” Howey says. ​“They will more than likely still be the guys driving the knackered vans and making ends meet to keep it going. But I think it’s going to get harder and harder to achieve. One thing is for sure – the waves will still be there.”

Noah Petersons is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Instagram.

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