Property in Newquay, the UK's surf capital, is moving upmarket

The Times Online, 21 March 2008.

The town centre is also getting a makeover and the town is attracting more and more sophisticated visitors

Fred Redwood
The late 1970s and early 1980s were bad years for Newquay in Cornwall. “It became the resort where the yobs of Great Britain met the blue-rinse brigade,” says Ian Lillicrap, of the local estate agent Lillicrap Chilcott. “Newquay was Hell-on-Sea, full to bursting with down-at-heel guesthouses. You dared not go into the town centre at night because of the mayhem.”

There were good reasons why Newquay went downmarket at that time. Like every other bucket-and-spade resort in the country, it could not compete with foreign package deals. So Newquay made the best use of its biggest asset - its surfing beaches - and focused on the youth market. Nightclubs sprang up, the old-fashioned family bed-and-breakfasts became glorified dosshouses for young surfers, and the middle-ranking hotels suffered through under-investment, attracting mainly coach tours. Newquay fell well behind its neighbouring towns in trendy north Cornwall. Today the average house price in Newquay is still a third below that of Padstow.

But that picture of Newquay is about to change. Restormel Borough Council has concluded that more money would be brought into the town's economy if the old-fashioned hotels lining the main streets were knocked down to make holiday apartments. “Today's more sophisticated visitors want good-quality self-catering, not cheap B&Bs,” says Lillicrap.

The town centre is also getting a makeover. The architects Trewin Design Partnership plan to build a shopping quarter with multistorey and underground car parks on the site of the bus station at a cost of £127million. A new sea wall and promenade at Towan Beach is also in the pipeline. Just outside the town, Jamie Oliver has opened his new restaurant, Fifteen Cornwall, at Watergate Bay, and a new television soap, Echo Beach, is drawing attention to the area's beaches.

But the flagship for the regeneration of Newquay is to be found closer to the centre of town: Fistral Beach. To the uninitiated, Fistral is just another pretty bay in Newquay's collection; to the surfer this is heaven. Offering the biggest and best waves, including the legendary 35ft Cribbar, Fistral is where the major surfing competitions are held and where hardcore enthusiasts have traditionally congregated. Since the 1970s, in property terms, that has not necessarily been a good thing. Headland Road, overlooking Fistral, has for years been “guesthouse alley” - a scruffy line of crash pads for travelling surf dudes.

Now that is changing. A chic new hotel, The Carnmarth, has been built and upmarket apartments are on the way. Prices give the lie to Newquay's cheap and cheerful reputation: apartments in Acorn Property Group's most reasonably priced block, Zinc, cost from £275,000; at Azure, prices start at £350,000; and at Pearl, which also has two penthouses at £1.2million and £1.3 million, you will pay at least £385,000.

Darren Honey, 39, a professional investor and landlord from Bristol, has bought two of these apartments to let and has bought another for his own young family. “I've been coming to Fistral for years and there's always been a party scene,” he says. “The difference is that today's visitors are more mature and affluent. Newquay has better investment potential than any other coastal resort in the country.”

If you do not want to live near a surfing beach, you can pick up a three to five-bedroom period terraced house on a non-seafront street for £250,000 to £350,000. A two-bedroom terraced house a mile from the beach costs as little as £165,000 and a three-bedroom 1980s semi about £200,000. Popular, quiet locations are the Gannel estuary and Pentire Headland to the west of Fistral, and Lusty Glaze to the east. Diane Nettleton, 42, has bought a house overlooking Crantock Beach with the sole intention of knocking it down to build another. “Location is all-important when you are buying here,” she says. “This makes economic sense.”

Transport links are improving. Newquay airport, now owned by the council, is expanding: there are flights to London City Airport as well as to Leeds, Gatwick, Manchester and Bristol. Incomers should check the small print before buying in Newquay, however. “Some properties have a clause stating you have to own a main home elsewhere,” says Lillicrap. “You may only want the house as a holiday home investment initially - but that clause, which is quite common, may come back to haunt you if you want to retire here.”

However, walking through Newquay at night in summer, when hordes of young people are spilling out of the pubs, clubs and fast-food eateries, is still not for the faint-hearted. “We are taking a hard line on management of the night-time economy,” says Phil Mason, the director of regeneration at Newquay. “We are working with the police to issue dispersal orders to large groups of people using the beaches at night. Barbecues are banned, we are clamping down on under-age drinking, and we want to stop the ‘happy hours' of cheap alcohol. We are determined to promote youth culture in Newquay - but a different type of youth culture.”

FACT FILE

The average price of a home in Newquay is £235,837 compared with an average of £296,719 in Truro and £313,921 in Padstow (Land Registry).

Property prices in Newquay have risen by 87.6 per cent over the past five years. In 1997 the average price of a home in Newquay was £60,010.

Newquay airport handled 380,000 passengers in 2006. In 2001 it was 75,000. The surf industry generates an estimated annual £21 million - much of it in Newquay - for the Cornish economy.