WE’D ALL love to live in Mevagissey, wouldn’t we?

It’s peak Cornwall, picturesque, next to the water and it bucks the ‘hollowed-out haven’ trend – there’s a strong sense of community, but that community is worried about the future.

If you want to live in the fishing village it will cost you. Even properties classed as affordable are far from it. Yes, £800,000 is affordable to someone, but for the average Cornish family desperate to stay in a place where previous generations have called home?

Like so many coastal towns and villages in Cornwall, there is a housing crisis in Meva.

There are currently around 40 properties for sale in and around the village with 93 people on the housing list. They can’t afford the vast majority of those properties – over half of them are priced between £500,000 and £2.25-m.

I visited Mevagissey after recently reporting on a failed bid to build eight new homes on what has been dubbed locally as “millionaire’s row”. Local people spoke against the application, which a Cornwall Council committee ended up refusing on the grounds of harm to the character of the area and the protected National Landscape, which the village sits within.

Mevagissey resident and former member of the parish council Garth Shephard told the meeting: “The construction of unwanted million-pound clifftop houses does nothing to satisfy local need and would come at the expense of the natural environment.”

An ‘affordable’ home on a neighbouring development recently sold for £500,000 on the open market.

I met Garth and other members of the community to discuss their housing fears as well as visiting Meva businesses which are proving there is life in the old sea dog yet.

Garth said: “The fundamental problem is that Mevagissey is an attractive place to live. The average price of a detached house has just gone through half a million. The problem with affordable housing is that they are tied to market value, so 80 per cent of the market value is what you have to pay.”

Mike Roberts, chair of the parish council, added that if an affordable house was to be built on the recent application site, the possible selling price would be £800,000.

“That’s out of the reach of a local person. Affordable housing – the name is a joke,” said Mike, who’s remarkable for his 93 years. “Like all coastal villages, if a house comes up, it’s sold, particularly if it overlooks the harbour. It’s then a second home or a holiday let.”

They all agree there’s not enough social housing in the village and what there is is very old stock.

“In Mevagissey, there are many three-generation families living in the same property,” said Garth. “That’s because the middle generation have never been able to move out to find their own home in Mevagissey. Many homes only have two bedrooms.”

Dr Barbara Dunn, who has lived in her clifftop house for over 25 years, added: “There should be a framework for when affordables are resold. There doesn’t seem to be any barrier to stop them being sold at market value. That probably get sold to someone who isn’t in the village, then you’re going through the whole cycle again.”

She said that when she tried to sell her house at least 70 per cent of viewers wanted it as a second home. “There was only one local couple interested in buying it, but there was no celebrity chef in Mevagissey and their friends were in St Ives and Rock.

“The next door house which was on for about £1.2-m eventually sold to second home owners.”

Barbara said that an estate agent recently told her that a couple earning an average Cornish wage can only afford a mortgage of about £180,000. Finding a family home for that amount is almost impossible.

Mike added: “We need affordable housing – the problem is the topography in Mevagissey; a steep valley, with difficult access and traffic problems. There are numerous problems confronting putting affordable houses here. However, there have been sites identified that could be developed.”

Cllr James Mustoe, a local boy who represents Meva at Cornwall Council, added: “The parish council has been proactive in identifying several sites for affordable-led housing when Cornwall Council did its call for sites last year.”

James knows the housing difficulties first-hand.

“My wife and I are both from Mevagissey. When we got together we couldn’t afford to stay here, so we moved to a private rental in Carclaze for 13 years. In that time, we were earning slightly more than the average wage of a couple in Cornwall – it took us nine years to save a deposit for a £230,000 affordable house because we were paying our rent at the same time.

“I was working two jobs, my wife was working one full-time job and we still struggled to get on the market.”

The answer to Mevagissey’s problems may lie in nearby Gorran Churchtown. In 2013, the Diocese of Truro sold the village’s old school house.

The community got together, formed St Goran Community Land Trust (CLT), raised the necessary funds, bought the building and created what CLT member Chris Lobb says is “properly affordable accommodation for local people” – five flats alongside a community hall.

James told me: “In an ideal world, the perfect solution would be for Mevagissey Parish Council to lead on a community land trust to deliver that sort of affordable housing for the village.”

While walking around Mevagissey, it’s plain to see how popular James is. Unprompted, several people praised the councillor for how much he has done to help improve life in the village and he certainly raised a huge list of things that have been achieved or need to be achieved with me.

One Mevagissey resident he introduced me to is John Fillingham, who runs the Harbour Tavern, is a parish councillor and also happens to be a safety specialist in the film industry.

John’s life completely changed when he came to Meva 13 years ago to help make The Bad Education Movie – he fell in love with the village and also his now-wife.

A London lad, John joined the Royal Navy, then worked for the BBC before starting his film safety business. “I’ve only ever had jobs where I’ve travelled the world. I’d never settled anywhere until I came here.”

He said: “I found a different kind of vibe here. The best description I ever heard was from a customer last year, who said ‘we’ve been coming to Mevagissey for our holidays every year for the past 30 years and what brings us back is there are prettier places in Cornwall but Mevagissey has a soul’.

“It’s a genuine working village. Okay, we’ve got holiday homes here like many other places, but I think there is a higher level of people who live and work here by comparison to other places.”

John’s father-in-law is a reminder that the village is still home to proud Mevagissey folk among all the second homes and holiday lets. He has lived in the same house overlooking the harbour for 80 years and has only been outside Cornwall twice in his life … he hated it both times.

“Housing is an issue,” added John. “Everybody keeps using those words ‘affordable housing’. What does affordable mean?

“Housing association type organisations are not interested in building any more of those kind of plots because it’s expensive for them and they’re not getting the government backing they once were.

“There was that application for eight houses that are a million-and-a-half-plus, and the developer’s saying ‘well, there’s a housing crisis’. Great, so you build eight houses with no one living in them.”

It’s not all doom and gloom in Mevagissey, far from it. There are around 52 social clubs in the village and two huge annual events – Mevagissey Feast Week and the relatively new shanty festival which in six years has grown from one day to three. Held in October, it proves a boon in the extended holiday season.

“People come from all over the world and all of the B&Bs are booked up a year in advance. It really brings Mevagissey to life at a time when it normally isn’t,” said James.

Another place bringing the village to life is the Mevagissey Activity Centre. Mark Sweeney, its commercial director, says it’s come a long way in the past 18 months.

“We weren’t getting a lot of users, so we put some plans together, got some funding and have made quite a difference.”

Too right they have – two tennis courts that were never used have been transformed into a MUGA, a multi-use games arena, with floodlighting. It’s used for all manner of sports now including five-a-side football, netball, pickleball and rugby training.

There is soft play for kids inside the building with a film club, yoga and pilates, which have attracted over 100 people to some of the classes. It’s made people in the village more active as well as improving social cohesion in Mevagissey.

There are new businesses too, which are also doing their bit to make the village an all-year destination.

Orange Ora at The Wheelhouse on the quay is a rebranding of well-known restaurant. The building goes way back and was a Methodist meeting place where John Wesley first preached in Mevagissey.

“Times have changed and we’ve changed with them,” said Libby Hunter, who runs the café and community hub with owner Richard Jellard.

“It’s all about bringing the community back into the Wheelhouse,” she added. “We were very much known as a tourist destination and were working 15 weeks of the year, and even that was weather dependent.

“It just wasn’t viable anymore, so we’re open all year now. We listened to what people were saying across the village. People are now looking for retreats to chill out, so we’ve created that.”

A large upstairs room which sat vacant for years is now a community space hosting pop-up office space, reiki, yoga, social networking and illustration classes. There will even be a sauna out on the terrace soon.

Just around the corner is the recently opened Mevagissey Bookshop, run by Tamsyn Williamson-Gillie who noticed a gap in the market and is now selling a mix of new and secondhand books and records.

“I think there was a dip after Covid, but there’s a new impetus in the village now,” she told me.

However, parish chairman Mike left me with a cautious word: “There are a number of empty shops at the moment, which is rather unfortunate. One hopes that it will rise again.”