St Ives, Cornwall

St Ives spent centuries pulling pilchards out of the Celtic Sea by the million, then discovered the far easier trade of selling pasties to people who came to look at the water the pilchards used to live in. It is genuinely beautiful, which is the problem: the streets were laid out for fishermen on foot and are now navigated by hire cars with roof boxes, reversing. The painters came for the light and stayed, and the light is still here, doing the same free work for anyone who turns up with an easel or a phone. Whether the town still belongs to the people who live in it all year is a question the harbour answers differently in August than it does in February.