Town in Cornwall, England
Newquay
A Cornish fishing port now home to Britain's best-known surf beach, a clifftop hotel from a Roald Dahl film and a spaceport.
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Key information
- County
- Cornwall
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Surfing, Fistral Beach, Boardmasters festival and long summer holidays
- Famous people
- Joseph Treffry
About Newquay
The man who shouted "Hevva!" from a hut
Long before anyone paddled out on a board, Newquay's big money was in pilchards. On Towan Head stands the Huer's Hut, a small white lookout where a watcher scanned the sea for the dark stain of a shoal. When he spotted one, the huer raised the alarm with the cry "Hevva!" and signalled to the boats below where to row. The whole town depended on that shout. The hut is still there, perched above the rocks, and is one of the best-known landmarks on Cornwall's north coast.
Why a town with a quay is called "new"
The name is as plain as it sounds. A new quay was built here in the 1400s to give the little harbour better protection, and the settlement took its name from the improvement. Before that it had its own Cornish name, Tewynblustri. Fishing carried the town for centuries. In the 1800s the harbour got a new purpose when Joseph Treffry, the Cornish industrialist, built a railway to carry minerals and china clay down to it for shipping. Then came the passenger trains. A railway to Newquay opened in 1876, and holidaymakers began arriving by the carriage-load to look at the sea rather than fish in it.
How Cornwall's surf capital got its waves
Newquay faces the Atlantic with nothing in the way, which is why the swell rolls in so reliably. Fistral Beach, on the western side of the headland, is the town's surfing showpiece and has hosted national and international contests for decades. There are more than ten beaches within the town's reach, from busy Towan to the cliff-backed coves of Lusty Glaze and Porth. Many have a surf school on the sand, and learner surfers in wetsuits are a fixture of the summer scene. Nearby Watergate Bay is the main stage for Boardmasters, the festival that grew out of a surf competition in the early 1980s. Each August it turns the north Cornish coast into a music and watersports weekend.
A clifftop hotel and a film full of witches
The Headland Hotel, opened in 1900, sits above Fistral Beach like a red-brick castle. Film fans know it as the setting for the 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches, in which it stood in for a seaside hotel full of very strange guests. It is a fitting piece of Newquay theatre. The town has always attracted people who want a bit of drama, whether from the Atlantic or from the evening out. On Towan Beach, a house on a tiny rock stack called the Island is joined to the mainland by a suspension bridge. It is one of the most photographed bits of the seafront.
Pasties, pitches and penguins
Food here is classic Cornish seaside. Pasties are bought hot in paper bags and eaten with one eye on the gulls, and fish and chips and Cornish ice cream are summer staples. For sport, the surf is the main event, but ball games survive too. Newquay AFC play football at Mount Wise, and Newquay Hornets are the town's rugby club, a sport that is close to a religion across Cornwall. In Trenance Park, Newquay Zoo opened in 1969 and gives families a wet-weather alternative to the beach, with penguins among the residents.
From pilchard port to spaceport
Newquay's airport at St Mawgan, once an RAF station, now flies holidaymakers in and out. In January 2023 it also became the setting for the UK's first attempted orbital launch from British soil. A converted Boeing 747 called Cosmic Girl took off carrying a rocket under its wing, but the rocket failed to reach orbit. The attempt still put Cornwall's north coast in the history of space flight. It is quite a journey for a town that began with a man in a hut shouting at fish.