[Charlie_Bubble]

I'm in Newquay at the moment staying with my parents. I would say that Newquay has changed for the worse over the last 10 to 15 years. It used to be a resort aimed at families during the summer and the elderley during the winter months, but now is almost exclusively aimed at groups of young teenagers & adults. During the off-season the population is about 19 - 20k, but during the summer another 100 - 120k people flock to the area. Surprisingly, the local police force doesn't suddenly grow 6 times it's normal size.

I don't doubt that places that have a week long mardi gras or carnival don't face the same problems, but there is normally an increase in policing for the length of those events, they're concentrated in a small area of the town and the event lasts maybe a week at most. The season here is 4 - 5 months long, the trouble is all over the town and there is no sudden addition of hundreds of extra coppers.

Thankfully a lot of the guest houses at the top of my parents road have been returned to private residences or gone bust. I remember one summer when all the cars up the road had their windows smashed, windscreen wipers destroyed etc. as some drunken idiots returned home after a night of 'fun'. My parents have had people parking in their drive, blocking access to their garage and one such vehicle was left there for a total of 4 days over a weekend. The opposite side of the road has no parking restrictions, so it used to regularly have people sleeping in cars, VW vans etc while they came down for a week. Not very nice to walk out of your house and see drunken people crawling out of the cars/vans and going to the toilet in the gutter.

The local council shares some of the blame. It used to be run by Restormel council, which was based in St. Austell. They used to happily take all the local rates and taxes from Newquay and spend them on St. Austell and try and charge any businesses wanting to move into the town huge business rates. So gradually all the family orientated shops, high street names and facilities left Newquay (It has been without a cinema for about 10 years now, which St. Austell has a large multiscreen cinema and the biggest high street shop for years was Woolworths). Now the local councils have been banded together into a countywide council. The drain of money from Newquay to St. Austell has stopped. Suddenly a cinema is coming back to Newquay and Sainsburys has opened up in place of the crappy old Somerfield. It's still not perfect though. The majority of shops are seasonal surf/bucket and spade shops selling cheap tat. Woolies is still vacant right in the centre of town and the majority of businesses in town are bars and pubs, which is half the problem.

It's not the town I remember being in as a child and most of the time when we are down visiting my parents we don't even go into town, opting to instead go to Truro, because the town centre is a warzone most evenings and too busy to walk in during the day for the small number of shops worth going into.