It's summer in Cornwall.
It's gorgeous here -
rugged and breathtaking -
during a summer like no other.
With its glorious beaches...
..some pretty good surf
and iconic wildlife...
Oh, my God. Those beautiful females.
They're absolutely, stunningly gorgeous. Yes!
..this is one of the most beautiful corners of the world.
It is a real vision of Cornish loveliness, isn't it?
But the pandemic and the lockdown threaten Cornwall's way of life...
If we don't open everything up,
every single business round this harbour will go bankrupt.
..and highlight an often unseen Cornwall
of temporary work and people struggling to find a home.
Look at that! I've got lights and a bed and that's about all I need.
This feels like another Cornwall,
and it is.
I want to explore the touristy coast...
..and during these two programmes...
I had no idea!
..discover the hidden story of Cornwall
the visitors don't always get to see.
Staggering! It's another world.
Fire!
EXPLOSION
I'll be exploring the coastline,
and I'll be out on the sea, in gorgeous Cornwall.
There's few other regions of Britain that have such a dramatic landscape,
combined with romantic mythology and epic legends.
Cornwall's got an incredible 400 miles of coastline,
more than any other county in the country.
It is stunning here.
It's easy to see why so many people want to come to Cornwall.
Just over half a million people live in Cornwall.
Most years, Cornwall enjoys, and sometimes endures,
more than four million visitors,
but when I started my travels around the county,
the beaches and the villages felt eerily quiet.
This is one of the most popular tourist areas in the whole country.
For the last few months, it's been pretty damn empty,
as we've all been in lockdown,
but over the next few days that's all set to change.
Now, people here rely on tourism as much as anywhere in Britain -
as much as many places in the world, to be honest.
Are tourists going to come back here?
We shall soon see.
But for many businesses here, the next few months are vital.
It really could be make or break.
Tourism is worth billions to the economy of Cornwall
and supports tens of thousands of jobs.
Just like in the rest of the UK, during the lockdown,
pubs, restaurants, hotels and campsites were shut.
Spring and early summer were a write-off.
The closures hit especially hard here.
Cornwall so depends on tourism.
There were warnings a quarter of tourism businesses in Cornwall
face ruin, along with thousands of jobs, livelihoods,
and the economy of the county.
July 4th was the big national opening up day.
Across the county, people were preparing for tourists to arrive.
As lockdown lifted, I wanted to understand more about life
and lives in the county, so I first went to visit a group of friends
who used to work in local restaurants on the Cornish coast,
the Taco Boys.
They've set up on their own, selling food from a pop-up food truck -
a converted horsebox - just by the famous Polzeath Beach,
With six in their team, they had big plans for 2020,
then lockdown hit, as it did a million other small businesses.
Today was reopening,
although this probably wasn't quite the celebrity launch
they might have dreamt about.
Robbie, I think I should have a breakfast taco.
Yeah, one of those? Yes, please.
I feel quite excited for you guys.
It's quite a big deal that you're here, you're open, you're starting.
This is it. Yes, it is.
I'm now your third customer. Yeah!
And the other two are our staff! THEY LAUGH
We all met working at the Enodoc Hotel in Rock.
We were really proud of the food we were putting out.
Felix was the head chef there at the time.
But we just felt we were a little bit limited by never actually
seeing the customer.
We never saw anyone or anything!
Just a windowless kitchen.
If you'd had a window, you might still be there.
Possibly,
but then again, it's not quite a beach view, is it?
No, it's not!
You've got a porthole through there, haven't you, Blaise?
Yes, indeed, and sometimes you feel as if you're on a cruise ship.
Yeah! You just look out there and you can see the waves.
And it's rather beautiful.
Is that mine coming through? It is.
It's a little bit of a messy job,
so you take a napkin and you hope for the best.
That's it. I like the sound of that. Thank you very much. Look at that.
Isn't it fantastic?
In the South West, hundreds had died from coronavirus, but other parts
of the country had much higher infection rates.
In early summer, many in Cornwall were worried an influx of tourists
would bring the virus with them.
Felix Craft, the Taco Boys' head chef, was sure they could work
within government rules.
We have the perfect set-up.
Because we're on a beach, it's open air,
and you can easily socially distance.
And you've got dog walkers,
you've got people, surfers getting out to sea,
you've got a trade here,
but at the moment, we need them to come.
What happens if they don't?
If they don't, I don't know what...
The future of our business is very uncertain.
It's a real hard time to be a young, small business.
I kind of feel vulnerable as hell.
I can prep all the food I want,
I can make the food I can,
but at the end of the day, if no-one buys it,
there's no wage for anyone.
The weather is another factor.
And that makes a massive difference to our income, and it really does.
If it was sunny right now, I reckon you'd have 20 people
down there having breakfast, but it's raining,
so we've got, like, five, maybe three.
The frame's not holding very well here.
Doesn't go up fully, does it?
All of the catches here have rusted over the winter, so no longer...
Curses!
They're no longer holding the...
The winter does take its toll on a lot of our equipment.
The short British summer is everything here.
The Taco Boys now had about eight weeks to sell enough tacos
to pay off their debts, earn enough to survive
and save enough to get them through the winter,
all on the equivalent of roughly minimum wage.
What are the Scales of Justice, Felix?
Scales of Justice
is how we know we're taking home a wage, pretty much.
So, what we do is, each day, Robbie or myself will cash up.
We'll plot on the graph where we fell,
and we need our average to be £1,500 a day,
for the whole season, to break even, basically.
Break even? Yeah, yeah.
To make back what we've lost from coronavirus
and get in the green for September, going in to the winter,
cos we can't go into winter with a debt.
If we go into winter with a debt, we won't survive,
because we still have to pay our rent through the winter.
So that's the figure that we have to hit every day.
Sums it up, yeah.
The whole community relies on tourism to make money.
That's also the hard thing - we're coming out of a winter
that's been prolonged.
That winter is now four months longer than it needed to be.
In my head, I'm going,
"I've only got two months of income and then I've got another winter."
What do you want to do, then, boys?
We should probably go for it, given we've publicised it.
I mean, go for it. I think there's a lot... Go for what?
Tonight. Stay here. Yeah.
It is brighter through there. How are you feeling?
I'm feeling good.
20-somethings often take flak, usually unfairly,
for their work ethic.
The Taco Boys had total commitment.
They needed it because they'd worked out they had to earn £90,000
during the eight-week summer just to survive the year.
NEWSREADER: Boris Johnson has urged the public to enjoy summer
safely as the coronavirus lockdown is eased
for England's hospitality sector.
Summer 2020 brought into sharp focus just how reliant Cornwall has become
on the short holiday season and tourism jobs,
especially for youngsters like the Taco Boys.
Pubs and restaurants are among the businesses that will reopen
for the first time in several months.
Tourism is crucial here because so many of Cornwall's other
traditional industries have declined or withered away.
I travelled down the coast to Padstow.
This used to be a quaint fishing village.
Now it's an iconic holiday destination
bristling with lovely restaurants.
The lockdown had lifted and tourists were returning.
There's a lot of people here now, eh? There is a lot of people.
From when there was nobody... Yeah.
..I think 4th of July, they just turned on the tap.
You know, it's good. Certainly a lot of SUVs in the car park.
Oh, yeah. Flipping heck. You get some money coming down here.
An annual migration of Range Rovers. Exactly.
But people have got to live.
Yeah, I think... People have got to earn.
You know, it seems like it's a trade-off in lives, isn't it?
If we don't open everything up,
every single business round this harbour will go bankrupt.
Yeah.
We're heading out with Johnny and his dad Maurice.
Johnny Murt's family have been fishing for crabs and lobsters
from Padstow for four generations.
There used to be dozens of boats working out of this port,
but now Johnny's one of the few who still ply the trade.
This is just about my perfect day for heading out on the water.
Flat as a pancake. Smooth as...?
Smooth as oil. Smooth as oil!
Not bad when it's like this. You don't notice the difference, do you?
Well, if it's rough, I certainly do, yeah.
Do you? Where? Just in terms of how hard the work is.
On days like this, it's quite easy work, so, yeah.
Well, I'm delighted to hear it.
On days when you can barely stand up, it gets more difficult.
Fishing used to be a much bigger employer in Cornwall.
Over recent decades, hundreds of boats have gone out of business.
It's partly because we've got too good at fishing, targeting them
with sonar and satellite mapping.
Too many fishermen chase too few fish.
Stocks of some fish have declined.
But there we go, there's some lobsters.
Yeah, but look how small they are.
For a lobster, you're looking for a 90mm carapace. Right.
So, you use your measure in the eye socket,
and you can see that one's very, very small.
See, all of these lobsters here... Are too small? ..all small.
Slow up a bit, Dad!
So, look, this one here... Yeah.
..is just too small.
Right? That goes back in?
I'll give you that. You can measure some now. OK.
And when you say you're looking for that,
because you're required to by law or cos that's what consumers want?
Yeah. For your permit.
So you've got to go to the back of the eye socket.
There. Right.
And then on the shell, look, it's just size.
That's just the right size. Yep.
That's about as small as we'd be allowed to take.
If you put that one in there for us. Yep.
There's support for conservation rules, partly because
if lobster stocks dwindle, that means less jobs for fishermen.
Fishing jobs have also declined due to mechanisation and new techniques.
My grandad worked 250 pots
and there were two men employed on his boat.
It was a bit bigger than this one.
This one employs one person
and I work 500 pots. Right.
So, by having our sterns cut out and our winches are better
and our technology in the wheelhouse is better,
so technological creep has made us have advantages
over my grandad's generation.
But reduced down the employment.
But, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So, you know, whereas before,
250 pots could provide a wage for two men,
it just wouldn't work around here now.
Yeah, on!
Operating further offshore and out on the ocean
are giant factory fishing boats,
often paying lower wages to foreign crews.
They can stay at sea for months,
catching hundreds of tonnes of fish
and shellfish all year round.
We're 25 foot, so we're 7.8 metres.
You know, there's only so much weather we can work,
so that in itself is a, you know, a built-in conservation mechanism,
isn't it, that we can't we can't go out in very bad weather?
But as you jump up the size classes, they can.
So, if you're a super trawler size fishing boat or something,
you can basically stay at sea all year round, all conditions.
And they do.
There's only around 800 working fishermen left in Cornwall -
not much in a county of more than half a million people -
but fishing is still critically important to Cornwall.
Those are vital year-round jobs in small communities,
and culturally, fishing is at the heart of pretty Cornish villages,
even if, in some areas,
pleasure boats outnumber fishing boats 150 to one.
This ship takes another cargo out of Cornwall,
what used to be known as "white gold."
I'm leaving the coast for a bit and heading up into what some call
the Cornish Alps.
They're actually towering slag heaps left over from generations,
centuries of open-cast mining in the area,
but still pretty dramatic.
I was high in the hills behind St Austell, heading into an area
of mining that used to dominate the economy of the region.
Mining has such a heritage here.
People have been mining Cornwall for thousands of years.
There's an area of land near here that, in the 1800s,
was producing so much copper
it was known as the richest square mile in the Old World.
It's quite the legacy, eh?
It's not all historic.
There are still holes being dug.
So, you ready to see Littlejohns Pit?
Littlejohns Pit, OK.
Ben Thompson is the site manager here.
SIMON GASPS
Bloody hell!
This is the biggest china clay mine in the world.
170 metres deep. It's the width, as well.
It is utterly enormous.
I had no idea!
As time has grown on, we've taken in certain different pits,
so, Littlejohns, Karslake, Greensplat,
are all names of villages that were once in mid-air over there,
but we've now taken as the mine has grown.
You've consumed them. Correct.
So, I grew up in Little Treviscoe,
which you can just see the row of houses over there.
It was on the back of one of the mines in the middle
of clay country. That's a staggering connection and heritage.
I'd say a lot of...
The majority of people that work here have got some sort of
family heritage or relationship,
who has worked in this industry at some point.
What are you taking out of here?
So, from here, we're taking out china clay,
the second most valuable mineral produced in the UK
after that of North Sea oil.
Wow!
China clay was originally used to make fine porcelain in China.
Nowadays, it's found in dozens more products from paints
and cosmetics to paper and plastics.
The team were pumping high explosives for a blast,
under the eye of mining engineer Alex Leigh-Pearson.
So, who has decided this is where you're going to blow up, basically?
I essentially create a design around the blocks of ore
that we have in the ground,
and we attempt to liberate as much clay as possible
whilst making sure that everything is nice and safe.
How much rock and mass are you blowing up this afternoon?
This blast, this one is 23,000 tonnes, and that's...
23,000?! 23,000.
Yeah. And that's...
It's just over average for us,
but we sometimes go down to about 8,000 and up to about 60,000.
They're quite rare, but the 60,000 tonne blasts, they're quite fun.
They're big blasts.
That's colossal.
23,000 tonnes is more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
Five, four...
LOUD EXPLOSION
And the Earth moved.
Incredible!
And that's a good blast.
We just want to see it just wave and drop.
That's all we want to see. That's excellent.
THEY LAUGH
What on earth is going on?
What are you doing? Just washing the clay.
You're washing the clay? Yep.
It liberates the clay out of the granite.
This pushes out around 250 litres a second.
It's blasting the rocks up in the air.
They're going to be up to a tonne in weight,
and it will push those very, very easily.
That's a hell of a tool you've got there.
We employ maybe 750 people in Cornwall directly.
The more material we can make here, the better.
There's a little bit of "a man who loves his job," isn't there?
You do. I really do. I love this.
My parents worked in the industry.
My grandfather worked in the industry.
My grandfather worked with some of the guys that work here now.
So, quite often I'll be driving around saying,
"Hello, how are you doing?"
They'll go, "Yes, boss. By the way, how's your grandad?"
SIMON LAUGHS
There used to be thousands and thousands of people employed
in the Cornish clay mines.
Now it's really just in the hundreds.
This is one of the only remaining major industrial employers
left in the county. It's one of the few that are left.
As recently as the 1980s, huge numbers of people in Cornwall
mined clay, tin and copper.
It would be wrong to overromanticise hard manual labour,
but just like South Wales and parts of Northern England,
mining was at the heart of working-class communities here.
It was partly foreign competition that hammered the industry.
Many think government should have intervened to save jobs.
Others say the industry was unviable.
I don't think of Cornwall as being a post-industrial
part of the country, but it is.
We have lost more of our industry in the UK
than almost any other major economy in the world.
And, of course, we were told in this country that
that would be replaced by the knowledge economy
and a brighter, cleaner future with higher-paid work,
but for a lot of people,
the end of that staple work in manufacturing industry
and in heavy industry resulted in long-term unemployment,
and for an area like Cornwall, long-term decline.
Camborne is one of Cornwall's biggest towns,
just a few miles inland from some of the poshest tourist spots
along the north coast.
It has some of the most deprived areas in the entire country.
This feels like another Cornwall.
And much of Camborne was built on mining,
with the money from mining.
There was a lot of wealth here.
There are some very grand buildings,
but the last mine closed more than 20 years ago,
and there's also lots of signs of decay and deprivation.
I served my apprenticeship there.
The apprentice supervisor's office
is still there in the window opposite.
I remember sitting there.
Don Gardner is Camborne, born and bred.
He used to work as a specialist electrician for the biggest employer
in town.
Don, can you tell us a bit about Holman's here?
Holman's built a factory around mining equipment.
It got worldwide recognition for air compressors, rock drills,
all types of air equipment.
How many people were employed in total? About 3,200.
So this was a massive employer in the town, then? Massive, yep.
And the best payers.
You imagine 3,000 families living off one company.
I joined Holman's at 16
and I was there 24 years.
And all those jobs have now...?
Gone.
It was heartbreaking.
When Holman's died, a lot of the town died with it,
and that's how we got into the state that we're in now,
because the wages are gone.
Whether industrial decline was inevitable or avoidable,
the end result hasn't always been an abundance
of alternative well-paid jobs in places like Camborne.
That used to be a factory that made surgical stockings. 120 people.
The cash-and-carry now, used to be what?
Rank, Bush and Murphy.
They built televisions.
And this was pottery, you said? Pottery, yep.
And now, irony of ironies,
we've got here the world's first Cornish pasty drive-thru.
After he retired, Don and his wife Jen decided to help out
their struggling community, setting up shop on an industrial estate.
Don, this isn't a small, little site, is it?
No.
This is our warehouse.
Don and Jen founded Cornwall's first independent food bank.
It's now one of the biggest in the country.
This will provide a family of two with a breakfast for six days,
a lunch for six days and an evening meal for six days.
How many families are you feeding from here, Don?
Somewhere in the region of between 400 and 500 families a month.
I get dads that can't eat for three days to feed his children.
We have families who come in and say, "Can we have food
"that we don't need to cook?" Because...?
They haven't got enough money to put in their meter.
And we're standing here,
and if you went up on the roof, you could see a beach,
but there's children in this town that's never been there.
No! Yep.
When Don and Jen started the food bank 12 years ago,
they were serving 72 meals a month.
Now it's a staggering 14,000.
Hundreds of families depend on the food bank.
It's the scale of what you're doing here that I find particularly...
I was going to say overwhelming, but it's quite humbling, as well.
I can't do it without people giving me this.
I can't do it without 74 volunteers.
Forgive me for doing this, Don,
but you're talking to us now,
and your beloved wife, Jen,
has just passed away.
Her funeral is tomorrow.
Tomorrow, yeah. Yeah.
And you still wanted to talk to us.
She would want me to talk to you, cos she was part of this.
I know Jen would want me to tell people
of the hurt, the deprivation,
the constant worry of,
"Where am I going to get next week's money from?"
It's a lot of weight on those shoulders.
I wake up every morning, and I say in my prayers in the morning,
"Please, Lord, help me to make a difference to somebody today."
And that's it. That's what I do.
Then I want to carry on, in Jen's memory.
I'm going to follow...
..carefully.
DON LAUGHS
Perhaps Cornwall's reputation as a sunny holiday haven
might be a dangerous mask,
making it too easy to overlook the fact areas of Cornwall
are actually among not only the poorest in Britain,
but the whole of Northern Europe.
For a long time,
there was some graffiti up around here
that's since been removed,
but I do think it was very pertinent and appropriate.
And it said something like,
"Cornish lads are fishermen and Cornish lads are miners, too,
"but when the fish and tin are gone, what are the Cornish boys to do?"
For me, Don's a total hero.
He and his team of brilliant volunteers deliver food
all over the Camborne area.
During the pandemic, demand began soaring as the hospitality
and tourism industries were hit hard.
Your food bank delivery, Guy.
That's extraordinarily kind of you. Thank you so much indeed.
You're not the typical-looking person that one imagines
is a client of a food bank. No.
My recent background is hospitality, running hotels.
Running? Running hotels as a hotel manager.
Is this a little extra help or is it a critical lifeline?
Critical lifeline.
Yes, I want to work. Of course I do.
It's just all gone a bit pear-shaped at the moment.
How many jobs have you gone for in the last few months?
In the last six months, probably in total, 250.
Speaking from personal experience
of being unemployed for just over a year,
I found it hard to step outside the door. Mm-hm.
I've become a bit of a recluse in the last few days,
or the last few weeks.
You know, even having a shave's an effort.
Thank you, Guy. Good luck to you, all right? Pleasure. Thank you.
What do you think the future holds?
We're trying to gear up because we know people are going to be
in a long-term winter struggle,
and if we get a real bad winter,
how are they going to afford their electric, gas, heating?
And, to be honest, we can't do any more.
You know, we haven't got a bottomless financial pit.
We need to buy food for people.
I've done what we can.
Wages here are low, up to £4 an hour lower than the national average,
while poverty and unemployment in Camborne is just too high,
and it's often the young who are being particularly hard-hit.
I went to visit the nearby Pengegon estate,
which has had a tough time in recent years.
I really love an allotment. I do!
I don't have one.
But I love how they are these concentrated, intense bursts
of colour and life...
DOG BARKS
..and activity!
Hello! It's OK!
So, yes, this is an area with a lot of problems and deprivation,
but of course, as in most areas of Britain, there are people working
to make a big difference.
And one of those groups is over here.
WILD Young Parents is a group helping young mums and dads
on the edge of the estate,
giving them a chance to get out and meet others.
With mentoring and activities,
the group helps raise their confidence and aspirations
for life and work.
I feel like, "Knock-knock, can we come in?"
Here's the door. Here's the door.
You're putting it together? Yeah.
Are you a fast worker?
If I'm getting paid!
Doing a house up at the moment... No, not today.
Let's get on with doing the shed.
I'm a full-time dad to one of my children.
People struggle with their mental health a lot of the time,
and I think coming to something like this, it gives you a chance
to get involved in something and just talk with people
that are going through similar things.
We're cutting these planks of wood up,
two metres, 270,
to fit the side of the shed.
Two metres, 270. Yeah.
What's the aim here, Tom? What are you doing?
I mean, in terms of building a shed.
It's for when the young parents come down here and do allotment work,
they can go in and have one-to-one time with their mentors.
Wow, the piece of wood fits perfectly!
Yep.
Where are you in your life now?
Are you feeling relatively happy?
Compared to three years ago, I'm in a lot better place than I was.
I suffered depression, anxiety,
post-traumatic stress disorder.
I was a drug addict.
And it's just brilliant to talk to people about what's happened
in our lifetimes.
Is it almost something you need at this stage?
You need that confidence boost, that achievement?
Yeah, this is definitely satisfying, watching this go up.
It looks pretty good, doesn't it? Considering it's from scratch!
It's a shed, and you've put it up in a day, and that's your bit.
I feel like I deserve a little plaque!
I think you could get a sharpie and at least write on the inside.
What do your children need to do or study or aim for to make sure
they've got careers and jobs and work and a roof in the future?
Well, I always got told when I was in college and stuff,
if I want to get a job, go to Plymouth,
or just carry on travelling until I find something decent,
because there is just nothing in Cornwall.
Everyone that I went to school with,
I think most people are, like, up country now.
Most people have moved away.
I don't really know. All mine are in prison.
Seriously?
Yeah, honestly.
Yeah, cos they couldn't get jobs,
they just went out and done crime and stuff.
Yeah, just ended up in prison.
I've never seen, like, something long-term down here.
I think I've had...
I'm 22 and I've had, like,
six, seven jobs.
Different industries are becoming more automated,
so you need less workers in factories,
fishing, construction. Even farm work now. Farm work.
So, unless you can carve out a niche, your sort of advice
in some ways is leave Cornwall and keep going?
Yeah.
If you actually want to have a career,
that's what's lacking, I think.
There's jobs but not careers.
You genius. That is it, isn't it?
It's the career opportunities that are difficult.
There are jobs but there aren't careers. Yeah.
Good luck with everything. Bye.
Cheers, guys.
For a lot of young people in this county,
there are not proper long-term careers.
There is just short-term and seasonal work
that isn't always entirely fulfilling, and it doesn't always
give people that sense of identity and permanence and longevity.
I think, as a county, but also as a country,
we are not brilliant at harnessing the talents and abilities
of all our young people.
I think that's a bit of a let-down for them
and I do think it's a bit of a tragedy for us as a country.
NEWS REPORT: After weeks of isolation,
people are out again in large numbers in some places.
By mid-July, Cornwall's tourists had definitely arrived en masse.
Millions of lockdown-weary Brits had been released after months
stuck inside, and it sometimes felt like most of them headed straight
for Cornwall.
NEWS REPORT: Roads are expected to become busier this week
due to the restrictions being eased further and continuing reduced
capacity on public transport because of physical distancing.
The population of some areas of the county had almost doubled.
Brilliant stuff. Thank you.
Now, this was more like the Cornwall I was used to.
Thank you.
Not everyone was completely blessed by the holiday spirit...
CAR HORN BEEPS
Brilliant, thank you.
BEEP will you?!
Eh?
You need to move! Look! Move!
Welcome to Cornwall.
Cornwall's beaches were packed,
and anyone selling ice cream, hot dogs or tacos
was rushed off their feet.
Matt!
Next to Polzeath Beach, the boys were working flat out
in a race to make up their early season losses.
This is like August bank holiday busy-ness, but 24/7 right now.
Hi, guys. Good, thanks. What can I get for you?
Like, it is... It's mad. Such a short season, as well.
We're halfway through it now,
and just as you think stuff's going well, it's not.
We haven't hit the sweet spot yet.
The Taco Boys had just a few short weeks left to work off their debts
and earn enough to support themselves through the long winter.
Like a lot of seasonal workers in Cornwall, they can't afford
to live in the tourist resorts,
so they camp nearby.
The view could be worse.
It's your campsite. It's Camp Taco, yeah.
So, who's where?
So, myself and Izzy, girlfriend, live in Connie the Convoy, LDV.
Connie the Convoy?! Yep.
Blaise lives in Cochang the Caravan,
because of the number plate that says Cochang on it. Don't know why!
THEY LAUGH
Abbie is Heck and Ellie's little pad.
And then Jev lives in Maddie the Caddie.
So... Look at that! ..this is everything.
You haven't tidied it up, which is good. Oh, there's the guitar!
Yeah, I've got lights and a bed,
and that's about all I need.
Hello, how are you doing? I'm good, thanks. Simon.
Is it inconvenient, inappropriate?
This is Izzy.
Has it been the two of you in the van together
during this whole period of...?
It's madness, isn't it? How the hell have you managed with that?
I'm surprised we haven't killed each other, to be honest!
I think there's a lot of people
who are surprised you haven't killed each other. Yeah!
This is just the pad to crash in at night,
and then first thing in the morning,
leave it till the next night, I guess, really.
But she's not a bad...
We're very lucky to have her, so I'm very grateful for my home.
Is it choice? Er, no.
Or if you could, would you like to have affordable accommodation?
Yeah, in an ideal world, it'd be nice to be able to have that choice.
A flat? Yeah, a flat.
A flat, yeah. I've pretty much written it off.
I'm like, "Pffff..."
What, you'll never be able to afford it?
Well, realistically, to buy a house, especially on the kind of money
we make and how unpredictable it is,
who the hell is going to loan us money?
The seasonality of, especially our industry round here,
obviously it relies on tourism.
Which is what, six months on?
It's not even six months, actually, like...
Start of the season's Easter, so whenever that falls,
and then you just notice a big drop in September.
So, a big problem with Cornwall
is that there isn't a 12-month-of-the-year economy?
That is really true,
and really true in, like, so close to home.
Like, one of us really struggles in the winter...
You know, there's very little money about,
there's very little work about,
and we end up bailing each other out in the winter.
That's what happens, like...
But not everyone has a community around them, do they?
Yeah, like, people are skint in winter.
Everyone's saving their pennies
and everyone's, you know,
watching where they are and all that kind of stuff.
Affordable housing is such a challenge
for most youngsters in the UK.
We've all heard stories of crazy money being paid for tiny rooms
in our big cities,
but even in Cornwall, anyone wanting to get their foot on the housing
ladder faces huge barriers.
I headed towards the far south-west tip of Cornwall and some
of its most spectacular coastline.
I don't think I've ever been in this part of Cornwall before.
It's home to some of Britain's most picturesque fishing villages.
Visitors, tourists and second-homers do bring in huge amounts of money
to the local economy,
but in some villages, up to half the houses are second homes.
It's pushed prices up to levels you only see in London
and other big cities,
in a county where wages are way below the national average,
so they're completely unaffordable for local youngsters.
To discuss some of the problems facing people in Cornwall,
particularly when it comes to housing,
what better person could I possibly go to see
than a woman who lives in a shed?
I think that's it.
Oh, my goodness.
Catrina Davies has been living here for over a decade.
It wasn't a lifestyle downsizing.
Wow!
She had no choice.
It's very shed-y.
Hi. Hello, Catrina? Yeah.
Thank you for agreeing to meet us at your shed.
You're welcome.
This was my dad's office in the '80s.
It was... This is very old.
It's probably about 100 years old.
It was a derelict building for quite a while,
maybe 20 years or something after that.
Then my life kind of went tits up. I had nowhere to stay,
so I started sleeping on the floor in here.
Thought I'd stay here for a couple of weeks or maybe a month.
But that was kind of ten years ago.
You know, every year, it just gets harder and harder and harder,
so I never managed to leave.
So, instead, I've just made it into my home.
What do you mean it gets harder and harder? To find somewhere to live,
to find enough work to pay for that place to live.
I mean, down here, you know, all the houses,
the house prices are way, way more.
This is the problem. This is a very busy time of year.
The rest of the year it's dead.
Do you think we could go in to your...? I know you've got a back
garden. I have, yeah. Can we go around the back?
Did I remember to tidy up my garden? Oh, no, don't tidy up.
OK, good.
OK, thank you. I'll leave the door open, then.
This is my kitchen.
And you've got a camping stove inside, I can see.
It's very old.
Ten years, maybe. It's fine.
I don't have a fridge.
I don't have space for a fridge.
This is the best option for me.
All the other options are unliveable.
Not that it's always been easy. Like, a bathroom...
You know, I had cold showers for a decade.
I used to just have a shower tray and a hose pipe all year round.
You're hardcore!
Yeah, you have to be hardcore.
Catrina's an author and housing campaigner.
Like many in Cornwall, she's got a particular beef about second homes
often left empty for much of the year.
I mean, housing is such a massive issue...
Yeah. ..and challenge in this...in this country.
I think more than it's been for generations, really.
Yeah.
Population just keeps increasing,
amount of houses generally isn't. What's your personal...?
You're saying something interesting, actually,
cos you're saying what everybody says, which is there's not
enough houses - it's too many people, not enough houses.
And that's actually not the case.
So, it's not a housing crisis.
It's an affordability crisis.
So, particularly somewhere like this,
we've got loads and loads of empty houses,
and we just don't have houses which are affordable for people
to actually live in. So it's...
Houses have become, like, a luxury item.
You can have a toy house
and that's the market for them, is a kind of, like,
niche, luxury market.
But also houses are something that people actually need
as much as they need food.
I suppose a lot of people watching this will think of housing as a home
and a home that's cosy and secure...
That's what we need. ..and comfortable.
But by making houses into assets,
we've kind of lost the whole point of houses,
which is that they're homes.
And the whole point of a home is that it's somewhere that gives you
this sense of security and privacy
and kind of longevity.
And there's a small generation that's made a hell of a lot of money
off the back of housing suddenly becoming much, much,
much more valuable than it was. And then this whole other generation,
and I'm kind of right on the edge of it, which is just forever locked out
of that, or they're going to inherit it.
So you're just baking in this huge inequality that's just going to run
and run and run.
I thought what Catrina was saying was fascinating.
It is the case that many of us in the UK
like to think that we have a similar standard of national wealth
and standard of living to neighbouring countries
like the Netherlands or Germany or France.
But, actually, we're a very unequal country,
and so much of our wealth in the UK is concentrated and focused
in London and the South East,
and that can really skew the national figures.
So, London is so incredibly wealthy,
and at the other end of the spectrum,
by the standards of Northern Europe,
our poorest areas are really desperately poor.
We have a real issue with inequality in this country.
One side-effect of the pandemic has been the number of people who've
switched to working from home, possibly permanently.
That could mean more of Cornwall's second homes
are inhabited all year round,
and that should help to build local communities,
spread some of London's wealth around the county
and reduce inequality.
Cornwall is such a beautiful place to live for remote workers,
but it also needs to offer local careers.
There are ambitious projects to put Cornwall
at the forefront of the sustainable energy industry
and the so-called green economy.
That could provide lots of proper jobs.
And there are plans to restart traditional industry.
I've come to visit South Crofty mine.
That closed more than 20 years ago now,
but there are some very serious attempts under way to get it
up and running again as a fully functioning mine.
Well, I never.
Oh, my goodness.
This is completely staggering.
It's another world.
The town of Camborne is just above us... Yeah.
..and we're already into a completely subterranean existence.
What a place.
There are around 300 miles of old mining tunnels
around this area.
The mine closed partly because global tin prices slumped,
but that's now changed.
Owen Mihalop is the chief operating officer at South Crofty.
The price of tin metal has gone up significantly since the mine closed.
In the '90s,
the dominant use of tin was in tin cans and tin-plate,
whereas nowadays the dominant use of tin is solder,
which we find in all electrical items.
Tin is really the glue that holds
all of our electrical items together.
Which puts Cornwall at the cutting edge of technology in many ways.
It certainly does.
This is what we call a jumbo.
Ha!
It's a drill. Yeah.
Exploratory drilling has restarted in South Crofty.
There's actually a vein here.
It's only about half a metre wide,
but it contains both tin and copper.
A seam of treasure. Yes.
We're in the process of evaluating this to see whether it's worth
mining more of it.
This is a 10ft long steel.
So, we're drilling three metres into the face.
If you want to have a go on it, you're more than welcome.
Of course, I'd love to have a go. Are you serious?
Yep, absolutely. Paul can show you.
Under appropriate supervision,
I started drilling holes for explosives.
Reopening the mine will cost around £100 million,
but then it's thought there could be at least £700 million worth
of tin down here.
The workers here have to prove it's economic to get it out.
Have I broken anything, Paul?
No, you haven't.
Thank goodness!
The team here are convinced there's a fortune to be made from mining
South Crofty, but they also point out that mining in Cornwall,
especially in existing tunnels,
avoids some of the huge environmental and ethical costs
that come from mining in some other countries.
In London, we raise the capital to finance mining operations
all over the world and I think now we should be investing
in our own resources.
Also, we can produce tin here in a responsible manner
that doesn't involve child labour
or sponsoring conflict.
You know, if you go and buy a mobile phone,
you should be aware that rainforest has been destroyed
in order to create the tin metal to go in that phone.
We can produce tin here in a much more sustainable way
than...producing it from places like Indonesia and China,
where the environmental destruction is far greater.
If the mine reopens, it should provide 250 skilled, well-paid jobs
and another 1,000 jobs indirectly.
Great for one of the team, who first came here on work experience.
Naomi's now training as a mining engineer.
Are you Cornish?
Very Cornish, yeah.
Do you want to stay in Cornwall? Ideally, I'd stay in Cornwall,
but realistically, I'd probably go to Australia or Canada.
What would we need to do in Cornwall or Britain
to keep you and your skills here, do you think?
Definitely some investment in some mines to get them going again
and get some more jobs,
and then I would be staying, definitely.
What's going on here? What have you done?
You've put lots of wires in.
In each one of these drill holes,
you've got a detonator,
and that's what is on the end of this wire here.
But if we move out to the decline.
Time for another explosion.
Carefully does it. They don't want to annoy the neighbours.
So, that's the detonation cord?
So, right above our heads at the moment is Tesco's.
So, what's the aim?
Small earthquake below Camborne and Redruth,
will they feel that above us?
They will, but it won't be any sort of vibration that will cause
any damage on the surface.
So, no crockery falling off mantelpieces?
No, none.
All right. OK.
So, literally, all you'll need to do...
I'll say "fire" and you can press the button.
OK, everybody happy? Yeah.
Red is charged. Fire!
LOUD EXPLOSION
RUMBLING CONTINUES
Boom.
Fresh air...
I do think for so long,
Cornwall now has been really focused on tourism,
on hospitality, on that service economy,
a little bit like much of the rest of the country, as well.
And there are, of course, good jobs in that.
But there aren't hundreds or thousands of solid jobs
the way there were when there were things being built and made
and dug up here.
And I do sense that they need a bit more of that back,
perhaps like the rest of the country, as well.
In mines and down tunnels, I felt I was slightly missing out
on the glorious British summer.
There was one thing I simply had to do...
If I'm going to have the full Cornish experience,
I've got to camp.
I headed to the farm of Davina Foster,
who moved to Cornwall from London with her family four years ago.
They raise rare-breed pigs, run a smallholding
and this beautiful little campsite.
Davina. How are you doing?
Pretty good, thank you. How are you?
Not too bad. During this crazy summer...
Is there room at the inn? There is.
This is you guys. No!
Come on now, that is not a five-star view,
that is a totally priceless view.
Yeah, those rocks out there are called the Cow and the Calf.
SIMON LAUGHS
It looks to me like you've got a good number of campers here.
Have you made decent money from the camping season this year?
We have. For us, it's essential, especially this year,
where it's really unpredictable going into the autumn.
For you, this crazy summer has gone OK?
Yes, the first week went well.
Last week went well.
We've had a couple of really windy nights and, you know,
we're on a cliff...
The sun is going down and I've got to get my tent up.
I was going to say, all this chitchat...
I should really, shouldn't I?
There's been a noticeable increase about how quickly everywhere
was fully booked.
Everywhere was fully booked pretty much as soon as it was good to go
to start booking things again.
THEY LAUGH
If you wouldn't mind just sticking those where they're meant to go.
Just there. Right, lovely. So, the green in the green.
Oh, look, and there's one gone here. This is a bit of a fiasco.
Fiasco? Fiasco?! Just the tiniest bit of one.
Why didn't I get one of these inflatable ones? Ta-da!
You see?! That's lovely. Luxury.
O ye of little faith.
There we are. We'll just stand here all night and hold this.
This is idyllic.
This is the Cornish holiday dream,
camping by the sea, lit the fire...
..and no rain.
HEAVY RAIN LASHES
The sounds coming from outside are not ideal.
I was thinking last night,
how Cornwall is basically Britain's California...
Well, you know, it's on the side of the country,
it usually has the best climate and weather
and there's glamour and camping here...
..but this morning you could be forgiven for thinking
this isn't quite San Diego.
I still love Cornwall.
NEWS REPORT: Many people in the UK have decided to stay closer to home
for their summer break.
It's providing welcome support to tourism, which, like so much
of the economy, shut down throughout the spring.
Despite the predictable weather, the tourists kept coming.
Fingers crossed,
they didn't seem to have flooded Cornwall with the virus.
Most tourism businesses here survived the summer,
to the understandable relief of those locals who'd feared the worst.
I was in the camp that was like,
"It's going to be a real quiet summer."
It wasn't a quiet summer, it was the opposite.
It was twice as busy as it's ever been.
It became fun.
We had days down here where we were just crushing out - big queues.
Everyone gets back up from work and their spirits are high.
Evening. Good evening. Hello, sir.
Are we too late for food? A little bit.
When we first met, I mean, to your absolute credit,
you were super-clear about what you needed to do
and where you needed to get to, I suppose, this summer.
Yeah.
How have you got on?
Financially, we've done well, like...
We hit our targets that we were discussing when you were first here.
So, you sold more than £90,000 worth of tacos?
Yeah. I'm so pleased! Cheers.
So, looking forward, what's the plan?
After September, end of October,
especially if you work outside,
there is no income or custom here.
And we wouldn't be able to all stay here and live off what we do.
We can't work for each other while staying here.
This is the last month on the trailer
and last month in this pitch, really.
We're selling the trailer at the end of this month.
You're selling it? Yeah.
It's the natural progression of the business.
That was a stepping stone.
That's how we had to start
cos we didn't have the capital for four walls.
Put together the funds from this year
and we've bought an eight-year leasehold
for a restaurant in Exeter.
Wow. In Exeter!
You're leaving Cornwall?
Yeah, that's the sad bit.
And we're leaving Cornwall because it doesn't exist here.
There's nothing on the market. There's just nothing to buy.
Like, you've got to be mates of mates, friends of friends,
sons of someone, to get the restaurant round here.
So, we had to go into Exeter where there's more opportunity for growth,
more opportunity for all of us to carry on living
and working towards this common purpose.
You really feel that there's no opening for you? No.
And that's why Exeter feels right.
There's a possibility to create a food scene there
and a possibility to tie it into here.
There's nothing saying that you can get your crowd in Exeter
and then be like, "We're doing a popup on the beach."
So we're not going too far,
and as Felix says, we will be coming back.
Felix, Robbie and the rest of the team are fantastic grafters,
but as they'd say, in Cornwall,
there's simply not enough of the vitals for them,
like available and affordable homes and year-round careers.
Cornwall, like the rest of the country,
needs to offer its teenagers and its 20-somethings a proper future.
It's been the story of Cornwall for so long that,
to make a go of life, people have to up and leave this county,
so often, too often,
but that it should be happening now, still,
I think it's a bit of a tragedy
and it is really a tragedy for Cornwall.
Next time...
Yes!
I meet some of Cornwall's iconic wildlife...
Oh, my God, beautiful females, they're absolutely gorgeous.
..and ask what the future holds for one of Britain's favourite counties.
There is a beaver down here... SIMON GASPS
A beaver!
It's summer in Cornwall.
It's gorgeous here. Rugged and breathtaking.
Cornwall is rightly famous for its stunning beaches,
some pretty good surf, and picture-postcard fishing villages.
It's a real vision of Cornish loveliness, isn't it?
On this bit of my journey around this beautiful corner of Britain,
I'm going to meet the people battling to protect our wildlife
and the environment.
There is no way that anything could escape from that.
And farmers trying to make a sustainable living from the land.
There just isn't enough profit.
It would be pennies, not pounds per hour.
In a county with so much variety and natural riches,
I'll meet some of the returning residents...
There's a beaver down here.
No species does as much as this one does.
They're engineers.
They were the first beaver here for probably a thousand years.
I'll be exploring inland, the coastline,
and I'll be out on the sea... in glorious Cornwall!
It would be nigh impossible to tell the story of Cornwall
while ignoring the sea.
Cornwall is almost an island.
80% of the county is surrounded by water.
Here, the Atlantic collides with the coast,
shaping the land and life.
Oh, look at that!
Cornwall isn't just a lovely bit of Britain.
It's a gorgeous corner of planet Earth.
Warmed by the gulf stream,
blessed by the light.
Cornwall has an extraordinary landscape and environment,
and it's home to some of Britain's most spectacular wildlife.
This is a real treat.
I'm heading out to look for a really iconic creature, just off the coast.
I left Newquay Harbour in search of what's actually Britain's largest native carnivore.
My guide was Sue Sayer, a world expert on these Cornish locals.
Oh, my God, they're beautiful females.
They're absolutely stunningly gorgeous!
Can you see?
Yes! Yay!
And you're using your camera there to identify - not just take
pictures, I'm guessing? A bit like our fingerprint,
every seal's got a unique fur pattern,
and that enables us, by eye, to work out
which seal it is that we've seen.
So you can track them for life
and follow them wherever they go around the coast.
It's awesome.
These are grey seals. A big adult can weigh a quarter of a tonne.
More than a third of their global population live around the UK coast.
Sue would be first to admit she's a bit of a grey seal nut.
What drew you to seals?
I'm going to give you a very strange answer.
The stranger, the better! I think it's because I don't have children.
I got to a certain age and I needed to find something to fill
the potential lack-of-children void.
Seals, not only were they persecuted a bit,
and had a bit of a bad press,
but equally, there was very little research about them.
So 1999, I knew nothing about seals.
2000, I did my first survey.
Now we're pretty well-known for our photo-ID work.
When Sue began her pioneering research, we knew much less
about grey seals, but she's since recruited a small army of citizen
scientists around Cornwall and the south-west, who survey
and record sale numbers, creating a vast research archive.
Together, the Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust study, protect
and rescue these magnificent creatures.
I feel slightly ashamed, actually, that I hadn't known
just how important the British colony of grey seals actually is.
I often think of the UK as being... Having been stripped
of its really wild life.
It's still beautiful, frankly,
and humbling to be in the presence of
a deep-sea, really wild creature.
Like so much life in our oceans, grey seals face a precarious future.
Even being disturbed by well-meaning tourists can be a problem.
Sue wants us all to keep a healthy distance.
They're too close, really. She's surrounded, isn't she?
She's got people on both sides.
These animals are coming out of the water so that they can rest,
and also digesting their food that they've eaten.
Of course, if she doesn't get fat enough through feeding
and then resting properly to digest that food,
she won't put on enough weight.
And if she doesn't have enough fat reserves to feed her pup,
her pup won't make it.
So the key thing about disturbance in the summer is that we affect
pregnant females, and we don't see the impact of that
until six months down the line.
What is the biggest threat to seals?
Big storms.
You know, we've had a lot of extreme weather events recently, and...
Yeah, yeah. More extreme weather events. Much more extreme.
Unpredictable weather. Yes.
We get storm surges that wash pups off, away from their mothers.
And once a pup's separated from its mother, that's it.
It's curtains, really.
Groundswells are really bad because what they do
is they destroy fishing gear.
So they pull it off its moorings
and it becomes lost fishing gear,
and that's a big issue for all sorts of creatures. Hm.
This is a seal called Lucky Bunting.
So I went out early one morning and saw her on the beach,
entangled in net, and I knew - my heart sank in to my boots -
we needed to do something or she was going to die.
We have to get to the seal before the seal knows we're there.
Otherwise, the seal will leg it into the sea
and we've got no chance of rescuing it.
And she had an absolutely dreadful wound. I was really shocked
at the wound and I felt her pain.
God, you can see... Yes. You saw a little bit of the wound, then. Yes.
Red raw. And all I could say during the entire rescue was,
"God, this smells." Just smelled so awful. Of rotting flesh?
Yes. Rotting flesh. Yes.
HER rotting flesh. Her rotting flesh, yes. Yes.
It was just dreadful.
So we cut the net off...
..and then she gets a barrier spray to help
reduce the likelihood of infection.
So she was off. She was in no doubt at all that she wanted
to get off back to the sea.
And there was us, you know, jubilant that we'd cut the net off her.
And then this was sent to us by a volunteer.
And this is Bunting here.
And this is a male being very protective of her.
So we think she's possibly about to have her pup,
and he is clearly telling Harry, the diver, to back off.
"This is my girl." Yeah. "I'm looking after her. Go away."
That's really clear body language. Get outta here!
So we know she survived, we know she's thrived.
We know she's done normal stuff.
In fact, she's taught us some new science, and all
because we were able to get the net off her.
If we hadn't got the net off her, she wouldn't have survived.
And this is just netting that has been lost at sea or discarded. Accidentally lost.
Accidentally. They're not deliberately set to fish? No.
Fishing nets cost far too much
to deliberately discard, if they're still operational.
So nobody would right-mindedly discard a net deliberately,
but a lot of nets get ripped up in storm surges.
And with more extreme weather events, we're getting more of that.
Cornwall is on the front line
of many of the environmental challenges facing the UK.
Nationally, our wildlife has been decimated and our seas face
a great struggle against pollution.
Around the world, I've seen how
climate change is already impacting people's lives,
and now it's being felt in the UK.
I travelled on to the lovely fishing port of Looe,
on Cornwall's south coast.
Busy, busy!
Like many of Cornwall's coastal towns, much of Looe has been built
just a few feet above sea level.
Hello, you OK?
Hello, there. Can I have a crab sandwich, please?
Course. White or brown? Brown, please.
Thank you very much.
Sam Chapman serves up local delicacies by the quayside.
Tell us about the sandbags.
So we... These are used, obviously, in the winter months,
trying to prevent the flooding.
When we get the storms and stuff, the water will come
over the river there, and it will come up through the drains,
through the walls. Through the walls? Yeah.
Yeah, so all these walls are lime mortar so it just soaks through.
So they're porous? Yeah. Yeah.
So we flooded five or six times in the winter.
Five or six times?! Yeah.
We've got everything in the sandwich bar six inches off the floor.
You flood that much? It can do, yeah.
It's the benefits of living here,
that's unfortunately what you've got to deal with.
Do you think the floods are happening more or less frequently?
I think they are happening a bit more. There's certainly more water coming up over the banks.
You have to put your wellies on -
it isn't uncommon, but sometimes it will be a waders' job.
Do you have flooding insurance, yourselves, or you don't need it?
No, we can't get it here. You can't get it?
No, we can't get covered for floods.
What, because you've flooded so often?
Just because of where we are, yeah.
Looe is said to be the most frequently flooded town in England.
High tides and storm surges are to blame.
It's not a new phenomenon, but it's believed to be getting
worse, almost certainly because of climate change.
Lots of communities in Cornwall have problems with flooding,
and, of course, we do also across much of the country.
Inland, away from the sea, flooding is often caused by rivers
bursting their banks after torrential rain,
and the fact we've cut down forests
that would normally soak up water like a sponge.
In Cornwall alone, 12,000 homes are at risk of flooding.
Nationally, we spend billions every year on flood defences.
But there might be another, older way, to hold back the water
and improve our environment.
I'm on my way to see a farmer now, who thinks that nature
can offer solutions.
Here we are, Woodland Valley.
Hello, Chris. How are you?
I'm all right, how are you?
There's not much that Chris Jones doesn't know about farming.
His family have been here since 1960.
This isn't a smallholding, is it?
No, it's about 170 acres here. Right.
It's smaller than the average British farm now.
About average for Cornwall, I guess.
Chris farms near the village of Ladock, one of the places
in Cornwall at risk of severe flooding.
Chris, what's your experience of flooding here?
Down in Ladock, the village a mile or so downstream,
they have 17 houses flood.
And November 27th 2012,
we had an incredibly heavy downpour and the river just came up.
The main road was about a foot underwater.
It was just water, water everywhere.
I mean, there was a river coming out of the end of our lane.
And that got me thinking about holding more water here.
And so what was the process that took you to a solution?
We invited somebody up here from the Environment Agency
and he looked at the stream here,
and they had lots of prescriptions for us for things we could do.
What were some of the things they were suggesting?
Oh, we could dig ponds parallel to the stream.
We could have cut lots of trees down and built what they call
woody debris dams in the river.
Basically, it's all time and money and effort. Mm.
And there was no budget to do that.
And then, critically, there was no budget to maintain it either.
So when that was sort of decided that there was no budget,
I said, "Could we get beavers to do it for nothing?"
What, it just popped in to your head?
You went for beavers!
You have beavers on your land. Yep.
This was knocked down just about a week ago.
No! Yep.
Look, it's almost comedy! It's almost a cliche.
Yeah, it's what they do. This is beaver stuff in action.
And this is...
..the lowest of the beaver ponds. Beaver dam!
Beaver dam. That is so brilliant.
Look at what they managed to do!
Yep. They dam across,
and they create a considerable pond behind. Yes.
So this is the next pond up. So they don't just create one dam? No.
No. You end up with what almost you could call water terraces.
You get a series of dams coming down in their territory,
and each pool joins up with the next one, links up with the next one.
This has only been here for a couple of years, hasn't it? Yes.
It already looks like a... Permanent feature, doesn't it?
..semi-permanent, rooted feature to me. Yeah.
Now, before, the water would come through here, maximum of 15 minutes
for a peak to arrive and then leave.
Nowadays, it's over an hour.
The water from here doesn't all end up in one lump down at the river
in Ladock, adding to all the lumps coming from other tributaries
and then causing the flood.
GASPS
No! They haven't created this?! Yes.
That's a lake! Oh, my goodness.
So there was a small pond here.
They've made it probably three or four times deeper
and then doubled the area.
They're engineers. They're engineers. It's incredible.
And it's a home to fish and insects and frogs and toads and newts.
And the whole shooting match is going on in there.
It's a whole new ecosystem.
And you just get this incredibly complex food web,
and it's just getting more complex all the time.
We keep seeing different sorts of dragonflies here,
for example, different birds.
We're on eight new bird records here in three years.
Beavers, they're a part of that ecosystem,
but they are creators of the ecosystem.
They're the start, for you.
If you like, the whole thing
turns into this sort of, almost orchestra of life.
I like that, Chris.
An orchestra of life.
When you balance everything up,
there is no single species does as much as this one does.
There is a beaver down here.
GASPS
Beaver!
Beaver! There's a beaver on the bank!
Look, the beaver's moving. Look, look, look, look!
It's coming to the water. Yep.
"I now have got a nice big piece of bark here,
"can take it somewhere nice and private, where those bloody people can't be watching me!"
SIMON LAUGHS
It's huge!
And he's just feeding.
Oh, look at that.
He's using his little hands to stuff things into his face.
Noshing away. Noshing away.
Beavers have teeth like bolt cutters,
but they're actually vegetarians.
They're native to the UK
but were hunted to extinction hundreds of years ago.
Some farmers oppose their reintroduction,
saying they can impede drainage and make fields too waterlogged
for crops and grazing.
But a major study of wild beavers has confirmed they reduced flooding
and pollution, and boosted fish and wildlife.
Government ministers suggest farmers might be paid to have beavers,
such are the colossal environmental benefits they can bring.
We've got seven or eight beavers at the moment.
Mum and dad, couple of two-year-olds,
and a couple of one-year-olds,
and two or three real young ones.
The thing about them is their eyesight is very, very poor.
The wind is coming this way
so it can't smell us, and if we remain quiet,
it probably won't really notice.
Look at you, you tough old farmer, you bloody love them, don't you?
I do. I really do.
I think they're extraordinary animals.
They can do so much for us.
So this is Bodmin Moor.
It's a really iconic Cornish landscape.
A place of myth and wonder.
Bodmin Moor is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
But what does natural actually mean?
This was once widely forested, but it was cleared hundreds,
and possibly thousands of years ago, often for grazing animals.
Now, where some see open beauty, others see barren land -
stripped, sterilised.
Either way, it's also how we farmed for generations,
and tried to feed the nation.
And when many of us think of Cornwall, we think of the county
in terms of the coast and tourism.
But actually, the biggest industry here, by far, is agriculture.
At its heart, this is a farming county.
Farmers have taken a lot of flack in recent years, unfairly blamed
for helping to ruin our environment,
even as they supposedly rake in the subsidies.
Actually, many farmers are struggling.
The Farming Community Network charity offers help and counselling.
Sue Gilbert covers this, one of their busiest regions.
Is Cornwall a tricky place to earn
a living as a farmer, or a good place?
A Cornishman can farm anywhere in the world.
So if you can farm here, everywhere else is a doddle.
What, cos Cornwall is tricky?
It's hard, and it's knowing your land, which farmers do.
They're as married to the land as what they are their wives.
SIMON CHUCKLES
I think there's at least one opinion poll that's been done that showed
Britons generally think that farmers earn on average about twice as much
as they actually do.
If I said to you, I've got farmers living on less than what the
benefits people were paid...
No, I have got farmers, I can assure you,
they are not on very much money.
But the love of the job keeps them in the work.
COWS MOOING
Will and Jess Jeans met at agricultural college.
They took on a farm to raise cattle 11 years ago,
when they were both just 21.
But at the end of last year, they almost quit farming.
They called in Sue to help.
Afternoon!
Hello! How are you?
Soggy. Soggy?!
Very well, thank you.
Hello, I'm Simon.
I'm Will. I'm Jess.
Edward.
So, what's going on?
A bit of fence repair, clearly.
Yeah. You're hammering it with a giant Thor hammer!
The giant hammer!
Well, do you want to carry on burrowing out a hole?
Flippin' heck! That's it.
And then wiggle, and then lift and drop, and wiggle.
A lift and drop and wiggle, I like that.
SHE CHUCKLES
Jess, how long have you been here?
We came here in 2009, and we farmed through the wettest winters,
the coldest winters, the driest summers, the hottest springs.
I think we've had every extreme.
We've broken every weather record since we've been here.
We've been through some really tough times.
You sort of have to question why you're putting yourself through it.
There's never a day off. You know, we've taken two nights away
from the farm in 11 years. Two nights?
Yeah. In 11 years?
Yeah. Goodness me.
Is this pretty... Is this sort of all right?
That's probably deep enough, yep.
So do you want to put that in the hole? Yeah.
Surely Edward is basically ready now? Yeah.
He could take over a farm somewhere.
Honestly, having someone young and keen spurs you on.
I really hope that the industry will provide for them
because, you know, you sort of live and breathe it.
Will has to work off the farm a few days a week to support, you know, to
buy food and stuff. Because financially, you would struggle?
Yeah, you can't do it. It just isn't enough profit.
I would not like to sit down and do the calculation where I worked out
how much we work for per hour because it would be pennies,
not pounds per hour. But surely you're farmers -
you're getting loads of money in subsidies, aren't you?
THEY LAUGH
When it comes down to it,
the consumer is the one being subsidised.
You know, we're being subsidised... In what way?
To keep food affordable, cheap... er, than it should be.
The fact is, you can't do this for, you know, £3.30 a kilo,
which is, you know, what the deadweight price has been over the last couple of years.
What?! It's not possible.
I think of meat generally as being £15 per kilo to £20 per kilo
by the time it gets to somebody like me buying it.
You're just laughing. What... The deadweight is..?
It's been down... Well, it's been down as low as £3.05.
And it takes us to produce that beef for £3,
it would take us the best part of 30 months of work and care...
And investment. ..and investment to produce that,
and it doesn't really stack up.
A small farm like ours cannot compete on price with large
industrial farming units that can put thousands of cattle through.
But all our beef, effectively, all ends up on the same shelf,
and our cost of production is just wildly different.
Because of, you know, look at where we are and how we produce it.
Our cattle eat grass and other, you know... And aren't in a feedlot.
Exactly. Yeah, that's the difference.
They see daylight. Yeah.
This costs more.
Will and Jess get a fraction of the money in the food chain.
The average farm business income for an English livestock farm
can be as low as £12,500.
Supermarkets are often blamed for driving down prices
paid to farmers, while getting fat on profits.
Some supermarkets happily buy from industrial farms,
which can produce meat cheaply, but with lower welfare
and environmental standards.
But this isn't just about supermarkets and feedlots.
It's about us.
Studies have shown British shoppers pay less for food than most other
Europeans, and that we're much more concerned about price
than about quality, source, or sustainability.
We do seem to have quite a tricky relationship with farmers
and with farming in the UK at the moment, which I do think
is a complete tragedy because farming really matters now,
perhaps as much as ever.
Of course, Covid has brought issues of food security
and self-sufficiency to the fore,
and we have the colossal issue of our global climate crisis.
So how we use and how we manage our land, and how our food is produced,
is of critical importance in this county,
but in the country as a whole.
Travelling across Cornwall, I was learning a lot about the challenges
the county and our country faces, especially
to the natural environment.
But I was also realising that one of the many brilliant things
about Britain is that, at grassroots level, there are so many people
trying to make a difference.
I headed back to the coast, because I'd heard about a group
of volunteers doing incredible work to clean up the sea.
On my travels, it's become increasingly common to find there's
a need for lots of organisations
and some really wonderful people to be taking plastic out of our seas.
Now, normally that's done by people going along beaches
and picking it up. But I'm off to meet a group
who are getting it actually off the seabed.
Morning. Natalia? Hello. Natalia - yes.
Hi, Natalia. Simon. Nice to see you. Nice to meet you.
Can we manage an elbow? Just about!
Natalia Paliakova works in housing with local authorities,
but she's also part of Fathoms Free,
a group of volunteer divers cleaning the sea.
What are you doing today?
One of our divers earlier spotted a fishing net that is sitting
there on the reef and it's trapping animals.
And because they have no way of freeing themselves,
they just slowly die.
And as they decay, it attracts more marine animals
and it's a never-ending cycle.
So what we're trying to do today is we are trying to send four divers
down so they can bring that net out.
It's estimated 640,000 tonnes of lost fishing gear and nets
enter our oceans every single year.
Fishing gear nearly killed the seal I was told about earlier
on my travels in Cornwall, and it's thought to make up
the majority of large plastic pollution in the seas.
So we have arrived at the site,
and Mark has put a buoy in,
so now the divers know where they need to descend.
This was a risky and technical operation, for expert divers only.
But Natalia was happy with me observing from a distance.
I can't get down to their depth...
..without air,
so I'll have to come... Wait back up here
while they do the hard work.
How far down have they gone?
Down to 30 metres. 33, maybe.
What are they taking out of the water there?
They're called ghost nets,
because they...basically they float around in the ocean. They are lost.
Nobody's coming for them, nobody knows where they are.
But once it's out there, it's never going to break down.
It's never going to biodegrade.
It is estimated that they do break up after approximately 600 years.
600 years?!
Estimated!
The reality is we just don't know, do we? No, we don't.
And we are, as a species, putting this into our ocean
by... In extraordinary tonnage around the world every single day.
When they find a net underwater, they are going to attach bags
to them. The bag has a small opening at the bottom and they're just going
to squirt a little bit of air into that bag,
and it's going to start rising up.
There are several reasons how they get lost.
They could snag on the reef, which perhaps is what happened here.
Most of the time, it's not intentional.
The monofilament line of these nets is almost invisible in water,
in order to catch fish.
But when they're lost, drifting in the ocean, they trap and entangle
all sorts of sea life. They're ghost nets and death-traps.
So where is it now?
Those six buoys on the surface over there,
that represents the line of the net. What, all the way over there?
Yeah. It's a long, long net.
That's an incredibly long net, isn't it?
The net the team were working to bring up
stretched over about 200 metres.
But industrial fishing vessels use nets that can be several miles long.
It's believed ghost gear like that kills more than 130,000 seals,
dolphins and whales every year, along with countless millions
of other birds, turtles and fish life.
Wow. Here it comes. Oh, my goodness!
Look how thin that is.
So this is the monofilament that you're talking about.
This is the net.
So you effectively have ropes along the top
and then ropes along the bottom.
So it would be strung across a large area,
with buoys either end, and then weighted down.
And it would just be left there as what you would call a gillnet?
Yeah. So to trap marine life by the gills,
so it would just get... Their gills, their body would get caught in this
and they would suffocate, effectively.
They will die in the net and can be hauled in as a result. Yeah.
You won't break it. You'll cut your fingers.
Incredibly strong, isn't it? Yeah.
We can see that this net has been down for a few months
because of the amount of marine life that is stuck in it.
They are actually, some of them are alive.
That is a big old crab. Mm.
And it's completely wrapped. It has no chance.
There is no way that anything, that that could escape from that,
without your patience and scissors.
But it's moving.
It's alive. We're going to release it.
Some of the sea life could survive down here for a week, for example,
suffering, before it dies.
But if a dolphin or a seal or anything else,
it needs to come to the surface to breathe air...
It goes down and sees something that it thinks is food in one
of these nets, and will literally drown underwater.
I mean, you can catch large dolphins with this.
Once anything is tangled, it's, it's gone.
Oh, happy!
Why is it being left up to you?
It shouldn't be left up to you, in my view.
Perhaps because it's invisible.
To an average person, who isn't a diver, it's invisible.
It's just out of sight and out of mind. Yeah.
The death of millions of sea creatures in discarded plastic nets
is a disaster for the whole ocean ecosystem.
For more than ten years, I've seen marine waste soiling beaches
and seas around the world.
And it was a shock to see the same thing happening so close to home.
The very latest research suggests there's more than 14 million tonnes
of plastic on seabeds.
The work of Fathoms Free is brilliant, but many believe
the scale of plastic pollution now requires
a huge coordinated response.
Natalia, who do we...
Who should we blame for this, and what needs to change?
I don't think we need to blame anybody in particular.
I think that the way we fish needs to change.
We are engaging with the local fishermen where we can.
Ideally, we want fishermen to just let us know they lost a net
in any particular location, so we have a good chance of going
and finding it there before it drifts away.
There's around 800 fishermen still plying their trade in Cornwall,
and they're vital to the year-round economy
of Cornwall's coastal communities.
Nowadays, their catch is exported around the country
and across the world.
Many of them head out in search of crabs and lobsters,
which they pull in almost £2 million worth of every year.
Fishermen from here, and lobsters out at sea, of course, are part
of an enormous global trade, and subject to the whims
of the global market. As we know, over recent decades,
life in our oceans has taken a huge hammering,
and lobster numbers, even off Cornwall, are no different.
Carly? Ah! Hello!
Hi, Carly. Nice to meet you. Dr Carly?
Erm, yeah, some people call me that.
A doctor of lobsters. It's not quite a medical doctor!
Doctor of lobster is still pretty good, isn't it?
Yeah. It's different.
Can we come inside, then? Yes, let's come in and have a look.
Dr Carly Daniels is a marine biologist
at The National Lobster Hatchery in Cornwall,
where they work to preserve and increase lobster numbers,
while supporting local fishermen.
I have got a mask.
Dip your feet in the foot bath, that would be lovely. All right.
And then I'll take you through to where the process starts.
So these females have actually done their business out in the world.
The males and the females mate out at sea, and then will have 5,000
little babies under their tail. Little things here.
So they release loads of larvae into the water, in the hope
that maybe one in 20,000 of them would survive through to adulthood.
That doesn't make their overall species survival rate particularly good, does it?
So every four years, one survives. Yes. But that's why we're here.
What we do is protect them through these early stages,
where in the wild, they'd unfortunately be eaten.
We protect them, give a better chance of survival, and release them
back when they're more naturally able to fend for themselves and survive.
This cone here is actually last night's larvae that hatched.
So you can see how easy it would be for them to be eaten
by a fish that comes past.
Inside these tanks, the tiny lobster larvae will triple in size
in just three weeks. Lobsters never stop growing.
If they can dodge the fishermen, some can live for 100 years
and weigh more than a whopping ten kilos!
So these guys have come out of the cones that you saw through there.
It just looks like a mini lobster! It does. A tiny, tiny, tiny one!
They'll be looking for somewhere to settle on the seabed
and they'll stay here anywhere between about two to three weeks,
up to a couple of months,
before we then release them back into the wild.
Life in our oceans is under more pressure than ever.
According to the United Nations, 90% of all global fish stocks are now
fully fished or overexploited.
Some European lobster stocks have already collapsed completely.
Here in Cornwall, Carly is trying to support and protect lobster numbers
by giving them a helping hand.
So the seas and life in them
face an almost impossible number of threats,
but at least here, in this box,
there's some goodness going back into the sea. Definitely.
Is it something that we need to be doing for other species in the sea?
Yeah, very much so.
I mean, it isn't just done for lobsters.
So in Japan, there's over 80 species, I think,
that are stock-enhanced, as we call it.
So their stocks are enhanced in some form.
It still only contributes, I think, to about 2% of the global fisheries
is stock-enhanced, so it's still a relatively small proportion.
So lobsters aren't the pioneers in this, but it is happening. Yeah.
I'll hand you a tray.
OK, thank you.
I am slightly in love with lobsters now!
I mean, they are fairly, almost unbelievable creatures.
They have copper-based blood.
They have three stomachs.
They can taste with their feet!
And, if needs must, they can spontaneously amputate
their own limbs...and then grow them back!
So here's quite good. Right.
So we've still got exposure here in that you've got open sea. Yep.
But you've got a bit of protection from this reef, so you don't have the crashing waves.
OK. You can see there's a lot of seaweed in here.
In this Cornish rock pool. It's good cover.
In a Cornish rock pool, yes! Perfect!
And then just hold the two trays together,
and then pull the lid off.
Let the other one float. Let the other one caught.
OK. Look at you!
If you give them a helping hand, just a little bit of water,
to flush them out of those cells. Just like this? Yep.
HE CHUCKLES
There they go.
To see it happening here, and life going back into the sea
and into the web of nature is just, it's wonderful.
So, fingers crossed, they can now look after themselves.
So far, Carly and the hatchery team have released half a million
juvenile lobsters back to the sea,
often with the help of volunteers and local fishermen.
It's really important for Cornwall, and a great example
of how sustainable fishing can work.
It can also pave the way for other species to be hatched, bred, and set free.
Sustainability is a massive issue for our oceans.
But I'd already seen that, in Cornwall, what we do about the land is just as important.
There are huge problems for farms and for farming.
The number of people employed on them has dropped dramatically
over recent decades. Salaries are very low
and there's huge environmental problems caused by farming.
But there's a lot of farmers who are trying to grow
and trying to produce meat differently.
And I'm heading to see one of them now.
Hello, Matt. Yeah, nice to meet you, Simon. Nice to see you, too.
Elbows? Yep, cool.
When Matt Chatfield took over the family farm,
it hadn't made a profit in 30 years.
HE RATTLES THE FEED
Come on!
Look at that!
Come on!
If you go behind... Yeah.
..and then I think they'll come.
Come on, then. You've got a choice - you've got us coming towards you,
or you've got food up there. Come on!
I strongly suggest you take the food.
There we go!
Come on!
This is probably the most enjoyable part of the job,
is just seeing sheep go on to live fresh pasture.
Like, it's just unreal.
It is an epically beautiful site.
I know, I am really lucky.
You've got astonishing roots here, haven't you? Yeah.
We've farmed the same farmland for about 400 years.
My grandad, you know, probably the person I love most in the world, and the person I respected the most,
but he farmed in a way that, you know, I now perceive as crazy.
Basically, utilise your land in a sort of chemical-burdened way
to basically produce as much grass as possible.
You don't get any nutrients with it. So they were doing their hardest,
but it was just so difficult to make money from a small farm.
So I thought the only way I can make money and make this work is maybe
try and create a market for high-end produce.
The biggest cost for many of Cornwall's small farmers
are the pesticides, fertilisers and feeds
they've been encouraged to use for decades.
But the price they now get for crops and livestock often doesn't cover the cost of the chemicals.
Matt's more interested in ecology than chemistry.
He's given up supplying supermarkets, and taking a different tack.
All right! Hang on! I'm going for a head stroke.
You've got to wait. Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!
MATT CHUCKLES
What's different about your sheep?
So what's different is they essentially are mutton.
You're going for an older sheep...
Yeah, yeah. ..that gives a different type of meat, that most people
in this country think is an unattractive one. Yeah.
Mutton. Yeah. I wanted to do, like, the best meat I could.
To get the best meat, you need an animal that's walked around a lot in its life.
You then need to put a lot of fat on, right at the end.
And then, because we've got a fat cover, we can then age the meat
and it's really tender because it's been aged,
and there's no tackiness.
What is it that you're doing here that's different to what most
sheep farmers in Cornwall are doing? We call it low-input.
So I'm basically farming this
in a really traditional way that they would be doing,
but what I'm doing is not overgrazing it. Yeah.
So if I get that and I graze it to nothing,
there's no photosynthesis. And what happens then, the little
bit of stalk is like...has nothing to do
so the roots, instead of going down and searching for food, they
use all their energy to actually hold the plant.
And that's essentially how everyone has been farming sheep for a long time.
So what I'll do is, I'll graze it to halfway, move the sheep off,
and then, within a very quick time, it would then just start growing again,
and that's when you really start to regenerate the land.
How can we feed Britain farming the way you're farming?
If we improve how we farm, in this type of farming,
then I think, yeah, we could produce a huge amount more than we are at the moment.
You know, I'm grazing a lot more sheep on this land than I was last year.
Last year, I had about, say, 40 in this flock.
Now I've got 70. I think it's totally viable.
You know, I've spent hardly any money at all
and I'm now making very good money from a small farm. My sheep...
No fertiliser? No fertiliser, no chemicals, no anything.
According to the government, farming accounts for up to 10%
of our emissions of greenhouse gases.
This kind of farming helps offset that.
Without chemicals, it's much better for wildlife.
There's one, there's one. Butterfly! Butterfly!
That is a really good sign.
In the next few years, EU subsidies are going to be replaced.
It's likely that in the future farmers will be encouraged and paid to farm more sustainably.
Matt thinks greener farming
could involve learning from techniques used in the past.
When I took over the family farm, I got this ten acre of woodland.
I just realised it was an ancient coppice.
This was, like, managed woodland.
So what I've now done is, like, can I utilise this woodland
as part of my grazing system?
Average forest cover across Europe is at least 37%.
In Britain, it's a shockingly low 13%.
And in Cornwall, it's even less than that.
There is a new push to plant more trees in the UK, to combat
climate change, but it's generally thought we can't plant trees
in farmers' fields.
Jack, come here!
Matt is one of many who thinks woodland can be used for farming,
and today he's introducing some of his sheep to a whole new way of life.
That's it! That's brilliant, that's brilliant.
That's it. One's going. Two, three... Yes!
CHUCKLING
And look! There are sheep... in a woodland!
They're looking like they want to eat. One's grabbed the fern.
They've start eating.
So I don't think these have been in a woodland probably in their entire lives.
Forest farming.
The conventional view is that
livestock and woodland should not mix.
Yeah. My gut feeling
is that this is actually their most natural environment.
All I've done is used a chainsaw, cleared some trees, to create light
in here, and you've suddenly turned something they didn't really want
to come in to, to something now that they all do.
I now want them to come in, graze it down a bit,
but I want them to, like, basically add their own sheep poo,
to add nutrients, to get the whole carbon cycle working.
When you say the carbon cycle... Yeah. ..you mean the burying
and sequestering of carbon from the atmosphere, in the ground... Yeah.
..which is absolutely critical
if we're to prevent runaway climate change. Absolutely.
So it's new growth that really... You know, if you look at taking
carbon from the air through the soil, it's the new growth that
really does that. When something is new, it's taking a huge amount.
This system here is probably sequestering or putting five times
more carbon into the soil than pasture.
Apart from the electric fence,
that is a pretty ancient, timeless scene.
Under a rather majestic oak tree.
These might look like small projects, and in many ways they are,
but there's a lot of people who think these ideas could be part
of the future for farming in Cornwall and elsewhere.
A lot of Brits have gone vegetarian, but on average, we still eat
more than 75kg of meat, each, per year.
At current consumption, can we really use the same techniques
required for organically grown mutton, to supply a country
of 67 million with Sunday roasts?
Matt sells his sheep to a butcher, and I'm following him there now.
We're headed to the outskirts of the town of Launceston to visit
Philip Warren, one of Cornwall's oldest and most successful butchers.
It doesn't look very picturesque.
I think that's because it's a bit industrial.
Running the biggest local butchers I'd ever seen is Ian Warren.
This is the main workroom. So at the end is where they break all the carcass down,
and then this end is the final trim spec for the restaurants, etc, etc.
How many people do you employ in total? 100.
100 people. That makes you a significant employer, doesn't it?
Yeah, for a town of 7,000 people.
So, yeah, we're a good employer for the town.
Ian supplies a lot of meat direct to restaurants, but most of it is sold
through his local butcher shops.
This is actually Matt's sheep.
And they're good. Too much fat, or are you all right?
Plenty fat enough.
The hanging is the, sort of, we need to hang them for five weeks,
to get that meat tender.
And this is when, you know, the magic happens, really.
We're ageing it for the customers we've got because they're looking
for something different, something a bit better, and they're willing
to support that by paying a fair price.
A fair price. That's also what Cornish farmers need.
Ian makes his living out of selling meat.
He had some surprising views about the way forward.
Ian, what do you see as the future for livestock farming? Quality.
Quality. For British livestock farming, it's got to be quality.
When you've got US and Australia, and they can produce deadweight
cattle for half the price of what we do, why are we trying to compete?
How can they produce a carcass for half the price that we can here?
The cost of producing the feed is so much more efficient.
You know, they've got massive ranges where they can grow and grow and grow.
You can't do that in England.
They cannot change and become volumised and efficient in Cornwall.
The nature of the ground doesn't support that,
so the only way to do it is by going for quality.
Pay a little bit more for a little bit less.
Eat a little bit less meat.
A butcher... Yep. ..suggesting we eat a little bit less meat?!
Yep, but pay a little bit more for it.
I think there's a market out there for quality that is, at the moment,
unsatisfied because all that's going to happen
is less and less of Britons can be farming.
"Pay a little bit more" could be a tough message for people
on low incomes, struggling to put food on the table.
But in Britain, we spend less of our total household
expenditure on food to eat at home
than just about any country, except Singapore and the USA.
Ian the butcher isn't alone in his thinking.
Nationally, we have an obesity crisis caused partly by an avalanche
of cheap, low-quality food.
And meat farming is a big driver of global climate change.
If we want to keep eating meat, many believe it needs to be farmed
and consumed more sustainably, whatever the price.
It's gorgeous.
Ah! Cornish traffic.
A bit of a challenge.
Might reverse back this way.
But this time of year, of course, the population of a community
like this, a village, increases. It explodes, basically, as visitors
flood in. Particularly this summer.
Of course, in the winter, a lot of people who actually live here
will say that a community, a village like this can become ghost-like.
I was coming to the end of my travels here. Cornwall sometimes
feels like two different worlds.
Beautiful villages in one of the poorest counties in Britain.
Expensive second homes for outsiders,
seasonal and low-paid jobs too often for the locals.
It's a real vision of Cornish loveliness, isn't it?
Nobody quite knows what life will be like after the pandemic.
Cornwall's a microcosm of the country. It will need jobs,
better housing, and a sustainable, greener future.
There was one place I had to visit.
And this, of course, is the Eden Project.
It just feels as though giant interstellar bubbles have landed.
Its giant biomes have become one of Britain's
biggest tourist attractions.
It's the brainchild of Sir Tim Smit,
but his ambitions don't stop here.
Eden is a huge experiment to show what ordinary people
getting together can do.
I want to excite young people to think,
"Wow, the green economy could be for me in the future."
Tim thinks that to build a more sustainable future,
we need to think big and manage our land better.
To that end, they run a degree course here in agronomy, the science
of growing plants for food, fibre, fuel and land restoration.
We met a few of the students.
If you were looking at one area alone in terms of the global
definition of our future, in terms of how we're going to combat climate
change - the soil, the health of the soil, what we grow,
how we grow it, is everything.
They are utterly critical to life on Earth.
What does this machine do?
So this device measures the amount of CO2 released from the soil
by soil microbes, bacteria.
What you're talking about, correct me if I'm wrong... Hm.
..you are measuring how our planet breathes, how the ecosystem works,
how we, as the dominant species, survive. Just through this!
Tim is convinced Cornwall can benefit
from the new, green economy,
which the major parties have now committed to.
He wants to ensure Cornwall educates the young for future green jobs.
He also thinks agriculture will be critical in Cornwall's future,
perhaps employing some of his students.
One of the things that Covid has done is made a lot of people think
about localism, and I have a vision that the major towns in our country
will be surrounded by farms that completely change their whole
approach to agriculture, and will start to try and grow things
that, between them, they will grow 365 days a year.
I've been quite taken aback
by the extremes that you see in this county.
I hadn't realised just how appalling the job prospects are for a lot
of young people born and brought up in Cornwall.
How do you change that in Cornwall?
The future of Cornwall requires a boldness of a Cornish vision.
This is a metaphor, in many ways.
It was derelict. It now isn't.
We've got to work together as a county to make sure
that our school system and our education system as a whole
is integrated with building on those opportunities.
So we could rebuild this country.
We could make it a brilliant place to live, for everybody.
The biggest problem is belief that you can. We've got enough
derelict land here to be able to build the most extraordinary
housing stock for our own people here,
and for others who might want to come.
The whole thing needs to be joined up, and it isn't difficult.
I think you could create real wealth within one generation,
but for everybody here.
Perhaps we are ready for some bold, big ideas.
As a nation, we've been pretty divided in recent years.
We don't agree on much.
But the coronavirus pandemic has brought many of the issues facing
us into sharp focus, and opinion polls now show just a tiny
percentage of people want life and the economy to return
to exactly how it was in 2019.
We seem ready for change.
And travelling through Cornwall,
I'd met inspiring and impressive Brits with answers and solutions.
On a farm on Bodmin Moor, I met up with beaver guru Chris Jones
for one final date.
Thank you so much, everyone, for coming.
I think now we need to try and keep this as sort of responsible
and socially distanced as possible.
My father is going to release her, and then hopefully
she will like the new home she's been given.
And we're hoping to be able to release a male
in the next month to six weeks, who'll be able to join her,
so let's head down.
Farmer Merlin Hanbury-Tenison was releasing a beaver onto his land.
Even a single release is a big deal.
To let out even one, there have to be reports, studies,
construction, and some bureaucratic hoops.
There's quite a lot of people here, and there's another TV crew as well, and some journalists. Yeah.
And this is all for the release of one beaver. Yep.
Now, does that suggest that we are, as a nation, so denuded of wildlife
that a single beaver release means a whole crowd turns up?
Yes. This is beginning to turn the tide on the sort of decimation
of Britain's wildlife.
Yeah, please, if everyone heads through.
Because of fears about their potential impact on other people's
land, there are strict rules and regulations
about when and how beavers can be released.
Oh, my goodness!
GASPS
Look at all the wiring, the fencing that's been laid around here
to keep this beaver in.
I think there are a lot of people who hope that there
can be reintroductions of beavers without all of this fencing -
and cost, as well.
Otherwise, we are going to just see our wildlife,
our natural environment, just being diluted
and diminished further and further.
Biodiversity in the UK is in a parlous state.
Ranked on the abundance of its wildlife,
Britain has come a terrible 189th in the world.
Over half our species are in decline, and one in seven
are facing extinction.
The UK is one of the least-natural countries on the planet.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison, the famous explorer, is releasing a beaver
into the Cornish countryside.
Everybody ready?
The beaver has been named Sigourney, obviously.
Come on, Sigourney.
Ooh, that is a size beaver.
That is a size beaver.
That is brilliant.
Look! Yeah, she's cracking.
She's looking in really good condition.
There's a hush over people here.
There's a sort of awed fascination.
That's nice.
That is home.
Grown adults smiling like children here, watching. Look.
You're the first beaver here for probably a thousand years.
Maybe more.
We've been denied wildlife for so long,
we've almost forgotten the sense of awe
that it can inspire on our own island.
It's not unusual or weird that they return, it's...
..it's a rebalancing.
We lost something, but we can get it back.