St Ives Harbour
Boats settling on the sand at low tide, a live webcam on the Cornish harbour of St Ives that drew the artists.
About this view
A live webcam over the harbour at St Ives, on the north coast of Cornwall. The tide is the show: the harbour dries out completely twice a day, so the boats moored on the water in the morning are sitting upright on wet sand a few hours later, and floating again by evening.
This was a pilchard port before it was anything else, the town once put out fleets after the shoals, and the fishing boats still work from Smeaton's Pier. Painters followed the light here from the 1880s, and the St Ives school that grew from it eventually earned the town its own Tate gallery, opened in 1993.
Low water is the striking picture, high water the prettier one (UTC+0, +1 in summer). Watch the gulls: St Ives birds are notorious for taking a pasty straight out of a visitor's hand.
