The pandemic did not merely change this demographic, it inspired in its members an identical quest: they must own property in Cornwall. With infections subsiding, the fixation has only intensified: searches for property in Cornwall, at 5m in a month, have overtaken those for London. The competition is all the more striking given a parallel series of news stories depicting heightened local resistance to the arrival, quite likely in an outsize SUV, of yet more price-inflating and largely absentee second-home owners. Maybe, as with the normalisation of massive SUVs in narrow, already polluted London streets, resistance just comes to feel pointless. But as some Manchester United fans decided last week of their own plutocrat problem, “there’s only so much passive resistance can do”.

Source: The Guardian May 09, 2021 06:22 UTC