This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

On the clearest days, St Ives seems like a trick of the eye. All golden beaches and cliffs etched with whitewashed cottages, it feels more like an Italian fishing village than an English coastal town. That incongruity has made the Cornish enclave one of Britian’s most popular summer escapes, but its charms don’t fade as winter sets in. Rather than hibernating, the town exhales. Its cobblestoned streets see less footfall, while its blissfully empty beaches hum with the meditative crashing of Atlantic waves. The drama of the landscape was enough to lure romantic painter JMW Turner here in 1811, and by the 1940s, artists such as abstractionist painter Ben Nicholson and sculptors Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth had made St

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