a day ago
This cutting-edge Cornish attraction honours a forgotten British heroine
It's hot. It's dusty. We're sitting on the stoop of a South African farmstead wearing veldskoen and looking out over the plains. The coffee we're given tastes bitter, and the rusk is dry.
But we are, in fact, in Cornwall – and it's all part of the experience at the county's newest immersive visitor attraction.
The Story of Emily, tucked away in the quiet, rural village of St Ive (not to be confused with busy seaside St Ives), is rewriting the rulebook in this part of the world, where attractions are increasingly desperate to attract customers in what – post-Covid – is proving to be a tough tourist market.
But here, you won't find pasties, ice cream, or any mention of Poldark.
Instead, tourists who visit the Story of Emily are met by a sophisticated, tech-based, multi-sensory celebration of the life and work of Victorian social campaigner, Emily Hobhouse.
The couple behind the project, Koos Bekker and Karen Roos, have already made waves in hospitality locations all over the world including the Babylonstoren wine estate in their native South Africa and The Newt in Somerset which, as the former Hadspen House, was the ancestral home of a branch of the Hobhouse family.
Now in Cornwall, their signature flair and style has already attracted huge amounts of attention.
'We know we have created something very special,' says General Manager Martin Lovell, 'and our rapidly growing visitor numbers reflect this, as well as the very positive customer feedback which has been incredible to read.'
The Story of Emily is not on the established tourist trail, however, and is miles from the sea, midway between the market towns of Callington and Liskeard.
There are three main elements; the Hobhouse family rectory, its gardens and the War Rooms – a cleverly designed contemporary building clad in scalloped zinc.
Inside the War Rooms, visitors are asked to change their shoes, given remote audio narration (plus, later, virtual reality headsets) and guided through a winding series of rooms.
Precisely timed entry slots mean that the experience is almost completely personal (inside, on the fully booked day we visited, we were briefly aware of only one other couple).
Using quite extraordinary cutting-edge installations, animation, film and original artefacts, visitors are transported in time and space to South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century and the Second Anglo-Boer War.
With a strong social conscience, and already having established the South African Women and Children Distress Fund, Emily first travelled to South Africa in 1900 (visitors sit, like her, in a bumpy train carriage). There she witnessed the appalling conditions of the 'concentration camps' – the first time the expression had been used – in which women were kept with their children.
The War Rooms doesn't shy away from other horrors as it tells the stories of vicious guerilla tactics and the British scorched-earth policy, as well as the massive number of casualties on both sides.
Appalled at what she witnessed, Emily went on to work tirelessly, not only to improve conditions on the ground but, more particularly, back in England as a pacifist campaigner where she was labelled a traitor for petitioning parliament.
In South Africa itself, however, she was, and is, thought of as a heroine; archive documentary footage shows thousands of people lining the route of her funeral.
Back outside, elsewhere in the grounds, the Rectory where she lived with her family has been painstakingly restored to the way it would have looked in 1875, when she was 15.
Audio headsets guide visitors through rooms in which designs from fragments of original wall paper, discovered during renovations, have been recreated and printed, entrance bells ring and the bed linen is starched.
The Kitchen Garden, with its immaculate Victorian glasshouse, heritage vegetables and rare-breed turkeys, leads down to the restaurant. Here, completely unlike just about every other attraction in Cornwall, there's no suggestion of 'local produce', pasties, cream teas or even Cornish fudge.
Instead, a menu of traditional South African recipes (albeit with modern twists) offers boerewors, ouma onder die kombers and roosterkoek, alongside a generous South African wine list.
Such a development costs many millions of pounds: a brave move in a tourism climate which has seen two major Cornish attractions close within the past year.
Dairyland, a farm-themed amusement park near Newquay, closed its doors last November after almost fifty years, having suffered a 'significant financial loss'. Equally, Flambards – a park of thrill and adventure rides which had been operating since 1976 – also closed its doors in 2024.
Despite being the new kid on the block, its sister developments around the globe mean that the Story of Emily has an impressive tourism pedigree. Other Cornish attractions have become intrigued, and even Jon Hyatt, chair of Visit Cornwall, has referred to it as 'refreshing' and 'push[ing] new boundaries'.
Its opening in May last year drew parallels with the excitement of the opening of the Eden Project in 2001. Back then traditionalists, who believed that Cornwall's visitors were content with a sandy beach and a cream tea, doubted that Sir Tim Smit's dream to tell a global story about man's relationship with plants would become reality.
Millions of people have proved them wrong. The landscape of Cornish tourism is changing, and so are its visitors' preconceptions; now perhaps it's the Story of Emily's 21st-century technology, sophistication and humanitarian message that's pointing the way forward.
The essentials
A day ticket for the Story of Emily costs £12/25 child/adult (under fives free). Relaxed B&B Coombeshead Farm, a 25-minute drive from the Story of Emily, has rooms from £180 per night.
The luxurious Pentillie Castle & Estate, a 20-minute drive from the Story of Emily, and has rooms from £2,035 per night.
