This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
The most westerly portion of Cornwall’s coast path is a landscape of vertiginous cliffs and rocky coves punctuated by relics of the county’s long-extinct mining industry — from lonely granite engine houses to expansive rubble wastelands.
I was here to escape from London during the horrors of the City bonus season. And, as I hacked through gorse trying to ignore my gripy knees, I wondered what the industry must have been like in its heyday — the crowds of diminutive Celts being waved off by their pasty-baking wives and the stench of soot and rotten eggs.
Well, very soon this may no longer be a world of the imagination. There is an increasingly plausible future where the crash of Atlantic waves and the squawk of seagulls is accompanied once again by the rumble of mechanical winches and the occasional crack of dynamite.
Almost three decades after the closure of the last Cornish tin mine — South Crofty near Camborne — there are now at least half a dozen projects across the duchy aimed at restarting this ancient industry.
One of these, Cornish Metals, recently floated on the junior stock exchange AIM with the three-letter ticker “TIN”.
Earlier ventures of this type had the doomed air of Du Maurier romances, but now the economics are more favourable. After a long period as the ugly sister of the commodity markets, tin is again fashionable as an essential component of the “energy transition”.
Its conductive properties are prized in batteries and electronics. And what’s getting folks even more excited is that Cornwall may harbour some of Europe’s largest deposits of lithium, the mineral which dominates modern battery technology.
Now, I know the Middle East war has pulled our attention away from over-the-horizon “green” revolutions back to the grim present day necessity of hydrocarbons. But, in our uncertain environment, we should not be making a choice between digging for battery power in Cornwall and drilling for oil power in North Sea. We absolutely need to have both.
Restarting the mines has the potential to propel Cornwall into the 21st century
So, I salute all these latter-day Poldarks hoping to strike it lucky. Not only are they serving our national interest, they may restore our oldest industry to the role it deserves and could plug an isolated region back into the mainstream of global commerce.
Go back 3,000 years and Cornwall was a vital stop in a vast trading network. Archaeologists are now proving that our tin was routinely present in the bronze artefacts left behind by the palace civilisations of the Aegean and the Near East. Later, when Julius Caesar pulled ashore in Thanet, it was the plumbum album of the West Country he coveted.
Fast forward to the Victorian Age and Cornish miners went global. It was their engineering expertise which opened up the gold fields of the Witwatersrand, Ballarat and the Klondike. Without those brave sons of Kernow, there would have been no gold standard, and international capitalism would have evolved very differently. The brooding cliffside mansions built by the luckier returning miners are now old people’s homes and insufferable boutique hotels. But they are an enduring legacy of Cornwall’s stamp on the world.
Yet, more recently, the economy of a region which was once so progressive has retreated to an almost palaeolithic level. It seems to me that large numbers of people now eke out a living selling surplus organic vegetables from their smallholdings and making primitive handicrafts such as rough-hewn pottery and painted pebbles.
Restarting the mines has the potential to propel Cornwall into the 21st century — as well as provide much-needed local jobs in the formal economy.
But there are powerful forces of conservatism which, I fear, will pounce at the first sign any of these projects achieving commercial success. Cornwall’s two largest landowners are the Duchy of Cornwall and the National Trust, and people of property are disproportionately retired emmets from upcountry. By and large, they would all rather like Cornwall to remain a faux-antediluvian paradise.
Right now, opposition is muted. It is hard to challenge the principle of investments which align so closely with the government’s official green growth and net zero agendas. And, frankly, we still are talking about pretty tiny pilot projects.
But, if things scale up, it could get edgy. Larger lithium projects in Serbia and Portugal have both caused major political scandals. And it is easy to see how British officialdom’s love of the suffocating “precautionary principle” could stifle success. (More newt tunnels or bat sanctuaries, anyone?)
The hard truth is this. Real economic growth that benefits the many rarely comes with a Farrow & Ball colour chart. The historic reality of the Cornish mines was one of life-shortening hard labour and nerve-jangling danger. I am not saying we must return to those days.
But, in a world that’s getting uglier, we may need to let go of our obsession with the twee and the picturesque.
