This is the story of a fishing town that sent four hundred boats after the pilchard shoals and pulled in the largest catch Cornwall ever recorded — and was then hollowed out by the tourism that replaced it when the shoals stopped coming and the seine nets went into the cellars for good. A St Ives tragedy of vanishing fisheries, an artists' colony turned holiday-let economy, more than one in four houses standing empty as second homes, and a harbour that still smells of salt but no longer of fish.