Is St Austell Worth Visiting? An Honest Answer

Short answer: As a town to wander, St Austell is ordinary and won't hold you for a day. As a base, it's one of the best in Cornwall: Eden, Heligan, Charlestown, Wheal Martyn and a run of good beaches are all within fifteen minutes.

The honest distinction

St Austell the town and St Austell the area are different questions, and most disappointment comes from confusing them. The town centre is a working Cornish town — shops, a brewery, the station — not a picture-postcard harbour. Nobody drives to Cornwall to walk around it. But the ten-mile circle around it contains more genuinely great days out than almost anywhere in the county.

What's actually here

• The Eden Project — the biomes, the rainforest canopy walkway, and the county's best wet-weather day, ten minutes from town. A ticket covers a year of visits.
• The Lost Gardens of Heligan — the jungle walk and rope bridge; one of Cornwall's true highlights, fifteen minutes south.
• Charlestown — the Georgian tall-ships harbour that every period drama borrows, two miles from the centre, with Springtide and The Boathouse for seafood.
• Wheal Martyn — the china clay museum, which explains the strange white landscape you drove past.
• The beaches — Porthpean for safe swimming and rock pools, Pentewan, Polkerris with Sam's on the Beach, Carlyon Bay.
• Hangloose — the UK's fastest zip wire, over the biomes, for the teenagers.

The verdict

Worth visiting? As a base, yes — a St Austell stay puts three of Cornwall's biggest attractions within a short drive, with the train line and the A390 making the rest of the county easy. As a destination in itself, no: plan for Charlestown, Eden and Heligan rather than the town centre, and you'll wonder why it has a reputation problem. Our easy-access guide, rainy-day guide and the St Austell guide have the detail.

Rules, hours and programmes are the owners' to change — check the signs on the day or the official page before you travel. Spotted something we've got wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it.