Bay View
Bay View
The curved white terrace of Victorian town houses in front of you points to a prosperous and affluent Porthleven at the turn of the twentieth century. The buildings, with their bay windows and gables each featuring the Cornish coat of arms, are Grade 2 listed. Completed in 1905, these residences have stunning views taking in the entire harbour area.
Bay View replaced an earlier row of houses called Buenos Aires Row. This image shows the harbour pre-1893 as the China Clay store has not yet been built. Picture courtesy of Roger Hosking
The houses of Bay View stand on the site of a much earlier development called Buenos Aires Row. There are a number of theories for the earlier name – one of which was that the materials used to build the earlier residences came from a nearby wrecked Argentinian ship, another that a Porthleven captain visited South America and liked the name. Buenos Aires Row was demolished in 1902 to make way for the new dwellings.
The houses of Buenos Aires Row can be seen across the hill in this extraordinarily sharp photograph. The last house being built on Bay View in 1905 Picture courtesy of Roger Hosking
Tracking in Porthleven. The cobbled road along the outer harbour would once have seen teams of men hauling on long ropes to pull boats far enough out of the harbour to catch the wind. Called tracking, this is the reason there are railings only on the beach side of the pier – the harbour side being left free for the men to drag the ropes along.
The end plot was once a temperance tearooms