The gateway to the far west of Cornwall, end of the line from London and with views of the bay from practically everywhere, arty and down-to-earth Penzance is full of culture, including a multitude of art galleries, music venues and theatres. In common with a lot of Cornish towns, Penzance went through a low period being rather out of favour, but has been firmly on the up – and up – for several years.

In 2021 Penzance was named one of four Cornish towns to be a recipient for funding from the government’s Town Fund programme and a new Creative Cluster is due to be opened soon. Voted the Muddy Best Place to Live in Cornwall in 2023 – and winning again in 2025 – whether you live in Cornwall or are travelling from further afield, here is our insider guide to Penzance.

EAT

In the town centre itself for lunch, dinner or just a cocktail, try 45 Queen Street just off Chapel Street and just down the road is The Cornish Barn at the Artist Residence. Med vibes Orto is a delicious new opening from Fred who was once behind Newquay’s Little Ears, and Barbican Bistro is down by the ferry port. Try the new version of Bruce Rennie’s The Shore on Alverton Street for fine dining, or something more casual grab a pizza at Pizza Plz or Fraser’s, which pops up frequently in the top 50 fish and chip shops.

Right at the top of Causeway Head is the Roundhouse – a super little café in the old taxi station kiosk, run by Joel – serving up delightful focaccia sandwiches, sweet treats and excellent coffee. The Cornish Hen deli is in Market Place, owned by one of the makers of Penzance’s own gin. The Honey Pot café is rated for coffee, and the Bakehouse Café too, and everyone loves Loafs bakery.

Just down the seafront at Newlyn – above – (where the sobriquet Stoke Newlyn-ton is bandied around) alongside generations of fishing families you’ll find a whole host of hipster delights. Ben Tunnicliffe’s pub, The Tolcarne Inn is a regular in the national list of top 100 gastropubs. At Argoe the fish literally comes straight off the commercial quay and onto the grill. Wine is by Lovetts, a little wine bar with all sorts of delicious food, find it opposite the Mackerel Seafood Bar. Foodie Newlyn is also home to the Newlyn Fermentary, Jelbert’s (the famous clotted cream ice cream) and a rather well stocked cheese shop right opposite a greengrocers.

If pub food is more your thing, just out of town you’ll find the The Victoria Inn at Perranuthnoe, Mexico Inn at Longrock and The Old Coastguard at Mousehole or head the other direction towards The Gurnards Head.

STAY

Two lovely places on Chapel Street are s beautifully placed to access the town and harbour – Muddy Awards finalist Chapel House is at the bottom of the street and a little further up is The Artists Residence.

Chapel House was previously Penzance’s arts club – the granite and brick building was originally built in 1790. Where once artists propped up the bar, ate their fill and made do with one bathroom for all the rooms, owner Susan has lovingly restored the building to its former Georgian glory with modern touches, including whitewashed floors, local artwork include much by artists from the Newlyn School of Art on every wall, nook and cranny, huge baths and TVs in each room.

For self-catering with a view, try the Bell Tower, just off Chapel Street, or plenty of larger options via Aspects Holidays or Cornish Horizons.

The Old Coastguard garden with sea view Mousehole Penzance Cornwall

The Old Coastguard overlooks Mounts Bay in the fishing village of Mousehole, near Penzance. Dog and child-friendly, choose from one of fourteen bedrooms, almost all of which look out over the water towards St Michael’s Mount and the Lizard. Dinner is served in the dining room and bar, a traditional brasserie-style menu with a strong emphasis on fish due to the proximity to Newlyn. The menu changes according to season and catch of the day, and around 25 wines and sherries are available by the glass, priced for locals, not tourists, so you can try something new. Our review is here. Doubles start at £195 year-round.

DRINK

Arcade Wines on Arcade Steps is the new wine shop from Emma and Rohit who are the husband and wife team at Lovetts. Polgoon Vineyard & Orchard is just outside the town, where they produce both wine and their own apple juice.

The Admiral Benbow pub on Chapel Street has a narrow tunnel underneath that was once used by smugglers and the entire place is decked out in items recovered from vessels wrecked on Cornwall’s coast over the past 400 years, earning the pub a CAMRA award for historical significance.

THINGS TO DO

The Jubilee Pool Aquathlon (Sun 15 May) is a fun early evening event for beginners to experienced triathletes

The Jubilee Pool is open from Easter to around November and offers all manner of events and sessions, from cold water swimming events including aquathons to music and more in the café, plus sauna sessions and one-offs like synchro.

Many groups love to swim off Battery Rocks, next to the pool, and locals led by women’s sea swimming collective Mor Swimmy fundraised to install a swimming platform just off the rocks last summer.

Montol is Cornwall’s traditional festival of midwinter on 21 Dec (the Winter Solstice) in Penzance. Dancers in full disguise, called Guisers, parade the streets, accompanied by music from peccadillos, drumming and burning torches. Muddy Awards finalist Golowan Festival takes place to celebrate mid-summer complete with parades, events and fireworks. Penzance May Horns is celebrated on the first Sunday of May, welcoming summer. The “devil of winter” is chased away by making as much noise as possible.

Penzance Food Festival is in September. Penzance Literary Festival is held in July.

Morrab Gardens is home to the Morrab Library, a beautiful independent library holding over 70,000 books. To see inside join, or pay a day rate for visitors of £5.

Both Penzance and Newlyn have working harbours, fascinating places to watch fishing boats, ferries and commercial vessels coming and going, including activity at Penzance’s historic dry dock. The Bay Discovery departs from Penzance on tours, from which you can spot all manner of wildlife, including often dolphins, below.

The Bay Discovery departs from Penzance on tours, from which you can spot all manner of wildlife, including often dolphins

BEACHES

Penzance and Newlyn are right on the sea front, where there is a promenade and stony beach running right the way along past the station. The sandy beach at Marazion reveals the St Michael’s Mount causeway at low tide. Some of the most beautiful sandy beaches are just outside Penzance – head east along the coast to Praa Sands, or further west to Porthcurno.

GARDENS / GREEN SPACE / VIEWS

On the sea front between Penzance and Newlyn you’ll find the Foster-Bolitho gardens as well as the skate park. The subtropical Morrab Gardens are a hidden gem, open daily and free. Head out of town for the bigger gardens of Trengwainton, Godolphin and Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens.

Rising Embers, a community sauna, is at Newlyn Green, near the art gallery – every Friday morning Jenny runs a Stretch, Sauna, Swim session at 9am at Newlyn Art Gallery.

The Iron Age hill fort at Lescudjack Castle / Lescudjack Hill is a great place from which to take in the view.

WALKS

It is a pleasant walk from Penzance down the promenade to Newlyn and then round to Mousehole, passing the fishing harbour, galleries and cafés of Newlyn before arriving in one of Cornwall’s prettiest harbour villages (above).

St Michael's mount causeway from Marazion, arrive after accessible walk from Penzance

Alternatively, start at the station in Penzance and head east along the Coast Path (take the path shared by the cycle path inland of the sea wall, alongside the railway). Soon you’ll have views across Mounts Bay to St Michael’s Mount. The largely flat path will take you past Long Rock beach and then the Bird Reserve at Marazion, which in autumn attracts rare migrants and flocks of swallows, and in spring nesting birds. If the tide is out, the causeway to St Michael’s Mount is exposed. There is also a bus back to Penzance.

Walk part of the Camino to Santiago pilgrimage, right here in Cornwall! The only pilgrimage route in Britain officially part of a European Cultural Route and described as a “coast-to-coast micro-pilgrimage,” St Michael’s Way starts on the north coast at Lelant Church. From here the route crosses to the south coast, ending either at St Michael’s Mount (13 miles) or a shorter, 11 mile, version ends at Marazion marshes. Both routes are waymarked with a scallop shell burnt into sign posts. The path officially opened in 1994, but people have walked this way from coast to coast for hundreds of years. The Friends of St Michaels’s Way have produced a ‘passport’ which you can collect from various places along the way, including St Uny church at Lelant, and Ludgvan, Marazion churches and St Michael’s Mount. You’ll find passport stamps at the same locations – check the list here.

The route passes by five churches, four holy wells (plus one lost), two hill forts and two standing stones, amongst other landmarks – the route marks the way that those heading for the Santiago de Compostela would have taken across the land, having arrived by sea at Lelant. Fun fact: since 2016, walking the St Michael’s Way can be counted as part of the 100km required to receive the Compostela (Pilgrim Certificate) in Santiago.

SHOP

Chapel Street has the loveliest indie shops including The Handworked Shop, comfy pants makers Knickerhood and hat makers Shaded the Label (all at no 61- 62) and Ebb Flow Cornwall (home to a pastel array of beach towels and ponchos) next door, as well as The Apothecary (above), Faded Vintage with yes antiques and vintage, plus Fishboy and shops for kids, indoor plants and more. You’ll find Muddy Award-winning bookshop The Edge of the World on Market Jew Street and we also like Barton Books.

Causeway Head is giving Chapel Street a run for its money (where lovely indies include Zennor Wild with blooms, coffee and gifts, a cheese shop, art gallery, Seven Stones for clothes and more) and . The Exchange Gallery in the town also has a good gift shop and café.

Penzance is also home to some of the lowest petrol prices in the Duchy – handy as there’s none at all to be had in St Ives or the only other one in West Penwith is in Trewellard, above St Just, on the other coast.

TOURIST

Isles of Scilly Travel Muddy Stilettos 2025 Halangy-Point-Scillonian-09

Penzance is where the journey begins to the Isles of Scilly. Isles of Scilly Travel offers two unforgettable ways to cross the water or sky: by Scillonian III, the iconic and much-loved passenger ferry, or by Skybus, the small aircraft linking the islands to Land’s End (as well as Newquay, and Exeter). Each journey offers its own kind of magic. Both modes of transport are dog friendly! Not enough time for that kind of island hopping? If you head to Marazion you can walk over the causeway to St Michael’s Mount.

Take a drive round the West Penwith coastal road down to Mousehole (see the famous Christmas lights in December) and on to Porthcurno, where you’ll find Muddy Award-winning theatre The Minack Theatre as well as the PK Porthcurno museum, offering a fascinating look into Britain’s role in global communications (peer down onto Cornwall’s least kept ‘secret’ beach, Pedn Vounder but the path is now closed due to wear and tear). From there you can head round to Lands’ End, pausing to walk to Nanjizal, and then again at St Just to catch Muddy Award-winning gallery the Jackson Foundation Gallery, and eat Moomaid ice-cream.

KIDS

Although presumably the teens agree with their peers the world over that their town is the most dull place on earth, there is the beach and skate park, and if they like water they will also like the Jubilee Pool, which has an inflatable race installed in the summer holidays. Many of the local galleries, museums and gardens have children’s activities in the school holidays, and I’ve yet to meet a holidaying tween who doesn’t like an arcade or two. The Savoy Penzance cinema is good for films, and there’s the pool at the leisure centre. Penlee Park has a children’s playground. The art school runs teen art sessions.

QUIRKY

Brontë fans might be interested to see Branwell House on Chapel Street, the home to Maria and Elizabeth Branwell (mother and aunt of Charlotte, Emily, Anne) who were from a prominent Cornish family. The house itself is also interesting as it is, rather unusually for the area, constructed of brick, said to be pillaged from a Dutch cargo ship. Further up Chapel Street is another unusual property, Grade I listed The Egyptian House, built in the style of Egyptian Revival architecture. The Landmark Trust have owned it since the 1970s.

The Gardeners’ House is a recently restored community hub in Morrab Gardens, after a journey of almost nine years to bring the derelict building back to life, with a full programme of autumn events.

Newlyn harbour is home to Ordnance Datum Newlyn (ODN) from which the height of everything on Ordnance Survey maps – mountains etc – are measured. You can see it here in this photo at the end of the harbour wall, being watched over by the Newlyn Fisherman Memorial, a 3.2m high statue of bronze and granite to commemorate fishermen lost at sea created by Tom Leaper. Chairman of the Penwith Society of Arts and outspoken supporter of the creative arts, he also created the statue which stands outside the Old Coastguard.

Newlyn Fisherman Memorial sculpture by Cornish artist Tom Leaper — Newlyn Fisherman Memorial by Tom Leaper

CULTURE

Find live music, comedy and theatre at The Acorn and Penlee Park Open Air Theatre, and just at the top of Chapel Street you’ll find Cornwall Contemporary, home to a wide range of both Cornish and visiting artists. Penlee House & Gallery is also worth a visit with both permanent galleries and rotating exhibitions exploring Penzance’s artistic past thanks to artists such as landscape painters Stanhope Forbes and Samuel John “Lamorna” Birch who lived and worked at nearby Lamorna for 60 years.

Arty colony Newlyn has plenty going on: the Newlyn Art Gallery and its sister gallery The Exchange have regular exhibitions. Newlyn School of Art runs courses galore. The Tremenheere Sculpture Garden just outside the town has all sorts of interesting outdoor art works, and of course, it is not far across to St Ives, where you’ll find The Tate, Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture Garden and more art galleries than you can visit in one day.

HOW TO GET THERE

The most glamorous way is to book at a cabin on the sleeper from Paddington. Great Western Railway’s Night Riviera Sleeper departs at 23.45 and arrives at 8am into Penzance (board from 10.30pm and wake as you reach Cornwall). A more budget friendly option is the sleeper without a cabin, or, just the regular old day time train which takes around five hours. The station is just at the edge of town, so it’s a short walk, or a taxi, depending on where you’re headed. Penzance is at the end of the A30 and now the road works have finished, you can whizz down from Bodmin in around 1 hr and Exeter in 2 hrs.

EAT

The Muddy Insider Guide to Penzance

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