The eccentric Cornish village home to ‘the best pub in England’

“The hills here are steep. Imagine cycling down them after six pints while dressed as a nun.”

Barman Sam Rogers is regaling me with tales of the “Tour de p--s” from behind the pumps at the Peterville Inn, St Agnes. The annual cycling event takes place in late September to mark the end of the lifeguard season in the Cornish village. Having kept beachgoers safe all summer, the local Baywatch brigade celebrates by doing something comically unsafe: hopping on their bikes in fancy dress and racing around the pubs. They’re well-oiled by the time they get to the Peterville. “We’re the sixth stop,” says Rogers.

It’s local colour like this that I come to pubs for. The good ones are the living rooms of local communities; places where legends are spun, and secrets spill like pints of beer. Only the Peterville Inn is not just a good pub; it’s the best. Or so judges at Visit England reckon, having recently crowned it the country’s finest for 2024.

That’s a bold statement. There are around 30,000 pubs in England, many of them excellent. “There are probably better ones, but who knows?” shrugs regular Robin Rowland, a retired engineer who I join at the bar. “All I know is that the staff here are outstanding [he’s right]; they make me very welcome. And the food’s great.”

I sip my pint of Proper Job and look around. Neat geometric tiling festoons the floor, wood panelling adorns the walls, and there’s a wood burner for when the weather comes in. It feels cosy but contemporary. But I suspect Camra anoraks would be underwhelmed by the ale selection. The Peterville is a “tied pub”, owned – like so many of them are – by Punch Pubs, which dictates what booze it sells. “We have a good relationship with them,” the pub’s manager, Steven Gibbs, is quick to point out.

The Peterville’s food menu, by contrast, dazzles, opening it up to the inevitable charge that you can’t call yourself a boozer if you serve côte de boeuf for £80 (cheaper meals are available). But that’s how pubs survive nowadays, right? The UK has lost a reported 6 per cent of its boozers in the past six years amid spiralling overheads. Diversify or die is the mantra.

“You can’t really survive just as a boozer,” says Lara Trubshaw, who took over the Peterville – then a scuzzy hostel pub – with husband Tom during the first lockdown in 2020. “Everywhere that’s successful is doing other things, whether that’s introducing more music, or going down the restaurant route.”

The pair’s vision was to go gastro. “We wanted to have an emphasis on food, because that’s a big part of Tom’s background [he previously created menus for the bar chain Belushi’s],” says Trubshaw, a former journalist. “We wanted to get families back, groups of girls back – you know, open it up to a wider audience.”

That audience does not, apparently, include seasoned local drinkers, some of whom question whether the Peterville can even be called a pub. “It’s a restaurant,” one local man, who wishes to remain anonymous, gripes, while admitting that the food is great.

Trubshaw shrugs off such criticism, pointing to the quiz nights and open mic nights they put on. “Some of the musicians down here are insane,” Gibbs adds. The Peterville’s positioning as a gastro joint, posits Trubshaw, brings something different to St Agnes, which has four pubs and two bars – not bad for a village of 3,200.

“They all offer something different,” she says. “We use them all. We’re very lucky in this village. St Agnes is buzzy. It’s thriving.” 

It’s hard to disagree as I stomp up the hill. It’s Friday afternoon and the place is pumping. Surfers drive around with boards on their roofs, beach-bound teens crack the tops off beer bottles, and off-the-clock tradesmen spill out of the St Agnes Hotel with the other regulars. Those who can’t find a seat outside “the Aggie” cross the one-way street and perch on the stone wall of the St Agnes Church opposite.

Tom Knight is among those on the benches. He’s a “blow-in” from Worcestershire but made himself at home in St Agnes, where he podcasts about his experience of being diagnosed with and treated for colorectal cancer. His podcast – Tommy Knight’s Bag of S---e – is, he says, a “crass guide to cancer, darkly humorous”.

Knight is sipping wine with friends and family when I perch next to him. “A lot of villages like this are dead in the winter, but not here,” he says, looking more dapper than anyone else in St Agnes with his crisp shirt and jacket. “It’s like this all year. People still live in the village, they go out – we’re spoilt for pubs.”

He likes the Peterville Inn. “The open mic nights have been superb,” he says. “It’s very much part of the community. It wouldn’t be my pub of choice for a pint, though; it’s catering more for diners.” The Aggie – regulars proudly point out – is a “drinker’s pub” (but also, as the name suggests, a hotel).

I leave them to it, walking up the main street, past the butcher’s, the baker, the greengrocer, and the post office – those other familiar, albeit disappearing, markers of a thriving community. The smell of fried fish wafts from the chippy. Over the patter of pub chat I hear someone clipping a hedge and, more surprisingly, German accents.

“You can’t get rid of the bloody Germans,” jokes Anja Lampke, who’s allowed to say that because she is German. I find her in the Cornwall Cafe, a cosy joint with just two tables and hundreds of bone china teacups hanging from the ceiling. Many are commemorative royal editions, some dating back to King George V. All are for sale. The ones with Prince Andrew on are the cheapest.

Like many of her country folk, Lampke was lured to Cornwall by Rosamunde Pilcher’s romantic novels, which are set in the area and have been serialised as films in Germany. They’re mostly “stupid love stories with nice scenery”, says Lampke, but they have a cult following back home. “I was an extra in one recently,” she beams.

I order a cream tea, which leaves me with change from a fiver. “Jam first,” says Bill Roberts, who’s run the café for 40 years. He met his wife, Carmen Roberts, also from Germany, in the nearby Railway Inn when she was here on holiday. I ask him about the pub of the year award. “To be honest, I don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around me,” he says. “It’s all a load of codswallop.” I’m not sure if he means the award or life in general, but he’s disappeared into the kitchen before I can ask.

I walk off the sugar with a stroll to Trevaunance Cove, where the waves are rolling in, much to the delight of local surfers, who look like tadpoles on the water. Watching over them are chimney stacks from Cornwall’s once-great tin-mining industry, and, closer to shore, the lifeguards, all wrapped up against the gathering storm. It’s late in the season now. Their shift is nearly done. They’ll be riding down the hills dressed as nuns in a few weeks.