Seaside town's population surges by 1,000pc as mayor asks holidaymakers to show some respect

In any other August, the bustling streets of Salcombe filled with hundreds of Britons enjoying what is likely their first holiday at home in years would usually be a welcome sight to most locals.

But in the midst of a global pandemic, the small Devonshire town - dubbed ‘Chelsea on Sea’ due to its popularity with middle-class Londoners - has been left “exhausted and overwhelmed” by a larger than normal influx of city-dwellers holidaying in the UK.

After Salcombe’s poulation surged by 1,000 per cent thanks to British tourists making the most of loosened lockdown restrictions, its mayor said visitors “think they are in a bubble” when it comes to social distancing and has urged them to “show a bit of respect”.

“It's like August bank holiday weekend every day, everybody is exhausted and overwhelmed. The businesses need the customers but we would just like a bit of respect back for the town that they claim to love,” town mayor Nikki Turnton said.

Her plea comes amid rising tensions in the UK between rural residents and British tourists looking to holiday in the countryside, as nearly one third of people are holidaying at home this summer due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Farmers from the Lake District to North Wales have reported cases of amateur ‘wild campers’ leaving festival-style mess in the middle of fields, abandoned tents on the side of mountains, and lighting open campfires in irresponsible places.

Instagram influencers are driving a huge interest in wild camping in the UK this summer, experts say, as people have been “penned down” for months and want to create the “authentic experience” they see on social media now more than ever.

Richard Prideaux, who teaches wild camping skills in North Wales, saida blog post he wrote two years ago on the laws of wild camping in the UK has received 30,000 hits in the past few weeks alone.

“There is definitely a massively increased interest in wild camping at the moment,” he told The Telegraph. “People who would have gone on a cheap holiday overseas are this year looking at doing something in the UK.”

But with the increased crowds come increasing amounts of litter - so much so that the term ‘wild camping’ has recently become synominsed to ‘dirty camping’ in the outdoor industry.

“The rubbish is a particular concern,” Mr Prideaux added. “My friends who live in various villages in North Wales have been seeing bags of rubbish dumped on the side of quiet roads and people having fires right next to the road.

“This year the magnitude is definitely worse because everyone was penned down in lockdown and now they want to go out and do stuff and they have fewer overseas options to do it.”

Mountain rescue teams are also struggling with the increasing number of Britons swapping Lake Como in Italy for the Lake District this summer.

Richard Warren, chairman of the Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association, said the “tidal wave” of lost and injured staycationers is pushing them to breaking point. Of the 19 call outs they have handled since Friday, 11 were “truly avoidable”.

Meanwhile, police in Aberystwyth, West Wales, warned against the fashionable "wild swimming" trend after a nine-year-old boy and his mother were swept away in a river.

The pair survived the incident, but the coastguard said the rescue was "like a scene from Apocalypse Now" and urged inexperienced swimmers not to try swimming in open water to make up for pools being closed.

Julian Glover, who wrote an independent review for the Government on England’s national parks last year, called for more education on how to respect the UK’s rural areas.

“It is a good thing that people want to come out of towns to walk and enjoy the landscape. We should support that. We can’t close the countryside off. But in return we need to make sure that the people who come protect what is special about those places,” he said.