Sand, sea, and St Andrews

Back from St Andrews.

We stayed – not for the first time – in an apartment overlooking my old school. Built in 1833, the South Street building was vacated in 2021 and is being redeveloped by the university prior to being reopened as New College.

I visit the town several times a year (usually when I’m up watching the football in Dundee), but February is the month my wife and I like to stay for several days. The weather is a lottery, of course, but it was pretty good last week. Very cold but mostly dry and occasionally sunny.

According to the latest census (2022) the town has a permanent resident population of 17,732, to which you can add over 10,000 students. (10,356 were recorded in 2025.) Of the latter, 42 per cent are international students, with one in five of all students at St Andrews reported to be from America.

I don’t doubt it because the predominant accent among the many students roaming the streets is American, or perhaps they’re just a little louder than everyone else!

Above: part of The Pends, a medieval 13th-century wall at one end of South Street, St Andrews.

Overall, though, the town hasn’t changed much since I was at school in the Seventies. Yes, the university has expanded and new departments and halls of residence have popped up, but mostly on the periphery of town. The town centre looks much the same as it did 50 years ago, which is hardly surprising because, although ‘new’ buildings have been constructed over the centuries, the street layout remains medieval and the centre is a conservation area.

Individual businesses have changed, of course, but what I like is the fact that independent shops still vastly outnumber major high street names. Furthermore, every visit is a culinary experience. In recent years we’ve been to the Peat Inn, a Michelin starred restaurant just outside St Andrews, as well as Haar and Dune which are run by Dean Banks, one of Scotland’s most celebrated chefs.

Last week we visited The Seafood Ristorante overlooking the West Sands (where they filmed the opening scenes for Chariots of Fire). I’m not sure why we haven’t been there before because the food was fabulous. The service was pretty good too. Our waiter was from Poland and he told us he had been living and working in the town for 20 years. He met his wife (also Polish) when they were working at the Old Course Hotel and their children are at my old school, Madras College.

Anyway, this ‘unique glass restaurant’ offers a wonderful view of St Andrews Bay – except on freezing February evenings when it’s pitch dark and you can’t see a thing, so we’ll have to go back another time to enjoy the full experience.

St Andrews harbour, a short walk from the town centre

Then again, for a fraction of the price you can enjoy what I still maintain are the best fish and chips in Scotland, if not Britain, at the award-winning Anstruther Fish Bar, a short drive down the coast. We’ve been going there since it opened in 1992 and we’ve never been disappointed. It even survived a change of ownership with no discernible drop in standards.

Everything, including the chips, is cooked to order so you may have to wait 15 or 20 minutes (or even an hour in the summer months because of the queue snaking out of the small harbourside restaurant), but it’s worth the wait – especially in summer when you can eat the piping hot food sitting in your car or on a bench overlooking the harbour with the many fishing boats bobbing up and down.

Back in St Andrews we noticed that Gorgeous, a tiny cafe on Bell Street that served delicious coffee, cake and bacon rolls, has closed, but there are plenty of other places to go for breakfast, brunch or lunch. I can now recommend The Niblick which sits above the R&A World Golf Museum opposite the old R&A clubhouse. Not only did they serve bacon rolls (with the option of fried egg, haggis, and black pudding), I was able to order both a coffee and a mimosa.

(The Niblick restaurant is not be confused with the bar of the same name where I bought my first pint, aged 15, in 1974. The bar closed many years ago and the premises are now in the hands of restaurateur Dean Banks, proprietor of Haar.)

Anyway, we normally drive straight home but this time we broke the seven-hour, 400 mile journey to Cambridgeshire by staying overnight in Newcastle. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve driven past on the A1 (motorway) or had a fleeting glimpse from the train, but this was the first time I have actually visited the city.

Then again, I still haven’t. Not really. Our quayside hotel overlooked both the Tyne and Gateshead Millennium bridges but we arrived late afternoon and left the following morning so, apart from a short walk that took us across both bridges and back along the quayside, we saw very little. Another time, perhaps.

Grannie Clarks Wynd is a narrow public road that crosses the first and 18th fairways on the Old Course at St Andrews