Compare St Ives car hire

An ever-popular holiday destination, St Ives is a picturesque Cornish port town in the far south of England, with golden beaches, scenic coastal walks and art galleries such as Tate St Ives and the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden drawing holidaymakers in their droves to the “jewel in Cornwall’s crown”.

Driving is one of the best ways of exploring the area, offering you more freedom than buses and trains. And you can find great deals on hire cars in St Ives by using our search tool above.

If you’re arriving in St Ives by train, coach or bus, you can collect your hire car from nearby Penzance, where you’ll find Enterprise, Europcar and local car hire companies. From here it’s a 25-minute or so drive to St Ives along the B3311.

You can also collect a hire car from Newquay Airport (NQY), which is about an hour away from St Ives. Hertz and Europcar both operate here.

If you’re staying outside St Ives, it’s best to use the park-and-ride service, especially if you’re travelling during the summer holidays. The town’s narrow roads are often congested in peak season and parking spaces can be hard to come by. Leave your car at St Erth station and enjoy the stunning coastal views on the train journey into St Ives.

To explore the area around St Ives, a hire car is a major asset for flexibility and time. That said, you should still allow plenty of time for all journeys – Cornwall doesn’t have any motorways and the main road through the county is the A30, which ends in Penzance.

St Ives is connected by B roads, so drive with caution on country lanes. If you find yourself on a narrow road with blind bends, use your horn to alert approaching cars. In some cases, you may need to reverse to allow a car to pass.

Be sure to set aside a day for the coastal St Ives to Sennen drive. Take it easy, enjoying the glorious sea views along the B3306, which winds through the clifftop fields of western Cornwall. The journey takes under an hour each way, so there’s plenty of time to stop en route with a leisurely lunch break and a walk to stretch the legs.

Park up at Zennor, a traditional village in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty with a church dating back to at least 1150. The famous Land’s End sign, near the south-western tip of mainland Britain, is a short drive from Sennen. From here, you can head back to St Ives the same way or continue around the peninsula, stopping at Mousehole, a particularly pretty fishing port.