Channel Islands reopen after lockdown

An unusual summer in the British Channel Islands

The summer of 2020 was not what anyone had planned. The British Channel Islands — Jersey, Guernsey, Sark, Herm, and Alderney — had been, like everywhere else, through months of closed borders, suspended ferry services, and the particular quiet of places that depend on movement and visitors suddenly containing neither.

But the islands emerged from their restrictions at different times and under different conditions, and by July 2020 the story of the British Channel Islands was, in several important ways, different from the story of the UK mainland. They had managed the initial wave of infection with particular effectiveness, had implemented their own border testing regimes, and were cautiously, carefully reopening to visitors in a way that the mainland was not yet able to do.

I went to Jersey in late July and to Guernsey in early August. This is an account of what those islands felt like in the first summer of post-lockdown life.

Jersey: the island rediscovered

The ferry from Poole to Jersey runs roughly 4.5 hours, and on the mid-July sailing I took, it was quieter than I had ever seen it. Condor Ferries had reduced their schedule and were operating at reduced capacity. The passengers on board were overwhelmingly British — families who had been planning a Channel Islands holiday for months, a few business travellers, a contingent of people returning to the island after being stranded elsewhere during lockdown. No international tourists, no day-trippers from France.

St Helier felt different on arrival. Not emptied — the shops were open, the waterfront cafés were operating, people were moving through the streets — but altered in atmosphere. There was a quality of attention to the everyday that you notice when the normal background noise of tourism has been turned down. The Liberation Monument was not surrounded by tour groups. The Central Market was busy with local shoppers rather than visitors picking up preserves. A group of teenagers was playing football on the open space above the Weighbridge.

The beaches told the clearest story of the summer. At St Brelade’s Bay on a Saturday afternoon in late July, the beach was as full as any busy summer day, but the people on it were overwhelmingly local. Jersey accents, Jersey pound notes at the ice cream stall, conversations in the queue that referenced specific streets in St Helier and people known in common. The island had, for a few months, been given back to itself.

This is not a sentiment that any island can sustain — the economics of tourism are real, and the hospitality businesses that had endured months of closure needed the visitors to return. But there was a quality to that Jersey summer that islanders described with a mixture of wistfulness and genuine appreciation: the experience of moving through their own island without the familiar weight of August crowds.

The border testing regime

Both Jersey and Guernsey had implemented their own entry testing systems, independent of the UK mainland’s approach, and arriving required either a negative Covid test result or a period of quarantine. The practicalities were straightforward enough for travellers willing to plan ahead. The process at Jersey Airport — where I arrived for the second leg of the trip — was brisk and efficiently organised in a way that suggested the island had been applying the attention to process and logistics that characterises its public administration generally.

The testing requirement had, in practice, filtered the visitor profile sharply. The travellers who had bothered to test in advance and book accommodation in advance were more committed visitors than the average day-tripper. Hotel operators I spoke to described their summer 2020 guests as more engaged, more appreciative, more likely to explore beyond the most obvious attractions — perhaps because they had been unable to travel for months and arrived with an accumulated enthusiasm for the experience, perhaps because the smaller crowds made it easier to explore.

Guernsey: a different pace

Guernsey’s approach to reopening had been slightly more cautious than Jersey’s, reflecting the smaller island’s stronger network of community relationships and a slightly more conservative institutional temperament. The result, when I arrived in early August, was an island that felt less changed from its normal summer self — quieter than a typical August, but not dramatically so, and with a quality of calm purpose rather than anxious recovery.

St Peter Port in early August is normally a busy harbour town, the marina full, the restaurants loud on summer evenings. In 2020, the marina was noticeably less crowded. The cruising yachts that typically fill it in August — a mix of British, French, and Dutch vessels using Guernsey as a base for Channel exploration — were absent or reduced. The restaurants, operating at reduced indoor capacity, had expanded their outdoor terracing onto pavements and harbour-front areas with an energy and resourcefulness that improved the experience of eating in them relative to a normal summer.

The coastal paths around Guernsey’s south coast — the cliff paths above Icart Point and Saints Bay, the path above Fermain Bay — were more heavily used than I had ever seen them. Islanders who might normally have been on holiday in Spain or Portugal, prevented from travelling abroad, had been walking their own coastline with an attention they do not usually apply to it. The paths were worn more noticeably at their popular sections. The car parks at cliff-top viewpoints were full.

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What the islands rediscovered about themselves

There is a strand of thought, common among islanders of all five British Channel Islands, that the experience of 2020 reminded them of something they had known before mass tourism arrived and then, gradually, forgotten. Not the economics — nobody was sentimental about the revenue losses — but the feeling of an island that belongs to its residents in a way that it cannot entirely, during peak season, when accommodation is full and the ferry brings a thousand people a day.

A hotelier on Sark — which had closed entirely during the first lockdown and reopened in late June — put it with characteristic island directness: “We were reminded why we live here.” The community activities that had sustained residents during lockdown — the mutual aid networks, the local food systems, the reactivation of skills and relationships that tourism can crowd out — had a quality that several people described as unexpectedly valuable.

This is not an argument against tourism. It is an observation about what the islands are when they are not performing themselves for visitors — more particular, more rooted, more interesting, in their own way, than the polished version that appears in the brochures.

The ferries and what their return meant

The restoration of Condor Ferries services to both Jersey and Guernsey in summer 2020 was a logistical achievement that the ferry companies did not make a great deal of fuss about, but which anyone who travels regularly on these routes will have appreciated. Condor’s fleet had been in various states of suspension, and the reactivation of Poole and Portsmouth services alongside the Saint-Malo route required the kind of coordination and planning that is invisible when it goes well.

For many visitors, the ferry remains the preferable way to arrive in the British Channel Islands — not only for those bringing cars or bicycles, but for anyone who prefers to arrive at a destination having crossed the water slowly rather than descended from the sky. The crossing from Poole, on a clear day, passes close enough to the Needles to see the chalk stacks clearly, and the approach to Jersey past Les Minquiers and the south-east corner of the island has a quality of arrival that the airport does not provide.

The summer ferries of 2020 carried a mix of returning islanders, committed holidaymakers, and a handful of people who had decided that, if they could not go far, they would at least go somewhere that felt genuinely different. The British Channel Islands, as places to which you can travel without a passport from the UK, offered exactly that: a crossing, a different architecture, a different history, a different light.

The smaller islands: Sark, Herm, and Alderney in 2020

While the main islands managed their reopening to visitors, the smaller islands operated under conditions of even greater exposure. Sark, with a population of around 500 people, had effectively closed entirely during the first lockdown — an experience that the island community described as both intense and, in certain respects, clarifying. The ferry link to Guernsey was the lifeline for supplies, and the islanders who remained were more directly dependent on each other than at any point in recent memory.

Herm, operated as a single estate, managed the lockdown period with a small number of permanent staff maintaining the island’s infrastructure and livestock. The hotel reopened in summer 2020, and the island’s relative accessibility from Guernsey — a 20-minute crossing on the Travel Trident ferry — made it one of the first places Guernsey residents visited once day trips between the islands resumed.

Alderney, with its Aurigny air link to both Guernsey and Southampton, had a slightly different dynamic — the air connection provided a resilience that pure ferry-dependent islands could not rely on. But the island’s small scale made the community dynamics of lockdown particularly visible: everyone knew everyone affected, every business was known personally to every resident.

Looking forward from 2020

The 2020 season was an aberration in a story that had been moving, for decades, in the direction of more visitors, more facilities, more infrastructure for tourism. The Channel Islands’ ability to manage their own borders allowed them to reopen in a manner that felt considered rather than panicked. The experience of a lighter-footprint summer — fewer visitors, more local engagement, a restored sense of the islands as places with independent lives — was noted, and has informed some thinking about how tourism is managed in the years that followed.

For visitors planning a trip, the practical lessons of 2020 were clear: book ahead, travel in shoulder season where possible, leave time to explore beyond the immediate beaches and restaurants, and treat the islands as places with genuine character rather than simply as a warm-weather escape. They reward that approach. They always have. The unusual summer of 2020 simply made it more visible.

Read more about planning a visit to the British Channel Islands or comparing Jersey and Guernsey for your next trip.