The Atlantic Hotel, Newquay: The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour Base

The Atlantic Hotel on Dane Road, Newquay, was the Beatles' base from 12 to 15 September 1967 while they filmed Magical Mystery Tour. John Lennon directed a scene at its outdoor pool that was cut from the film. The hotel still trades, and the town's 2002 Beatles plaque is on a boulder on the Killacourt.

One night that became three

The coach carrying the Beatles and their cast spent its first night in Teignmouth, Devon. On 12 September 1967 it went on through Plymouth, Liskeard and Bodmin and that evening reached the Atlantic Hotel, on the headland above Newquay. The plan was a single night. Mark Lewisohn's chronicle records that after some private discussion the band chose to stay put and use the Atlantic as a base for three nights rather than move to a new hotel each day.

They slept in four holiday flats in the grounds, not in the main building, and fans rushed them each time they walked across for meals. Staff were told not to ask for autographs. A young porter smuggled in his copy of Sgt Pepper anyway and got Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Ringo Starr to sign it, with George Harrison's signature added later; the record sold for about £111,000 at an auction in New Hampshire in 2014. In the ballroom a local guest, Doris Freeth, danced with McCartney, and a teenager who got in by posing as a waiter spent the evening playing billiards with Starr.

The pool scene that never reached the film

On 13 September the morning went on Watergate Bay, where each Beatle was filmed looking through a telescope. The party came back to the Atlantic for lunch, then split into two units. McCartney and Starr took the coach and most of the passengers to Porth, where McCartney was filmed on a tandem on the beach.

Lennon stayed behind with Harrison and ran the second unit at the hotel. Their scene had Nat Jackley, as Happy Nat the Rubber Man, chasing locally recruited women in bikinis around the hotel's outdoor pool, and they went on to film at the Huer's Hut above the harbour. About two seconds of it, a girl in a bikini, survived into the finished film. The full sequence finally came out as the bonus "Nat's Dream" on the 2012 reissue. That evening Spencer Davis, on holiday at Perranporth, drove over to see them.

On 14 September a field near the town drew so many onlookers that police had to clear a traffic jam, and only one of the two scenes shot there, the passengers squeezing into a small tent, was used. A late lunch in the hotel dining room with the resident band playing was filmed and cut. On the morning of 15 September the whole party was filmed cheering in front of the coach and the hotel, and the coach left for London. The second week of filming moved to West Malling in Kent.

The hotel since 1967

Silvanus Trevail designed the Atlantic for his Cornish Hotels Company, and it opened in July 1892 on a headland with the sea on three sides. In the Second World War the military used it as a convalescent hospital. It has 57 bedrooms. The pool guests use now is indoors, with a hot tub, sauna and steam room; the 1967 scene was shot at the outdoor pool. In March 2026 the Cornwall Hotel Collection, which also runs The Falmouth, The Greenbank and The Alverton, bought the hotel after a long period of family ownership and announced a phased restoration.

The Beatles boulder on the Killacourt

The hotel's own pages mention the visit but no plaque or display. Newquay's marker is a plaque fixed to a boulder on the Killacourt, the public green above Towan Beach, with the Atlantic in view across the bay. It went up in 2002; a local Beatles site says the Mayor of Restormel unveiled it on 19 October that year. Newquay Town Council's 2019 to 2021 redesign of the Killacourt planned to move the boulder within the green to a more prominent spot and levelled the paths for step-free access, so older photographs may show it in a different place.