‘There’s no way I could afford to live here’: How the Cotswolds became a social battleground! B
Once famed for thatched roofs and natural beauty, sleepy villages have become a haven for the rich, the famous and women in luxury yoga gear
“David Cameron? Jeremy Clarkson? The Chipping-bloody-Norton set?” barks an elderly dog walker in a muddy green gilet, striding briskly up the hill away from the thatched cottages of Great Tew, Oxfordshire. “They’ve taken over the Cotswolds. Treating our countryside like their own private playground. Don’t get me started on the ‘McMansion’ they’re trying to build over at Little Tew…” He pauses to catch his breath and points me back down the slope. “If you want to see how this place has changed since that lot moved in, go look at the notice board on The Green!”
At 9:30am, the small village green is hemmed in by a semicircle of black top-of-the-range 4x4s and the noticeboard does indeed back up claims that this is “the poshest village in England”. Pinned between the usual ads for guitar lessons and sporting events, I find contact details of a private jet and helicopter charter company in the place where most rural villages might offer the number of the local minicab driver.
As I turn to admire the sun warming the ironstone walls of the Grade I and II listed cottages – mostly built between the 17th and 19th centuries – I’m suddenly surrounded by women in luxury yoga gear, clutching puffer jackets and iPhones. Morning assembly has just finished at Great Tew Primary School – “a little school with big ideas” – and parents are swarming across The Green towards Quince & Clover – a cosy cafe where the gourmet breakfast options include acai berry bowls, chorizo eggs and ricotta pancakes. I grab a coffee and sit outside with Gary and Michelle on holiday from Newmarket, celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary with a stay in the village inn, The Falkland Arms.
Chuckling over the prices – “It’s £11 in there for a bottle of tomato sauce! Do these people think that’s normal?” – Gary tucks into a bacon sandwich while Michelle sits facing The Green, hoping to “spot a sleb”. “You know the Beckhams live here?” she says. “Taylor Swift rented a place up the road over the summer and Meghan Markle had her hen do at that chi-chi spa place at the top of the hill…”
By which, Michelle means Soho Farmhouse – a private members club-cum-hotel and spa owned by the Soho House chain now operating over 40 venues around the world. The company was founded in London 1995 by Nick Jones (husband of presenter Kirsty Young) as a networking space for monied creatives and now charges around £2,900 per year for an “every house” membership. I was surprised to learn that the business has never actually turned a profit – with pre-tax losses this year estimated to come in at £73 million.
But the Soho Farmhouse appears to be thriving, offering traditional country sports like clay pigeon shooting alongside yoga sessions conducted on surfboards in the swimming pool. Its shop sells wellies for £270. Its A-list guest list includes a mix of politicians, models, actors, footballers and aristocrats – including Brad Pitt, Kate Moss, James Corden, Margot Robbie, Eddie Redmayne, Noel and Liam Gallagher, David Cameron, Dua Lipa and Marcus Rashford. Prince Harry has rumoured to be the last man out of the bar on occasion. Locals and regulars call it “The Farm”; tabloids prefer “Butlins for Toffs”.
Soho Farmhouse sits on the Great Tew Estate owned by Old Etonian Nicholas Johnston. Locals initially welcomed the British millionaire’s investment in the area which had become increasingly dilapidated over the first half of the 20th century. The 4,000-acre estate and its beautiful manor house had fallen into disrepair under the stewardship of Major Eustace Robb whose family had owned it since 1815. In 1972, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner and his colleague Jennifer Sherwood described the decay of its prettiness as “one of the most depressing sights in the whole country”.
“When we moved out here in the 1980s, after Major Robb died,” says a local woman, while deadheading her roses, “we were probably in the first wave of people coming out from London. Yuppification, they call it.” She tells me her husband commuted down the M40 – “a straight line to Oxford Circus”. She is aware that the village has to move with the times – she’s happy to tell me that the red phone box now hosts a defibrillator and visitors to the church can donate via a contactless terminal.
She also agrees that Johnston has done much to restore the village’s fortunes. There’s a new grain store, the ironstone quarry has reopened to supply fresh building materials and The Farm provides over 400 jobs. “We all like Johnston, we’ll all have a chat with him if we see him about. But he’s got carried away and people are less happy.”
Problems began back in 2018 when the High Court blocked Johnston’s bid to keep using a road through a local industrial estate (the judge described his evidence as “belligerent and blustering by turns” adding that he had “formed a negative view of Nicholas Johnston’s willingness to give reliable evidence”).
The same year, one local told the Financial Times he felt Johnston “crossed over to the dark side” when he began working with American billionaire Peter Mullin on plans to develop a 63-hectare site to the south of the village, putting up a £150-million classic car museum and 28 luxury lodges. Johnston said he would use the money to help restore his manor house at the heart of the estate. Local celebrities were divided in the battle of “Bugattis v Barbours”: The Grand Tour presenter Jeremy Clarkson was all for it; actor Patrick Stewart was against. The proposal was approved by the West Oxfordshire District Council by 12 votes to seven in 2019.
Now Soho House’s majority shareholder – American businessman Ron Burkle – has nettled the locals further by proposing to build himself a “country house and gardens” up the road in the scattered hamlet of Little Tew. Plans for the property, which would sit over 4.37 hectares of farmland, were originally rejected in 2022 on the grounds that the proposals would result “in a medium level of less than substantial harm to the setting of the Little Tew Conservation Area and without there being discernible public benefits which would outweigh the identified harm”. But these have now been amended and resubmitted, pitching the proposed property (complete with swimming pool, gardens, lake and stables) as an “adornment to the landscape”.
Burkle’s architect, Francis Terry, has said the property would be the first classical “Passivhaus” [a German term meaning energy efficient house] in the country. And Burkle himself has insisted he will only proceed with the purchase if planning is approved, though he adds he’s open to making changes later down the line to keep everyone happy. Speaking to the Mail, he said: “Wherever I end up living, I want to be a good neighbour, support local charities and community organisations.”
Parking up in Little Tew, close to where a rambling group are snapping photographs, I chat to a retired villager who assures me that “none of us are in favour of Burkle’s house – the new plans aren’t markedly different to the originals and we all call it the ‘McMansion’”.
Leaning against the stone wall of the cottage he bought in the 1980s, he tells me: “It isn’t easy to build on greenbelt like this. You can only do it if you can prove agricultural need, housing need or outstanding architectural merit, which is what Burkle’s going for. But that loophole exists for isolated buildings – something really special like a beautiful little eco house that nestles into a hillside. The sort of thing you see on Grand Designs. Not a grotesque Georgian pastiche of a place like this, which looks like it’s been designed by Hollywood set builders.” He sighs. “It doesn’t meet any local need and the key point is that it isn’t isolated; it’s right at the end of that field. And one aspect the press hasn’t picked up on is that the proposed site is currently Great Tew Estate land.”
Further up the street I chat to another man – none of them will go on the record arguing it’s “poor neighbourhood manners” – who laments the “changing demographic of the countryside”. He tells me that: “When the older people die or go into residential care, their inheritors usually have to sell off the properties too, and if they’re splitting that money across a family it means none of them can afford to stay here. The working class has been entirely chased out of this whole area. You’ll see the little Fords and Fiats of the cleaners and the vans of the gardeners. But they have to drive in from miles away to get to work.”
I check Rightmove and see that the average price of properties sold in Great Tew over the last year was £1,700,000. Flats sold for an average of £155,000, with semi-detached properties fetching £1,750,000. This means prices are up 37 per cent on the previous year and 22 per cent on 2019.
As Little Tew has no shop, I drive on to the larger village of Enstone for a sandwich. There, the man behind the counter of the village store tells me, “There’s no way I could afford to live here. I have to drive into work every day from High Wycombe.” How long does that take? “Just over 50 minutes each way,” he shrugs. I move aside as he serves a middle-aged Polish stonemason who tells me he is working on the porch of a nearby church, where we then head for a cup of tea. “I’ve been in the UK for 18 years now and I can tell you the Cotswolds is a paradise for a stonemason. I love my craft and it’s a privilege to work on such beautiful old buildings,” he says. He chuckles over the “super rich guys” who employ him but makes the reasonable argument that their investment maintains “this perfect English dream, this rich history of yours”.
It’s the same story 13 miles away in the picturesque town of Burford, where locals tell me PR mogul Matthew Freud is “buying up the high street, building an empire” to mirror Johnston’s in Great Tew. Back in 2008 – while he was still married to TV executive Elisabeth Murdoch, from whom he was divorced in 2014 – Freud bought Burford Priory and filled the Grade I listed Jacobean manor with modern art. “I have the best kind of power: soft,” Freud told the Telegraph earlier this year. “It’s influence. You can only use it for something that’s not self-interested, or everyone goes, ‘F— off.’” Locals cautiously agree with this assessment, telling me he’s helped put the place on the map, but some also eyeroll the commodification of their community.
“He bought The Bull and turned it into a luxury boutique hotel and now he’s got The Golden Pheasant too,” says Burford’s former mayor, Keith Davies. A dapper chap of 86, who now runs a garden centre from his home with his wife and son, Keith tells me he was born in Burford in 1939. “It was a run down old town back then and there was no money. You could walk a bicycle up and down the middle of the high street.” He gestures to the house behind him, which he’s already gifted to his son, and explains his maternal great-great-grandfather (the town’s first mayor) built the place in 1889 with a large legacy from an uncle in Devon. “My father was a slaughter man who came up from Wales. We lived in the flat above my aunt’s fish and chip shop and he used to work in the slaughter yard just over there…” Keith points across the street at the recently renovated “Burford House”.
“That sold over three years ago, and there’s been nobody in there since apart from builders, hammering and chiselling away,” says Keith’s 81-year-old wife, Sandra. “The woman who lived there sold it after her husband died and moved into one of the smaller cottages. She put it on the market in Mayfair and got hundreds of offers. She eventually sold it to some guy from Nottingham [for £1.7 million] who paved over her beautiful garden with its lovely white hydrangeas.” The Davies think the buyer is intending to flip the house for a profit. “This place is so fashionable with the London set now and those people already own Chipping Norton, so they’re moving over there. They say Romeo Beckham has bought here…”
Keith is happy to see “new wealth coming into the town”, however. “I first saw Americans marching through this town on their way to the airfields on D-Day,” he recalls. “Now we’ve got flocks of American tourists coming to see Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm.” Forced to close the restaurant on said farm, Clarkson has been seeking alternate venues for his produce – including his Hawkstone beer.
“Clarkson knocked on my sister-in-law’s door a while ago and offered her £1 million for her restaurant, The Windmill,” says Keith. “The building [located just outside of the town] really did use to be a windmill, and Sandra’s sister built it up into a restaurant 30-40 years ago and later leased it out. When Clarkson came knocking, the lease was up, so she said yes and took his money.”
Hundreds of fans queued outside the TV presenter’s pub when it reopened as “The Farmer’s Dog” in August. Clarkson said he had been working with the local council to reduce any traffic problems the pub’s popularity might cause, adding that he’d chosen the location for its large car park. “There’s no villagers to p— off here. There’s no one to annoy. It’s a good spot,” he told The Independent in August. He also promised to try and source all produce from British farms, although he admitted he’d been struggling to find anywhere local that was growing black pepper. “But there is no Coca-Cola, no coffee. Other pubs do coffee.” He’s promoting his new hostelry as a “Hawkstone filling station” and British brewers are hopeful that he may even support the work of fellow fermenters too.
