The Cotswolds is awful

The Cotswolds used to be a wonderfully bucolic fantasy of English villages; red telephone boxes, gilded honey-stone hamlets with verdant greens where the vicar would umpire cricket matches, and pubs where poachers and gamekeepers would mix. Then it became fashionable and now it’s been Farrow & Balled to within an inch of its life.

You could blame the King for purchasing Highgrove House in Tetbury in the 1980s. Suddenly, wannabe poshos began buying Cotswold cottages in the hope some royalty would rub off on them (real poshos would never consider doing something so outré, and prefer Norfolk anyway). Now it’s experiencing the ‘Bamford effect’ thanks to the Daylesford farm shop. It’s filled to bursting with celebrities and the Chipping Norton media elite, and following them has been a steady stream of West Londoners with City jobs making the move to ‘the country’ under the delusion that Soho Farmhouse is anything other than Waco for social climbers; its woodchip pathways promising not to muddy footwear.