The Cotswolds have changed. Sometimes we can't go back

They always say about the places that have defined us: never go back. That’s always seemed nonsensical to me. If you love a place, of course you should return there. But my recent visits to my family’s home patch, in the heart of the Cotswolds, has left me so disillusioned and depressed at its transformation into a ‘look but don’t touch’ Instagram theme park, I’m minded to forsake my long-beloved hills. It’s official: The Cotswolds are overrated.

The direction of travel down there has been clear for a while.

• What are holidays for, for Queenagers?
• Cala Ratjada – the perfect spot for a Mallorca mini-break
• Travels with my mum – from Vietnam to Cambodia

The outstanding natural beauty of the yellow-stoned villages, verdant hills and lavender and peony bestrewn gardens has made it a magnet for Down from London weekenders for decades. Fair enough. On a good run, it’s less than a 2-hour drive from the capital, which makes the place rather too accessible for its own good.

Add to that fast rail connections from Charlbury and Moreton in Marsh to Paddington and the once rural cotswolds has yet become another bit of prime posh commuter belt. The Surrey/home-counties feel has only been exacerbated by the pandemic and the work from home ethos it birthed which has seen Cotswold house prices go stratospheric.

A countryside Notting Hell

The result is that the Cotswolds has become an overrated Notting Hell in the country. An extended West London suburb, populated by socialites who think a rural supper is accessorised with Jimmy Choos and Maison Margiela, (not fleeces and ancient wellies). As the mass affluent have moved in, the area’s beauty has inevitably made it a magnet of Instagram smugness where the likes of Josie and Charlie Irons, Beth Sandland and Audrey Masur crow about the magnificence of their alliums, conservatories, hand-made leather boots and garden-veg. This is the Cotswolds as Insta wonderland, all pouting twenty-somethings showing off the kinds of outfits no country-woman would be seen dead in; glorifying a kind of Cotwolds meets Montecito/Beverley Hills lifestyle of summer gardens, poncy flat whites and trout-pout features. Megan Markle will be filming one of her naff life-style shows here before you know it!

Where are the useful shops?

Towns which until recently contained useful shops are now a sea of interiors boutiques or tourist tea rooms. My whole life I’ve loved the toy shop in Moreton – which was run by several generations of a local family. We’d go there as kids for whizz-wheels and paddling pools, toy ponies and playing cards. I took my own children there to buy their first bicycles; it was our go-to for birthday and Christmas treats. Now? It’s yet another interiors shop, next to another one called Cotswold Grey. Flanked by an antique shop, a tea room and an estate agent. What happened to the butcher, general store and old fashioned bakers? Well the real locals shop at Aldi, and for the posh incomers there’s Warner’s Budgens (one old toff friend of mine calls it “Selfridges Food Hall” because of the prices).

But Budgen’s is budget compared to that most echt of all Cotswolds destinations: Daylesford Organic, the emporium owned by Lady Bamford of JCB fame (immortalised as they hosted Boris and Carrie Johnson’s wedding and provided their ready meals). Here in the heart of the Chopping and Snorting set (as those who live near Chipping Norton are dubbed, I can’t think why…) a nectarine costs £4 (I put it back) and tomato soup starts at £8. It’s one of those places that if you need to look at the price tag or aren’t one of the one per cent (or even 0.0001 per cent) you definitely can’t afford it. It’s an influencers paradise of perfectly landscaped flowers and bijou design.

A ground zero view of why the Cotswolds are overrated

Just up the road is Soho Farmhouse, beloved of celebrities, incomers and weekenders – always called Butlins for C***s by the locals because of its array of restaurants (Japanese, Italian-ish, a Bistro, a salad bar) tin huts for bedrooms, which are scattered around the old farm and reached by retro olive green bikes.

It’s pretty enough, but it’s a theme park of spas (£180 for an hour massage) and £15 salads. I was taken by a friend earlier in the summer to lounge by the pool on a boiling hot day. We sat on sun beds a couple of rows back from the muddy (slightly dank and smelly) pond and watched the scene. There were lots of yummy mummies, monjaro thin in expensive broderie anglaise. Lots of Americans talking loudly about the ‘impossible cuteness’. A posse of be-muscled 30-something bros talking biz loudly while drinking cocktails in the infinity pool (I dread to think what’s in that water…) And a group of Dubai influencers shouting loudly from a roped off area of sunbeds in front of us as they devoured bottle after bottle of rose.

I enquired of my Soho-house-member friend about the roped off sunbeds: You can book them, she explained, but to do so incurs a minimum spend of £60 per person for four hours. Steep to sit by a smelly pond. That’s like being in Cannes where you get fleeced 100Euros for a sunbed on a fag-butted pebbly bit of beach.

But that just proves my point: the Cotswolds has become a kind of landlocked Cote d’azur. An international byword for Instagrammable luxury which acts like a magnet for those wanting to flaunt their wealth (like St Tropez, or St Bart’s or St Moritz).

It’s not just the Lifestyle influencers. This summer has seen an influx of the global super rich from tech nepo-baby weddings, to US Vice Presidet JD Vance taking up residence for August down the road from David and Samantha Cameron, in Dean. Then there’s the reality show about Jeremy Clarkson’s farm – the traffic jams generated by Diddly Squat farmshop drive the locals mad. But sitting in an endless row of swanky cars (it’s like anyone NOT driving a Porsche Cayenne, Tesla, or Range Rover is banned) is just an everday fact of  Cotswold life. In Burford last weekend – ok exacerbated by Blur turned Cheese impresario, Alex james’s Big Feastival – it was gridlock. But even without the festival the traffic on the Fosse Way through Moreton, Stow and Cirencester is worst than in Camden Town.  And there’s no escape: Google maps now sends all the tourist traffic down the back lanes, meaning that even what used to be quieter villages now echo not with the gentle buzz of lawnmowers but the grrrr of powerful engines and the whine of electric motors.

I know that everything changes. And of course in nearly fifty years, the place where my family hail from won’t be the same. For the record,  my mum and aunt were born on Breden Hill, my grandfather ran the Evesham Journal and lived with my granny in Cropthorne, my uncle owned the estate agent in Broadway and my aunt has run the north cotswold pony club forever. My dad also lived there for thirty years, near Shipston and then in the shadow of Ilmington Hill. The place is full of family memories for me. But the transformation between now and then is stark.

Until recently there were run-down old stone barns which housed combine harvesters and straw bales. These days, every agricultural building has been turned into an influencer-friendly Des Res.  When I was a kid, the cotswolds was scruffy, working countryside: the fencing was delapidated, with barbed wire and old iron gates; these days its either intricate iron fretting painted that particularly tasteful shade of olive/Cotswold/Daylesford green, or creosoted posts and rails so sturdy they’d keep out elephants. On a walk last weekend, almost every gate was padlocked or electric; posters warned we were under surveillance and entrance into any field would bring ‘Gurkha security guards’.

In my childhood  there was a different ethos, a true right to roam; gates were generally open, farmers were friendly, we rode and walked pretty well where we pleased over the Cotswold escarpment, jumping walls and pushing through woods from Stanway bank to Broadway. Not any more. There are still public footpaths, for sure. But often they are bordered with barbed wire, kettling the walker within the mean dimensions of a path; the rest of the field out of bounds. Last weekend, I’d planned to revisit a brook where we used to always play pooh-sticks, paddle on the stepping stones and even lie in the stream on hot days. Now the brook is still there but a sturdy fence with a security camera means it is inaccessible to the public. On a baking hot day last week, I could look but not touch its cooling waters. We used to do this route as a circular walk, but now the cut-through back across the fields is inaccessible (it belongs to one of Britain’s richest men who has high electronic gates and surveillance) meaning the only way home was along a road. We spent much of that last two miles flattening ourselves against the hedgerows and banks of what was once a peaceful lane as enormous four-by-fours thundered by or got snarled up, pumping out fumes, on the single track road.

When we drove a few miles to eat at a local pub later that day, (main courses £30)  we noticed many other people were reduced to walking their dogs in the busy lanes. The countryside is beautiful but increasingly it’s like a National Trust house or a museum – all look but don’t touch.   Access now is about cash. England’s most Green and Pleasant land is picturesquely idyllic still, but actually walking those pastures green is strictly for the (super-rich) few.  The countryside is peppered with signs saying:  “Private Property, Trespassers will be prosecuted”. Everything carved up into expensive pockets saying Keep Out. Maybe that’s why the new mass affluent incomers flock to Soho Farmhouse – at least it is somewhere to go. The irony is that the really posh landowners and gentry (whom the Soho Housers are trying to mix with and emulate), don’t go anywhere near the place, they are busy sunning themselves by their private lakes or pools. The night before my visit  I stayed with a very old friend in her beautiful Cotswold manor.  “Don’t go to that ghastly Soho theme park,” my hostess said. “Stay here by our pool with us!”

But even for the super rich the Cotswolds is not what it was. They too grumble about the disturbance from helicopters flying A listers and tech bros in an out of Maison Estelle et al, and moan about “the impossible traffic”. I put out a few calls for this article. One mega toff  land-owner agreed the Cotswolds had changed beyond all recognition: “You are right and accurate about the Cotswolds now being Beckham Central; particularly around Chipping Norton and the dreaded Farmhouse, but there are still some undiscovered pockets… I’ve lived in my house for half  a century and my family have been here for way longer than that, but because of the notoriety of the area, we now see an unstoppable police-absent spate of burglaries. That’s why we have put in electric security gates and a whole load of locks and cameras which we never used to have on our estate. In fact I don’t know why we bother as we’ve been burgled so often there’s nothing worth stealing in the house anymore – they’ve had it all, apart from a second hand tractor, a hedge cutter and a pick up truck!”

I asked if he has wired off his footpaths. He sighed.  “Not yet – but I keep wondering if we might have to because of the total disregard by some walkers of country ways – their dogs chase the pregnant sheep and lambs, they flatten the wheat crops and drop MarsBar wrappers and Coke tins etc everywhere; not to mention the motorcross riders who abuse the bridleways…”

He makes a good point about the in-comers who are more obsessed by their Instagram feeds and the Cotwolds as backdrop than keeping it viable as working countryside. These new Cotswoldians often don’t understand the Country Code (which bids us to leave no trace, collect all rubbish, shut gates and respect and protect the animals). And are often anti the kind of field sports such as shooting and hunting which bind the true country community together.

Where are the normal people?

I’m sure your hearts aren’t bleeding for my wealthy mates, and some of you will be anti-fox hunting – but spare a thought for the ordinary locals.  The normal kids I grew up with, whose fathers were blacksmiths, or farmers and or worked for the local hunt, and indeed my own wider family diaspora, have been driven to the margins. My  87-year-old aunt lives amidst a constant building site of new housing in her village, her beloved field and stables now hemmed in on all sides by cranes, scaffolding and JCBs. Others have moved away “somewhere more real” like Devon or Herefordshire – driven out by spiralling house prices. Some cling on in tiny cottages on the edge of over-expanding, ever more-developed, villages which sprout expensive Executive Homes (with de rigeur range rovers) like a particularly virulent cancer.

When I say I spent much of my childhood in the Cotswolds, scampering around on my scruffy pony, people raise their eyebrows as if I am a rich snob.  I try to explain that the cotswolds I grew up in wasn’t like it is now. That I remember a time when food came from Fine Fare with yellow value labels; cakes were bought from the WI Market on a Thursday morning and veg from the lady with the barrow near Cutsdean, who grew it in her garden. We’d get seasonal produce like apples or asparagus straight from stalls on farms in the Vale of Evesham.  I remember Lardy Cake from the ancient bakers in Moreton, and bacon bought from a butcher in Blockley with sawdust floors who knew everyone’s names; and sherbert lemons from a big stick jar in the newsagent by the church. All those shops are swanky residences now.

Memories of picking fruit and making preserves

Most of all I remember fruit farms, high on the wolds above Charingworth where we’d pick our own strawberries, raspberries and loganberries. Jamming them was the drumbeat of the summer. As kids we’d pick and stuff ourselves on the forbidden fruit, filling those green PYO baskets. Later we’d lick the sticky unset jam from saucers as mum made it in a giant rusty preserving pan on an electric hob. Last weekend I wanted to pick fruit, it’s like a pilgrimage to my maternal ancestors but all of those fruit farms are now gone; their bushes ripped out for Insta-tastic residences.

It’s not just the shops or the fruit farms, it’s the nature too. I remember the car windscreen being covered with insects, owls in the barn hooting, and hiking to inspect our water supply (which came from a muddy spring up the bank, surrounded by cows). All gone.

But most of all I remember the lowering grey August Cotswold skies, the green of the fields particularly intense underneath them.  And mud, and quietness broken only by the  woo-woo of wood pigeons.

I am only 54, but the passing of all that so fast makes me feel like I belonged to a vanished world. It’s true the past is another country. Never go back.