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. But my recent visits to my family’s home patch in the heart of the Cotswolds have 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.
The direction of travel there has been clear for a while. The outstanding natural beauty of the yellow-stoned villages, verdant hills and lavender and peony-bestrewn gardens has made it a magnet for DFLs (Down From London weekenders) for decades.
Fair enough. On a good run, it’s less than a two-hour drive from the capital, which makes the place rather too accessible for its own good. Add fast rail connections from Charlbury and Moreton-in-Marsh to Paddington, and the once-rural Cotswolds has become yet another bit of prime posh commuter belt. House prices have gone stratospheric.
And the result is 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.
The area’s beauty has made it a magnet for Instagram smugness, as ‘lifestyle bloggers’ and influencers such as Josie and Charlie Irons crow about the magnificence of their alliums, conservatories, hand-made leather boots and garden veg.
It’s the Cotswolds as an Insta wonderland, all pouting twenty-somethings showing off the kinds of outfits no countrywoman would be seen dead in; glorifying a Cotswold meets Montecito/Beverly Hills lifestyle of summer gardens, poncy flat whites and trout-pout features. Meghan Markle will be filming a naff lifestyle show here before you know it.
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 generations of a local family. We’d go as kids for whizzwheels 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? Real locals shop at Aldi, while posh incomers are found in Warner’s Budgens (one old toff friend refers to it as ‘Selfridges Food Hall’ because of the prices).
Yet Budgens is budget compared to that most echt of all Cotswolds destinations, Daylesford Organic, the emporium owned by Lady Bamford, part of the JCB-owning family. Here, a nectarine costs £4 and tomato soup starts at £6.50.
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. Just up the road is Soho Farmhouse, beloved of celebrities, incomers and weekenders, with its array of restaurants (Japanese, Italian-ish, a bistro, a salad bar) and tin huts for bedrooms, scattered around the old farm and reached by retro bikes. It’s a theme park of spas (£180 for an hour-long massage) and £15 salads.
Earlier in the summer, I was taken by a friend to lounge by the pool. We sat on sunbeds a couple of rows back from the muddy (slightly dank and smelly) pond and watched the scene.
There were yummy mummies, Mounjaro-thin, in expensive broderie anglaise. Americans talking loudly about the ‘impossible cuteness’. A posse of bemuscled thirty-something tech bros talking business loudly while drinking cocktails, and a group of Dubai influencers shouting from a roped-off VIP sunbed area in front of us as they devoured bottle after bottle of rosé.
I inquired 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. It reminded me of Cannes, where you get fleeced 100 euros for a sunbed on a cigarette-butt-strewn patch of pebbly 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 saw an influx of the global super-rich – from tech nepo-baby weddings (thank you Steve Jobs’s daughter Eve) in Great Tew, to US Vice President JD Vance taking up residence for August in a rented mansion in Dean, down the road from David and Samantha Cameron and former US chat show host Ellen DeGeneres.
Then there are the crowds generated by Jeremy Clarkson’s reality show set on his farm – the traffic jams around his Diddly Squat farm shop and pub The Farmer’s Dog in Burford drive locals mad. But sitting in an endless row of swanky cars (it’s like anyone not driving a Porsche Cayenne, Tesla or the latest Range Rover has been evicted from the county) is just an everyday fact of Cotswold life.
In Burford at the end of last month – yes, exacerbated by the food and music event Big Feastival, run by Blur bassist-turned-cheese impresario, Alex James – it was gridlock. But even without the festival, the traffic on the Fosse Way through Moreton, Stow and Cirencester is worse than that in Camden Town.
And there’s no escape: Google Maps now sends all 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 everything changes. Of course, after nearly 50 years, the place where my family hail from won’t be the same. For the record, my mum and aunt were born on Bredon 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 for ever. My dad lived there for 30 years, near Shipston and then in the shadow of Ilmington Hill. The place is full of family memories for me.
But the transformation is stark. Until recently there were run-down 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 dilapidated, with barbed wire and old iron gates; now it’s 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. One poster warned we were under surveillance and entrance into any field would bring ‘Gurkha security guards’, many of whom have indeed served in the British Army.
In my childhood there was a different ethos and a true right to roam. Gates were generally open and 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, while the rest of the field is out of bounds.
Last weekend, I’d planned to revisit a brook where we used to play pooh-sticks, paddle on the stepping stones and even lie in the stream on hot days. The brook is still there, but a sturdy fence with a security camera means it’s inaccessible to the public.
We used to do this route as a circular walk, but now the cut-through back across the fields is cut off (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 the last two miles flattening ourselves against the hedgerows and banks of what was once a peaceful lane as four-by-fours thundered by.
Driving a few miles to eat at a local pub later (main courses £30), we noticed many others 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 picturesque still, but actually walking those pastures green is strictly for the (super-rich) few.
But even for the super rich, the Cotswolds is not what it was just a few years ago. They, too, grumble about the disturbance from helicopters flying A-listers and tech bros in and out.
As for the mega-toff landowners who’ve been here for centuries, one I spoke to agreed the Cotswolds had changed beyond all recognition: ‘You are right about the Cotswolds now being Posh & Becks Central; particularly around Chipping Norton and the dreaded Farmhouse. 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 spate of burglaries. That’s why we put in electric gates and a whole load of locks and cameras which we never used to have on our estate.
‘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’d 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, and they flatten the wheat crops and drop Mars Bar wrappers and Coke tins everywhere; not to mention the motorcross riders who abuse the bridleways.’
He makes a good point about the incomers who are more obsessed by their Instagram feeds and the Cotswolds as backdrop than by keeping it 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). They are also often vehemently against the kind of field sports like shooting and hunting which bind the true country community together.
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 ordinary locals. The normal children I grew up with, whose fathers were blacksmiths or farmers, 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 amid 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 diggers. Others have moved away, to ‘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 rigueur 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, but it wasn’t like it is now.
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. 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 those fruit farms are gone, their bushes ripped out for influencer residences. It’s not just the shops or 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 surrounded by cows). All gone.
But most of all I remember the lowering grey 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. And one to which I fear we can never go back.
Eleanor Mills is the founder of noon.org.uk and author of Much More To Come (£10.99, HarperCollins)