Another day and yet another famous name is supposedly moving to the Cotswolds, or at least a part of the country that they think is the Cotswolds but usually isn’t. This time it’s Beyoncé, who is said to be in the final stages of buying 60 acres near Wigginton, which isn’t in the Cotswolds.
To be fair, it’s closer than it is to Northampton, say, or Coventry, which is more than you can say for half the other places routinely cited, so fair do’s. Anyway, she and her husband, Jay-Z, are apparently seeking planning permission to build a spectacular rural estate in Wigginton in which they will no doubt spend two days a year when the Hamptons is too hot, and good luck to them.
One local, asked for his thoughts on the subject, encapsulated all that is best about this country when he replied: “I don’t give a flying toss.” What puzzles me, though, is why? Of all the places in all the land, why are Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and Ellen DeGeneres raving about the Cotswolds? Why is JD Vance holidaying there and Eve Jobs marrying there?
I’ve never been to Wigginton but I spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and, yes, it’s lovely but so are plenty of other places. If you’re traveling there by helicopter, as I imagine these people are, it doesn’t matter how close you are to London or wherever you park your private jet.
Friday night rush hour on the M40 is never going to form part of Beyoncé’s lived experience and her gratitude journal is unlikely ever to mention the end of the roadworks at Hanger Lane. So why not take the chopper to a house on the Gower peninsula instead, or north Norfolk, or the Isle of Skye?
I’ve been to all the places usually cited around there as draws — the Falkland Arms at Great Tew, Soho Farmhouse, the pretty villages of Bibury and Shipston-on-Stour and Chipping Campden. What can I say? The Falkland Arms is a pretty pub in a pretty village. Bibury is overrun. Soho Farmhouse is a middle-class cult, a huge car park with a mediocre Caesar salad on the side. Daylesford Farm Shop is ideal if you have 30 quid to spend on a chicken and RH England, the lavishly upscale outpost of the American homewares giant Restoration Hardware, is reliably both stunningly beautiful and echoingly empty.
The countryside thereabouts, like all countryside as far as I can tell, is drab most of the time but lovely in spring and summer, bucolic even, and with so many overlooked pockets. The municipal recycling facilities near Deddington, for example, which almost nobody ever mentions in the same breath as Beyoncé, are nevertheless the most beautiful in the land, commanding sweeping views across the Oxfordshire countryside. Unlike Diddly Squat, there are no queues and why the council hasn’t flogged the site for a fortune I have no idea. The achingly trendy Estelle Manor is part club, part hotel and so completely up itself that a friend walked out.
Beyoncé’s nearest big town will be Banbury, which I’m sorry to tell her is a mess, a once-proud market town hollowed out by expensive parking in the centre and free parking in the retail park out of town. Oxford’s still got its dreaming spires but it’s impossible to get near them these days unless you do park and ride.
Even if she’s making an extra special effort that day to keep it real, I can’t see Beyoncé doing park and ride. So I’ve got no idea why you’re here, Bey, but welcome to the neighborhood. And trust me about the dump.
Hilary Rose is a longtime columnist and features writer at The Times of London
