An excerpt from our latest book, The Pub. To read more from Clive, Jimmy McIntosh, Katy Hessel, John Banville, Charlotte Ivers and more, buy your copy today.
This might be the worst ‘pub’ in the world. With its Saint-Tropez-white patio furniture, anxious-to-please staff in ill-fitting red jackets, and a primary clientele of PR gals pushing around plates of crab linguine, The Bell in Charlbury is about as dishonest as a boozer gets.
On this bright and crisp Friday afternoon in May, it occurs to me that, perhaps, The Bell wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t pertain to being a pub. If it just came clean and admitted what it really is; a softly enforced members club where nobody spends more than two afternoons a year. Yet, owner Lady Carole Bamford is utterly convinced that The Bell and her four other upcycled boozers around the ‘shires are, indeed, pubs. Whereas to me, they look much more like vanity projects, for the JCB-empire spouse turned Countess of the Cotswolds.
Having only ever visited the humdrum county towns of Cheltenham and Cirencester before, I arrived in the Cotswolds trying to make sense of a part of England that has become byword for celebrity frolicking and establishment intrigue. This amorphous, somewhat abstract blob of green – which spans Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire – is the closest thing Britain has to a Hamptons or Palm Springs, a secretive, wealthy enclave of conifer-hidden mansions laden with yurts, firepits and extramarital skullduggery.
Most of the British elite have a pad here; the Windsors, the Camerons, the Johnsons, the Beckhams, Kate Moss, Rebekah Brooks and Hugh Grant, to name but a few. Alongside them are an ever-growing band of industrialists, financiers, Gulf royals and the few last-remaining oligarchs. Although subject to the same laws as everywhere else in Britain, the Cotswolds has the social makeup of a tax haven, or the Royal Box at Wimbledon. A place where wealth, power and leisure come together under wide open skies.
Recently, these sorts have found a new hobby: running boozers. On top of Lady Bam’s portfolio, Elisabeth ‘Shiv’ Murdoch owns two pubs in the area, and Jeremy Clarkson has bought another (on a former dogging hotspot, according to The Oxford Mail). Then there are the numerous thatched drinking holes that have been taken over by Big Hospitality groups – such as The Pig – or by Park Lane chefs looking for a new outpost for their empire. While the notorious Soho Farmhouse isn’t exactly a pub, it has further cemented the sexy, bibulous, Condé Nast-goes-country cliche of the Cotswolds.
Because of this, the area boasts a drinking culture like no other. Here, pub gentrification doesn’t just mean ‘wasabi peas behind the bar and an extra two quid on your Guinness,’ but sharing urinal troughs with some of the wealthiest people in Europe. A ‘changing clientele’ doesn’t just mean a few Guardian readers at the meat raffle, but Tom Ford sampling your guest ales. However, this is just one version of the Cotswolds. Much in the same way Notting Hill still boasts the occasional QPR pub, or all-night Moroccan barber shop, there are all kinds of niches and anachronisms to be found within the rolling green hills.
Alongside the aforementioned The Bell, there is The Rose & Crown, a gruff, resolutely ‘local’ boozer, where men with driving bans and mutton chops spray pints of ale at each other. Then, there is The Bull; a foodie, boozy, ‘down from London’ kind of establishment with a much younger and trendier clientele than The Bell – a little slice of Westbourne Grove dropped into the Oxfordshire countryside. The sort of place where you might share a tankard of Bishop’s Finger with Ellie Goulding and Brooklyn Beckham.
