Deep in the dark heart of Bamford Country, mutiny brews. For the past two decades, Lady Carole has transformed the Cotswolds. But what do the locals really think of her?
I am at the flagship Daylesford Organic in the Cotswolds, holding up a strange receptacle that looks like something you’d leave outside your house with a ‘please take me’ sign taped to it. Instead, this functionless pile of twigs – a ‘coppice basket’ – bears the same price tag as an iPhone 13. I ask a shop assistant why it costs £595, and am met with a withering look. ‘It’s made by a local artisan, actually.’
Over 20 years, Daylesford has grown from a little farm shop selling organic produce to a retail park behemoth, complete with a gym, spa, garden centre, and ranges of clothing, beauty and homeware. At the helm is founder Carole Bamford (wife of billionaire JCB chairman, Lord Bamford) whose expanding fiefdom now includes four pubs and 32 holiday cottages in surrounding villages.
There is no shortage of breathless column inches dedicated to Lady Bamford – or Lady B, as she is known to staff – and her enterprises. Harper’s Bazaar describes her as a ‘renaissance woman’, a ‘self-starting champion of sustainability, entrepreneur and tastemaker extraordinaire’. A review of her pubs in the Times describes them as ‘ravishing’. But a chorus of neighbours, from the Chipping Norton weekenders to the born-and-bred locals, are fed up with the streams of Daylesford traffic – and the clientele they ferry.
The glitzification of the Cotswolds is well-documented: the Soho Farmhouse effect; Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squatting; the billionaires pricing out millionaires. But it seems that Lady Bamford’s imperial ambitions for the green hills of Gloucestershire know no limits.
After standoffs with a fleet of Porsche Cayennes in the car park, I arrived to find the aisles of Daylesford lined with magnums and jeroboams of Château Léoube, the Bamfords’ signature rosé. The produce is expensive – ‘£50 for a jar of honey’ expensive – but undeniably enticing. Bamford was an early adopter of the organic food movement, and is passionate about provenance and animal welfare; it’s said that she banters with Charles and Camilla over who first popularised the trend in Britain.
There are hundreds of punters thronging through the various outbuildings, yet very few carry shopping bags. It’s almost like they’ve come here to perform the pseudo-rustic Daylesford lifestyle. This may explain why the company has never turned a profit: in the last ten years, it has lost over £20 million. But that’s of little concern when Lady Bamford’s efforts are backed by a £7.65 billion fortune. JCB is the biggest privately owned manufacturing company in Britain.
The Bamfords’ primary residence is Daylesford House, a Grade I-listed Georgian pile on an estate next to the farm shop. The grand entrance hall is always festooned with flowers and climbing plants, and there are liveried staff on hand to ensure that any falling petals are caught before they hit the ground. It’s here that Lord and Lady B throw their lavish parties and perform their generosity – interior designer turned arbiter of ‘common’, Nicky Haslam, has a free pied-à-terre maintained for him at the Daylesford estate. There are second, third and fourth homes too: another Grade I-listed house in Staffordshire where JCB is headquartered, the aforementioned Château Léoube vineyard on the French Riviera, and a neo-Palladian villa in Barbados, where everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Richard E. Grant – both Bamford intimates – have stayed.
Lord Bamford is one of the purported Tory ‘super-donors’. He has given tens of millions to the Conservative Party over the last decade and the couple have been particularly generous to their close friend Boris Johnson. During the pandemic, Johnson was furnished with daily deliveries of Daylesford Organic ready meals, heated up and served to the then-Prime Minister by a personal Daylesford chef. The Bamfords paid for and hosted Johnson’s wedding to Carrie Symonds on the Daylesford estate, then gave the newlyweds free access to both Lady B’s £20 million pad in Knightsbridge and another of the estate’s cottages. But the ‘pro quo’ to the ‘quid’ never quite materialised for Lady Bamford. The Observer reported that she was marked to receive a damehood on a draft of Johnson’s final honours list, but the outgoing PM was thwarted from ennobling his landlady.
‘The Earth is not a gift from our parents, we’re only borrowing it from our children,’ says Bamford in a promotional video. Daylesford Organic has B Corp status (‘a designation given to companies that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability’) and uses solar power and biodegradable packaging, but critics are quick to cry foul. Lord Bamford rides to work in one of the biggest helicopters in the UK. It’s the couple’s preferred mode of transport for hopping around the country, much to the chagrin of locals. ‘During Ascot week, it comes over four to six times a day,’ says one resident. ‘It’s very disruptive and it’s not appreciated by anybody’. Then there’s the private jet and the 204-foot superyacht, the Virginian. ‘I can’t be green all the time,’ she has shrugged in the past, which is better than nothing.
Lady Bamford is a regular presence at her various establishments. She’ll often materialise in a cloud of linens and cashmere, prompting an Anna Wintour-style panic among staff. ‘She waltzes in, and everyone stands to attention,’ says Henry Shaw, a local who worked at Daylesford as a teen. ‘She’ll then look around and say something like, “Why is that plant pot there?” and everyone freaks out. This woman has incredible power.’
Daylesford used to be a tiny village. Estate workers and long-stay residents lived in its hamlet of 15 cottages. But according to locals I spoke to, they were turfed out when Lady Bamford decided to convert them all into holiday lets. She has since bought 17 more in the neighbouring villages of Kingham and Oddington, daubing them in her trademark Daylesford duck egg blue and renaming them ‘Bunny’ or ‘Little Owl’. ‘Community life is cracked because families who used to live in these cottages now live elsewhere. Societies and activities are mostly defunct,’ says one Kingham local.
In her new book, Daylesford Living, Bamford writes that she decided to buy her pub in Kingham to ‘ensure the survival of a much-loved local institution that could live on for the community.’ It was formerly called The Tollgate Inn, but after a refurb and a rechristening, it reopened in 2013 as The Wild Rabbit.
I walk down a bridleway that connects Daylesford to Kingham and head into The Wild Rabbit. This is where, according to Lady Bamford, ‘We established the aesthetic for which Daylesford has become noted: warm, understated elegance, paired with the feeling of being nurtured.’ On the front terrace sits a drinks truck with a huge sign that reads, ‘Hurrah, it’s rosé season! Please order at the bar if no bunny is here.’ The food prices are humbling. The cheapest starter is £16, while the only main course under £35 sounds suspiciously like a side: hispi cabbage with potatoes. Desserts are all £14. ‘It’s no longer a place where villagers go to drink or eat,’ says a Kingham local. The interiors are very Saint-Tropez: beigery, sheepskin rugs and artfully dotted throws. A bunch of young men come in and start braying about the padel game they just played at Daylesford. I flee through the manicured pair of topiary rabbits that flank the entrance.
Since 2020, Bamford has bought a further three pubs in the area: The Fox at Oddington, The Bell at Charlbury, and The Three Horseshoes at Asthall. While The Bell was a mid-rate Greene King boozer before its Bamfordisation in 2023, the other two were beloved country pubs. Oddington resident Robert Pierce Jones remembers the glory days of The Fox Inn, where he was a regular. ‘There was a beautiful old bar that you could drink at, and they used to give you locals’ prices. It would be a combination of out-of-towners and locals, but it was always in balance.’ Lady Bamford bought the pub for £1.75 million and undertook a full renovation during COVID, building new guest rooms, adding an extension and gutting the interiors. It’s only a few minutes’ drive from The Wild Rabbit, so I try my luck there.
It is a place furnished almost entirely with terrible puns. Across the newly built blonde wood bar, ‘For Fox Sake’ is printed in block capitals. Above the kitchen pass is ‘Foxylicious’, while staff wear T-shirts that say ‘Foxy Lady’ or ‘What the Fox?’. There’s an equine theme too, with one wall covered in photographs of the Bamford children riding horses and posing in jodhpurs for Country Life, while their copious showjumping rosettes hang from a beam in the dining room. Daylesford-branded geranium-scented candles are lit everywhere, giving the vague aroma of a massage parlour.
It is impossible not to open the cocktail menu and let out a little scream. Names include ‘She’s Crazy Like a Fool, Lychee, Lychee Cool’, ‘Spicy Marg Mate’, and ‘Let’s Get Spritzicle’. There are events like ‘DJ & Pizza Thursdays’, where you can sip your Spicy Marg Mate to Balearic house tunes. ‘It’s very loud, sort of throbbing music they have on, and it’s very much a young person’s club atmosphere now rather than a pub,’ says Janet Eustace, Oddington’s Parish Council clerk. ‘We don’t go anymore because we can’t hear ourselves think.’ But according to staff, The Fox is Lady Bamford’s favourite. On rainy days, she has been known to light up a Vogue at her preferred window seat. When a punter once complained to staff, they said, ‘You can tell her to stop if you like, but we can’t’.
For a genuine public house experience, I am directed to The King’s Head in nearby Bledington, where the wood is dark and the bar is propped up by locals. ‘We are seriously running short of real pubs in this area,’ says Archie Orr-Ewing, its owner. ‘It seems to be the latest thing a billionaire needs these days to go along with the racehorse and yacht’. Property developer Sir Tony Gallagher now owns five pubs in the Cotswolds, a couple of which he bought with Liz ‘Shiv’ Murdoch, daughter of Rupert.
Lady Bamford is now 78 years old, and yet she shows no sign of slowing down: she’s just opened an ‘events space’ at Daylesford and is trying to redevelop a hotel on the edge of Kingham. I say ‘trying’ – her initial planning application for a 46-bedroom hotel, spa, gym, pool, alehouse and bakehouse was rejected after villagers sent 53 letters of objection. A new application has subsequently been submitted with a slightly reduced room count and a £20,000 deal-sweetener to smarten up the village hall.
‘There is always more to do,’ Lady Bamford said in a recent interview. It was both a promise and a warning. More pubs, cottages and hotels will be subsumed into the Daylesford empire until they re-emerge stamped with puns, smeared with duck-egg blue paint and baptised in Provençal rosé.
