Gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds has been a popular pastime for centuries. So too is writing about the huge numbers of people gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds. The Times, Telegraph, Express and the BBC have all covered the explosion of mass-tourism since the pandemic, which is driven mainly by social media algorithms bombarding the globe with irresistible Cotswolds images. You can now tour the Cotswolds to gawp at the sight of thousands of other people gawping, or buy a paper and gawp at a professional gawper gawping at gawpers.
A good start on this gawping tour is to drop in to Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat farm, where parking supervisors will usher you into the Jeremy’s enlarged car-park but you will then have to queue for two hours even to get inside the farm shop. You will feel a frisson of schadenfreude as you watch parents joining the back of that slow-moving queue and breaking the news to their children that it will be two hours till they set eyes on a jar of mustard.
Then, proceed to the pretty village of Bibury. The daily invasion endured by the residents of this village begins at 10 a.m. every day of the year, when the first coach of the day crosses its ancient stone bridge, reverses with difficulty into one of the two coach-parking bays, and disgorges its passengers, who are given a maximum of 45 minutes to look round, before being whisked off to the next stop on their one-day Cotswolds tour.
Meanwhile, in its ‘rewilding’ and ‘low carbon’ drive, the NT is refusing to dredge the estate’s lake
I was there last week, on what was a heavily Chinese day. Bibury has been a favoured destination for the Japanese ever since Emperor Hirohito visited in the 1920s and declared it a ‘sacred place’. But I’m told that the Chinese now outnumber the Japanese, among its up to 10,000 visitors per day.
The tourists who alight on the pavement beside the water meadow seem as bewildered by their unfamiliar surroundings as we would be if we were plonked down in a remote village in China on a weekday morning. There’s nothing to do except walk the short distance to the highly photogenic, still-inhabited 14th-century cottages called Arlington Row.
They have no front gardens. So, watch as the tourists go right up and stand inside the medieval doorways, pulling on the door-knockers or the roses as they smile for their photo. This activity will carry on all day, as coach after coach is disgorged. I talked to a resident of one of the cottages, Brian Skada, who tells me he’s ‘the most photographed man in Britain’, snapped by crowds each time he opens his front door. When he’s carrying the shopping in, tourists try to come in with him and sit down in his front parlour.
There’s one public loo, but you have to queue and pay. Recently, a coach tourist from rural China was spotted squatting down to do his morning bowel movement in the middle of the main road, the B4425 between Burford and Cirencester.
By the time that first batch returns to the coach, three more will have arrived. So you now can sit on a low wall and watch the fun, as stressed-out coach drivers try to deal with the lack of parking bays, and take turns to cross the narrow bridge cracking under the strain, and the locals get caught up in the 45-minute gridlock.
It’s crazy. There’s no regulation. You sometimes get ten coaches in the village at a time, causing all-round rage. The Cotswold District Council is being slow to do anything to ease the situation with enforcement or the building of more parking spaces. Bibury, it seems clear to me, should be taken right off the Cotswolds coach tour. You can live a fulfilled life without seeing Arlington Row. Visitors bring in nothing financially, except 40p for the loo and perhaps the money for a tea towel from the trout-farm shop.
Down the road at Bourton-on-the-Water, the opposite problem has arisen. Bourton, ‘the Venice of the Cotswolds’, thrives on its mega-tourism. Go there on a Saturday afternoon in June, and you’ll join teeming crowds of happy visitors sprawled on the greensward beside the river Windrush. Reports of the death of the high street are exaggerated, judging by Bourton’s heaving independent shops, six pubs and packed restaurants.
But here – crazily – the Cotswold District Council has now banned coaches from parking within walking distance of the town centre, and is doing its best to make it impossible for a coach even to stop and let passengers out. So, here, watch as full-up coaches drive slowly along the main road, searching in vain for a stopping place. All the car parks that used to have coach parking bays have been turned by the council into cars only.
I chatted with Madan Samuel, a former surgeon who now runs Bourton’s Post Office. He tells me that the District Council, while doing nothing as coaches swamp Bibury, seems to have a snobbish antipathy towards coaches when it comes to Bourton. ‘They’ve said in print that they want to attract “a certain kind of clientele” – meaning “the Daylesford type” – middle-class car-drivers, rather than coach loads from the Midlands. And they really shouldn’t be banning certain sections of society from coming here.’
The advantage of coach loads, in a place like this, humming with local businesses, is that because customers book their coach tour weeks in advance, they come even when it’s pouring with rain and the car-drivers are staying away. Madan tells me that if Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown gets re-elected as Conservative MP for the Cotswolds, there’s hope: he has promised to prioritise coach parking. If Paul Hodginson (Lib Dem) gets elected, ‘we can kiss goodbye to it, and half the high street will close down.’
In the enchanting and peaceful Cotswold village of Sherborne, meanwhile, residents have been thrown into a state of dread, because the National Trust, which owns the land around it, has announced its plans to open something called ‘Sherborne Big Nature Big Access’.
So here, you can come and gawp at the site on which future coach loads will soon be disgorged: next to fields on which paths for mountain biking and three visitor ‘hubs’ that will be built to ‘serve a variety of visitor needs’.
The literature for this plan, drawn up by National Trust marketing staff, who spout buzz words, is guff: ‘A place that is playing its part in the climate response. Where communities are contributing and benefitting from change. Where everyone feels welcome and can help to care for this special place… We are working with our partners and neighbours to deliver landscape-wide change.’
Meanwhile, in its ‘rewilding’ and ‘low carbon’ drive, the NT is refusing to dredge the estate’s lake, so it has turned from clear into a brown swamp. Rather than getting on with the unglamorous tasks they’re meant to be doing (looking after the estate bequeathed to them for the nation), they want to ‘reimagine’ it, aiming to siphon off the Bourton crowds and introduce them to the joys of the rewilded countryside. Let’s hope the Bourton crowds say ‘no, thank you,’ to this invitation.