Why ESSEX is the new Cotswolds: Noisy roads, swarms of tourists and the pretentious glossy posse have ruined it - much better to move like me to the real rural heaven, says SYBILLA HART
TEAM ESSEX
Sybilla Hart, writer
I grew up in Jilly Cooper’s Bisley which was, at the time, the unfashionable corner of the Cotswolds.
Back in the day, our local town of Stroud was crawling with tea rooms frequented by grannies with blue rinses, while the school run through industrial Brimscombe was not exactly scenic.
So I find it quite amusing that the Cotswolds has now become the chi-chi playground for A-list celebrities and the uber rich. Stroud is now considered rather chic but, to me, it will always be distinctly grey with too many multi-storey car parks.
At least when I was growing up it was authentic, with ‘real people living there’ as my mother would say, as opposed to just a stream of tourists in Airbnbs. It makes me glad I moved out a while back.
Admittedly, my husband Charlie and I didn’t exactly want to leave 13 years ago. We did try to buy a house in the Cotswolds that suited us and our three children, then aged between two and six, but it was hopeless.
Every house had something dreadfully wrong with it – a waterlogged garden or an add-on that deserved an award for the worst extension of the year.
And you didn’t get much bang for your buck. We viewed one particularly run-down five-bed and it was on the market for £1.3 million.
At our wits’ end, we changed tack and started looking east to the Essex-Suffolk borders where Charlie grew up.
Sybilla Hart, writer, says in East Anglia you can stumble across one hidden little village after another and not have to go near a main road
At first, I’ll admit, I was hesitant about having an ‘Essex’ address –something I know my family look down their noses at – but the area has all the good qualities of the Cotswolds of old.
We found ourselves a beautiful old farmhouse with views big enough for our growing family (we now have five children) over the Peb Valley.
The A12 takes you the whole way to Woodbridge for a dinner party and for a weekend away you can potter up the coast to Norfolk, avoiding motorways if you want. Bliss.
In the Cotswolds there are so many intersecting motorways and A-roads, it really put me off. It’s not abnormal to sit in a gorgeous house there and hear the road in the background.
For me, no amount of landscaped gardens or perfect pool houses would be enough to make up for the hum of nearby traffic.
Here in East Anglia you can stumble across one hidden little village after another – which have barely changed since the days of Constable or Cedric Morris – and not have to go near a main road.
You can follow the River Stour, flanked with poplar trees, from one chocolate box village to another without spotting a soul, although you may see several cows.
Best of all, there are no tourists clamouring for a selfie, as they do now in Bibury, and no tour buses in sight.
Neither do you have to get dressed up in chic outfits to go to the pub, as the glossy Gloucestershire posse do.
In fact, you’d get an odd look if you did. You could pretty much run through open fields next to Stoke-by-Nayland (in my opinion one of the prettiest villages in England) wearing clothes from Sainsbury’s Tu and no one would bat an eyelid. Unlike all the pretentious Amandaland Cotswolders, with their Botoxed foreheads and permanent ear-to-ear grins.
The Cotswolds now attract global A-listers such as Beyonce and Jay-Z.
While I don’t have anything against them, if I’m in the English countryside the last thing I want is to be aware of who is wearing or doing what.
The whole point of rural England is to escape from trends. To go on long walks with smelly, muddy dogs and marvel at mother nature as opposed to curating the perfect pastel tablescape with tat that was probably made in China in your minimalist beige home with one book on the glass coffee table.
I’m sorry to tell my mother and sister that I won’t be coming home to the Cotswold stone townhouse they have found for me in Cirencester, as pretty as it is. ‘The girls could go to Deer Park School and walk home to ours for tea through the park,’ my mother enthuses.
It’s a tempting thought but I’ve got used to my slice of rural England and I’m not sure how we’d fit five children, five dogs, two cats, six chickens and one horse into the house with a third of an acre of garden.
The thing about the countryside, whether you are in the Cotswolds or Suffolk, is that there is enough mud this time of year to put off everyone but the most seasoned country-dweller.
If the Cotswolds set can cope with mud on their white Range Rovers and Loro Piana cashmere then all the best to them.
I suspect that after a few winters knee-deep in the sticky stuff, some celebrities might bid goodbye to the glorious South West and retreat back to LA, where they will never need a mud room.
TEAM COTSWOLDS
Natasha Rufus Isaacs, co-founder of Beulah London
Whenever I tell people my sister, Sybilla, lives in Essex, there’s a brief but telling pause, long enough for Joey Essex and his veneers to flash across their mind, before I hurriedly add that it’s actually a lovely bit, right on the Suffolk border, all countryside and rolling hills.
Sybella's sister Natasha Rufus Isaacs, co-founder of Beulah London, says the Cotswolds look as if they're just off a postcard
The Cotswolds, in my experience, carry a different perception.
The area is known for its quintessentially English village greens, church spires and rolling landscape. I live in the Ampney villages, where everything is built from honey-coloured stone as if on a postcard.
Essex, meanwhile, is undeniably more beautiful than I expected, but comes with its own quirks: maniac drivers who model themselves on Lewis Hamilton and an impressive collection of potholes.
In the Cotswolds, even the village names whisper charm – Quenington and Coln St Aldwyns – while Essex prefers to keep things entertaining with gems such as Rotten End.
My parents moved to the small village of Bisley three months before I was born in 1983, so the ‘Shire’ is the only world I’ve ever really known.
In my 20s, I escaped to London, got married, and had three children. But enduring both lockdowns in the city sent us scurrying back to Gloucestershire.
Despite my mother’s sighs of, ‘Darling, please move back for good’, I was adamant I wouldn’t return permanently. Then my husband landed a job nearby, a rental house unexpectedly appeared, and we jumped before I had time to object.
The following summer, we made it official and bought a derelict 1970s bungalow, knocking it down and replacing it with a five-bedroom house we moved into just before Christmas.
Building your own house isn’t something I’d recommend to anyone with small children – or indeed to anyone keen on staying sane – but I am delighted with the results, with views over the Marlborough Downs and built in Cotswold stone.
You don’t get that in Essex, where every home seems too pink and medieval, with beams so low my 6ft 4in husband would be at risk of constant concussion.
When most people think of the Cotswolds – and I feel Sybilla believes in this stereotype now – they picture toffs in Barbour jackets, each clutching a Labrador, while mothers in Fair Isle knits (Botoxed to the nines), cluster at the school gates.
My experience couldn’t be more different.
The mums I gravitate toward arrive mud-splattered and wrapped in Dryrobes. It’s a minor victory if anyone’s glanced in a mirror, let alone brushed their teeth. Only last week, one mum – a farmer’s wife – turned up late and flustered, announcing, entirely unapologetically, that she’d just delivered a baby calf.
Totally genuine. No Botox or veneers in sight.
Sure, there is some truth to the Soho Farmhouse stereotype, but they’re just the weekenders, and not even the kind of weekenders who stay with friends. The real locals keep a wide berth.
I miss my sister deeply and still catch myself wishing she’d ended up just down the road.
She and Charlie even viewed a house nearby before opting for what we now call ‘the Essex move’.
Mum and I still send her listings of houses here we think she might like and I often imagine us meeting for coffee after the school run, rather than swapping updates from opposite sides of the country. Instead, our lives have diverged: mine towards honey-coloured stone and Labradors, hers towards East Anglia.
I know different people want different things from where they live – but Essex is definitely not the only way.
