The Cotswolds are up in arms. This is not for the usual reasons to do with new housing developments or solar farms, but simply because J D Vance may be spending his summer holiday there. Rather than being flattered that the US Vice-President should have chosen these isles as the place to spend some of his rare leisure time, or reflecting that good relations with the US are quite important at a time of tariffs, some people are threatening to protest. It will be the biggest thing to have stirred this famously idyllic and generally well-heeled part of England since the Countryside March of 2002.
Wait, though: put down the pitchforks. Whatever you think of him, give the man a break. Holidays, especially family ones, should be sacrosanct. Besides, be grateful to Americans – they invented the Cotswolds, now one of the few English regions to be its own internationally recognised brand, in the first place.
Two hundred years ago, the Cotswolds didn’t seem too special to William Cobbett, who called them “an ugly country” – shallow-soiled, treeless, unpleasingly bumpy. Bad to farm, they were only one grade up from the detested heaths of Surrey.
Times have changed since then. We’ve an eye for the dry-stone walls made, as Cobbett contemptuously put it, of “brash” – and we know that some of them date from the Neolithic period. If only Cobbett had been taken by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust to see coralroot bitter-cress and the bird’s-nest orchid in the ancient beechwoods of the Painswick Valley. Smell the wild garlic! Rather than presenting a bald and empty landscape, the round-shouldered, bosomy Cotswolds now seem to embrace visitors – J D Vance and family included – in a maternal warmth.
It took artists and writers, often American, to see the beauty. A group of them, including the painter John Singer Sargent and the novelist Henry James, formed a summer colony at Broadway in the 1880s. I have a fondness for Edwin Abbey who had a studio at Fairford, where he painted huge murals for the Boston Public Library on historical themes – the models were posed in costumes sewn by his wife. Unfortunately he went mad.
With its old-fashioned villages, their honey-coloured streets dignified by Classical doorcases, their churches still redolent of the wealth of the medieval wool trade, the late Victorian Cotswolds were far from London, not much industrialised and cheap. Farmers might still be seen ploughing with oxen, as they had since the Norman period. To William Morris, it seemed perfection; he called Arlington Row in Bibury “the most beautiful village in England”. This was followed by a stampede of creatives from the Arts and Crafts Movement, such as the charismatic C R Ashbee, who led a band of East End metalworkers to Chipping Campden in 1902, and Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers who lived at Sapperton. These arty types not only shaped how the Cotswolds look today but also vigorously protected the places that they loved. If Chipping Campden is idyllic, thank the etcher F L Griggs. Visitors who loved the Cotswold landscape have done much to preserve it.
Vance is not perhaps a preservationist but readers of his book Hillbilly Elegy will know that Nature is profoundly important to him. Son of a dysfunctional family in Ohio, he was grounded by visits to his grandparents’ shack in rural Kentucky. Things could get violent but he loved the stability and roamed the Creek. I would rather meet Vance in a Cotswolds pub than Jeremy Clarkson.
Hear more about the Cotswolds on Clive Aslet and John Goodall’s podcast Your Places or Mine
The Cotswolds are up in arms. This is not for the usual reasons to do with new housing developments or solar farms, but simply because J D Vance may be spending his summer holiday there. Rather than being flattered that the US Vice-President should have chosen these isles as the place to spend some of his rare leisure time, or reflecting that good relations with the US are quite important at a time of tariffs, some people are threatening to protest. It will be the biggest thing to have stirred this famously idyllic and generally well-heeled part of England since the Countryside March of 2002.
Wait, though: put down the pitchforks. Whatever you think of him, give the man a break. Holidays, especially family ones, should be sacrosanct. Besides, be grateful to Americans – they invented the Cotswolds, now one of the few English regions to be its own internationally recognised brand, in the first place.
Two hundred years ago, the Cotswolds didn’t seem too special to William Cobbett, who called them “an ugly country” – shallow-soiled, treeless, unpleasingly bumpy. Bad to farm, they were only one grade up from the detested heaths of Surrey.
Times have changed since then. We’ve an eye for the dry-stone walls made, as Cobbett contemptuously put it, of “brash” – and we know that some of them date from the Neolithic period. If only Cobbett had been taken by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust to see coralroot bitter-cress and the bird’s-nest orchid in the ancient beechwoods of the Painswick Valley. Smell the wild garlic! Rather than presenting a bald and empty landscape, the round-shouldered, bosomy Cotswolds now seem to embrace visitors – J D Vance and family included – in a maternal warmth.
It took artists and writers, often American, to see the beauty. A group of them, including the painter John Singer Sargent and the novelist Henry James, formed a summer colony at Broadway in the 1880s. I have a fondness for Edwin Abbey who had a studio at Fairford, where he painted huge murals for the Boston Public Library on historical themes – the models were posed in costumes sewn by his wife. Unfortunately he went mad.
With its old-fashioned villages, their honey-coloured streets dignified by Classical doorcases, their churches still redolent of the wealth of the medieval wool trade, the late Victorian Cotswolds were far from London, not much industrialised and cheap. Farmers might still be seen ploughing with oxen, as they had since the Norman period. To William Morris, it seemed perfection; he called Arlington Row in Bibury “the most beautiful village in England”. This was followed by a stampede of creatives from the Arts and Crafts Movement, such as the charismatic C R Ashbee, who led a band of East End metalworkers to Chipping Campden in 1902, and Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers who lived at Sapperton. These arty types not only shaped how the Cotswolds look today but also vigorously protected the places that they loved. If Chipping Campden is idyllic, thank the etcher F L Griggs. Visitors who loved the Cotswold landscape have done much to preserve it.
Vance is not perhaps a preservationist but readers of his book Hillbilly Elegy will know that Nature is profoundly important to him. Son of a dysfunctional family in Ohio, he was grounded by visits to his grandparents’ shack in rural Kentucky. Things could get violent but he loved the stability and roamed the Creek. I would rather meet Vance in a Cotswolds pub than Jeremy Clarkson.
Hear more about the Cotswolds on Clive Aslet and John Goodall’s podcast Your Places or Mine