Special Edition: Is This The Worst Pub In The World?

Our book launches today

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon. Our book about the pub, nattily titled The Pub, has launched today and is available from all good bookstores (and some bad ones too). With new writing from TF favourites like John Banville, Katy Hessel, Róisín Lanigan, Charlotte Ivers, Jimmy McIntosh and Bron Maher, it’s the broadest and best thing we’ve ever done, a 288-page compendium of tributes to the greatest institution in Britain and Ireland.

Many of you have already ordered the book, and we’ve seen it landing on doormats across the country. In fact, so many of you have ordered The Pub that the cigar-chomping fat cats at Big Book/ our charming and brilliant friends at Ebury have told us that we might be in with a chance of entering the Sunday Times best-seller list, which really would be a wonderful thing.

So if you haven’t made your purchase, you can do so at the link right below.

In the meantime, we’ve got one of the lead features here for you today, as a special treat. The town of Charlbury has been in the news this week, owing to a visit from a certain American politician. But a year before J.D. Vance’s motorcade rolled into West Oxfordshire, we sent Clive Martin for a Cotswolds dispatch.

You Can Ring My Bell

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.

I wondered if, perhaps, the pubs of Charlbury might tell us something about the English status system in 2024; its habits, its fascinations, its tendency to destroy everything in its wake. And while I knew that I would never be able to find ‘the spirit in the Cotswolds’ in such a place, I may at least stumble across some drunken reflection of the English psyche.

The crowd at The Bell, drawn by John Broadley

Our journey begins just outside Charlbury, in the town of Church Enstone, where our Airbnb is inconveniently located. The Crown Inn isn’t part of our official itinerary, but it also seemed like a nice, neutral starting point. Because while there were sightings of miso and harissa on the menu, there were also local geezers in hi-vis overalls, afternoon boozing at the bar, playing Monopoly Go and joshing about their wives. Maybe, this was about as ‘normal’ as it was going to get.

Trying to get a cab to Charlbury proves quite the endeavour, with many local firms seemingly enticed by such a short journey. ‘Just say you’re staying at Soho Farmhouse and they’ll pick you up quicker!’ blares a young waitress who spots us struggling with our phones. Through some connections, we eventually source the name of a man I’ll call Bill, who reveals himself to be a well-spoken octogenarian in wellies, one with a sideline in casual taxi-man labour.

In the car, Bill tells us that one of his recent jobs was ferrying a well-known fashion photographer to Maison Estelle, a Cotswolds offshoot of a Grafton Street members’ club. On the horizon, we spot a few new developments being built, and Bill starts espousing on the state of the area. ‘I’m not sure what affordable housing means around here,’ he considers. ‘There’s a chap by the name of Timmy Reid who still lives with his mother and father. He must be 50 now.’

It’s hard to blame poor Timmy for his predicament. Houses in this part of the world have an average price of around £411,000, which sounds fine in Londonenomics, but is about 14 times the local annual salary. Meanwhile, a two-bedroom Airbnb can fetch up to £25,000 a year if you do it right. Still, the situation has hardly made a radical of Bill. ‘If you’ve been here a long time, you see the value of your property go up. Who’d be upset about that?’ he laughs. I resist the urge to ask him if this is also the reason why he’s running semi-legal cab jobs into his eighties.

Bill’s attitude appears to reflect a wider antipathy to wealth and gentrification in the Cotswolds. In my research, I tried to look into the counter-narratives in the area, some evidence of resistance or pushback – like the kind you may find in Cornwall or bougie parts of the Kent Coast. But I found close to nothing. The nearest examples I could find were the endless rage bait stories and strongly worded letters in the local press, usually stoking the fires over parking crises and visiting coach trips of Midlands oiks. That isn’t to say people aren’t annoyed about what's happening here, but they’re a long way off fire-bombing Richard Caring’s limo.

On reaching Charlbury, we pay Bill his £20 for the three mile journey and step into The Bell. It’s hard to do justice to how stifling and antiseptic the place is. It unfolds like a corporate hospitality area at Brands Hatch or the Henley Regatta, with glaring off-white everywhere, brass fittings in the toilets and Bamford-branded soap sliding off the sinks. Some heinous Sting remix plays off the SONOS system, and some of the younger staff are wearing t-shirts that say ‘You’re Bellcome.’ We order three pints of Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone Lager, down them, and get the fuck out of there before someone asks us if we’d like to donate to Priti Patel’s leadership campaign. For all the talk of the Cotswolds being England’s Aspen or Gstaad, this feels much more like a suburban conservatory lunch.

Thankfully, The Rose & Crown is a very different proposition, all stained mahogany panels, warm ale and booming, wheezing laughs. Within seconds, we’re talking to a group of likely fellas at the bar. One of them turns out to be the retired postmaster of the town. ‘He were caught up in the Royal Mail scandal’, reveals one of his friends. But before I could express some platitude about wanting to see Paula Vennells sent to The Tower, his friend blurts: ‘He were the only one that were guilty!’ This doesn’t feel like the kind of joke you hear in The Bell. Meanwhile, a young barman in full Love Island regalia struggles with the demand for Friday afternoon libation.

Yet even here, the middle classes have been welcomed, including a group of ageing, lycra-coated cyclists who take up most of the tables. ‘We don’t win, we hit balls,’ guffaws a man in expensive tennis gear, while another Charlbury face fills us in on the local gossip, including the spate of west London drug dealers who come down on mopeds to service the clucking Shoreditch transplants.

A few jars later, we head 20 feet across the road, but into a different reality altogether. Let's put it in London terms: if The Rose & Crown is an honest Soho boozer, then The Bull is The Devonshire – a vast ‘concept’ pub that arrived in 2023 with an onslaught of hype and an associated aesthetic. Sister restaurant of Notting Hill gastropub The Pelican, The Bull is the place where Londoners feel safe, where they can use Apple Pay, drink recognisable beers and stride around in £500 boots without an arthritic sheepdog pissing all over them. If it were a brand, it would be Belstaff. If it were an artist, it would be Guy Ritchie. ‘Look at those beeeaauutiful espresso martinis,’ coos a lightly toasted lady at the bar, while a man who looks like Alex Zane has a protracted argument with his girlfriend outside.

The whole thing feels very ‘David Beckham’, and that’s fair to say, because apparently, he comes here a lot. Already, The Bull is already deeply associated with celebrity, and we’re not talking about a drunken selfie with someone who used to be in Eastenders. ‘I don’t care if he is bleddy Brad Pitt!’ splutters Malcolm, a Charlbury barfly we’re introduced to. With his jetstream-blasted cheeks and teeth like Aztec temple ruins, The Bull doesn’t really seem like Malcolm’s kind of place. He agrees, but apparently, he is banned from his old local for cuckolding the landlord.

The night drags on, the pints turn to speciality cocktails, and I see more and more people who may be famous; mostly chiselled 40-something men in quilted Barbour jackets, and stone-faced brunettes sipping coffee Patrons. It’s not a bad vibe at all, but it all feels rather artificial, rather safe. For these sorts, I imagine it's a break from Soho Farmhouse, a prelude to a massive session at Lettice’s family’s country bolthole. And then, a scene almost too on the nose to be believable plays out in front of us. A badly parked BMW is blocking the local bus. The infuriated driver marches straight over to The Bull, and quelle surprise, its owner is at the bar, shitfaced and slightly mortified.

The Bull (which is also a hotel) operates a shuttle service to Charlbury station (in the form of branded Land Rover Defender, naturally), but apparently this doesn’t extend to a couple of pissheads trying to make their way back to the next village at 11.30pm. So once more, the cab-wrangling begins. Our old friend Bill appears to be either too drunk, or too asleep, to pick up, so we find a firm in some nearby Oxfordshire town. It costs us £43 to go three miles. The price of fresh air, it seems.

The next day, stinkingly hungover and feeling a little queasy from an extremely rare steak at The Bull, I find myself at Daylesford Farm, Baroness Bamford’s magnum opus – her Fallingwater, her Megalopolis. Impressively, the reality of Daylesford is even further from a farm than The Bell is from a pub. It’s a shopping centre – an oppressive, sprawling complex that reminds me of some godforsaken mini-mall on the outskirts of Aurora, Colorado. The kind of place where you can have dinner at Olive Garden and pick up an assault rifle for dessert.

Except, you can’t buy anything so exciting at Daylesford Farm – possibly because you may be tempted to use it there. With its cookery school, wellness spa, ‘legbar’ and stone-baked pizza restaurant, Daylesford is a horrifying apparition of fancy-pants Britain, loaded with Jills, Brians, Jemimas and Gileses filling their trolleys with cheese, candles, dog treats and overpriced apple juice. Like some resentful guesthouse owner, it's always on the verge of asking you where you went to school, but is happy to take your cash regardless.

The Americanism of it all extends to the car park, with its shimmering royal blue Jeeps, textured- finish Teslas and mud-flecked Porsche Cayennes. For all Bamford’s eco-pretences (there is a waste pantry here, and the restaurant boasts a green Michelin star) the car is very much king in the Cotswolds. This isn’t walking country, for stray into the wrong field and you’re more likely to encounter a private security team than a pitchfork.

Stroking the hair of the dog, we take a seat in the outside bar with a G&T or two. In this slightly unreal kingdom of sheepskin rugs, massive parasols and ruddy-faced men in gilets, a strange urge hits me: I want to desecrate the place, to take a sledgehammer to a display of Bamford Prosecco and the artfully arranged pile of Richard E Grant’s autobiography. Even as a political realist like myself, there is something rankly offensive about Bamford’s plans to smear the countryside with thick layers of Farrow & Ball duck-egg blue, to take over its pubs and market them at people who saw The Holiday on a plane once and would like to experience that at any cost – all while her husband chucks money at all manner of rotten causes and investments. To me, Lady Bamford seems like some pseudo-rural Marie Antoinette, muttering ‘let them eat sourdough’ from her gleaming Land Rover.

I went into this excursion knowing that I would never find ‘the real Cotswolds.’ And while I caught a few glimpses of a truly ‘local’ universe – at The Rose & Crown, in Malcolm’s bawdy stories, and on Bill’s Crazy Taxi routine – I left happy that I was locked out of it. Because no doubt, if you show your culture too proudly in a place like this, some listless billionaire will find it, synthesise it, and turn it into a lifestyle brand.

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Pretty good, no? Do share this with friends, or better still, buy the book from this link here. There’s a beautiful memoir from John Banville and a listicle of the 80 best pubs in the country from Jimmy McIntosh. There’s nothing quite like it on the shelves. We’ll join you again next Tuesday for a conventional ‘OTF’. Until then.

All the best,

TF