The Cotswolds used to be a wonderfully bucolic fantasy of English villages; red telephone boxes, gilded honey-stone hamlets with verdant greens where the vicar would umpire cricket matches, and pubs where poachers and gamekeepers would mix. Then it became fashionable and now it’s been Farrow & Balled to within an inch of its life.
The Cotswolds is not the country. It is an extension of Notting Hill
You could blame the King for purchasing Highgrove House in Tetbury in the 1980s. Suddenly, wannabe poshos began buying Cotswold cottages in the hope some royalty would rub off on them (real poshos would never consider doing something so outré, and prefer Norfolk anyway). Now it’s experiencing the ‘Bamford effect’ thanks to the Daylesford farm shop. It’s filled to bursting with celebrities and the Chipping Norton media elite, and following them has been a steady stream of West Londoners with City jobs making the move to ‘the country’ under the delusion that Soho Farmhouse is anything other than Waco for social climbers; its woodchip pathways promising not to muddy footwear.
The Cotswolds is not the country. It is an extension of Notting Hill. Now every pub has a Michelin star, and the waiting list for lunch is six months because Giles Coren reviewed it in the Times. Every cottage has a pair of bay trees either side of the front door, and ugly plastic cones at the bottom of its manicured lawn so that no one dares park on the verge when they’re taking photos for their Instagram. The traffic, by the way, is unbearable.
Which leads me to the long-wheelbase-only top-of-the-Range Rover SV. Up until about a decade ago, you’d expect the driver of a Range Rover to be a middle-aged man in a wax jacket and a flat cap. Now, it’s more likely to be a yoga-addicted blonde clad in Lululemon. And that, in a nutshell, is the reality of modern Cotswolds life too. Range Rover’s design direction, customer profile and price tags have surged in parallel with the showy demographic of this Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire tranche – the golden triangle of Chipping Norton, Stow-on-the-Wold and Burford.
Now Jaguar Land Rover has made it official by creating a very limited-edition car personalised for what it envisions to be Mr and Mrs Cotswolds-Millionaire. Or maybe not plain old Mr and Mrs, given there are two ex-PMs in the vicinity and we all know how the honours system works.
The Range Rover SV ‘Burford Edition’ (slightly disappointed they didn’t call it the ‘Upper Swell Edition’ or the ‘Lower Slaughter Edition’, which are nearby villages, but the town of Burford is considered the gateway to England’s largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) comes with 615bhp, which’ll definitely make a mess of your neighbour’s verge, and what the company describes as ‘the pinnacle of Range Rover personalisation’ through its SV Bespoke department. The car will only be available to UK buyers, and just ten are being built. Pricing is POA, though it’s thought to be about £250,000.
The materials and colour palette are very much Mod-Cotswolds rather than Trad-Cotswolds: Aether Grey with a satin finish for the exterior, and two-tone Light Cloud and Cinder Grey woven fabric on the inside (as opposed to the usual wipe-clean Bridge of Weir leather), along with a generous helping of scatter cushions. It’s how I imagine Geri Halliwell-Horner’s kitchen to look, just with a supercharged V8 instead of an Aga.
The colour palette is certainly sophisticated, but not terribly well suited to dogs, puddles, or what Uncle Monty called ‘beastly oomska’. But, as I say, the Cotswolds is no longer the country, so maybe that’s moot. To the groupies of the Golden Triangle, it’s their dream car rendered in reality. For the old money over in Norfolk, though, I suspect they’d prefer a G-reg Range Rover in green or blue strewn with Labrador hair. The ‘Burford Edition’ was unveiled at Daylesford Organic, obviously, so potential punters could pick up some emergency cashmere, scented candles and a £10 radish at the same time.
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