Broadway
The Jewel of the Cotswolds: a single sweeping High Street of golden stone lined with cottages, galleries and old coaching inns.
The Jewel of the Cotswolds: a single sweeping High Street of golden stone lined with cottages, galleries and old coaching inns.
The name tells you what to expect. Broadway's High Street is famously wide and long, a gentle procession of honey-coloured cottages, galleries and tea rooms that seems to belong to an England you half-thought had disappeared. The broad main street is centred on a green fringed with red chestnut trees, and many of the limestone buildings that line it date from the sixteenth century. At the heart of the village stands The Lygon Arms, a grand old coaching inn with roots in the 1600s, where both Charles I and Oliver Cromwell are said to have stayed (though never, one imagines, at the same time). We tend to park once and simply walk, because the whole point of Broadway is to slow down and drift from window to window. High on the hill above the village, Broadway Tower is worth the short drive up for views said to reach across sixteen counties.
It is the shopping and the browsing that keep pulling us back. Independent art galleries and antique dealers sit alongside boutiques, and the standard is high: this is not a village of tat. The Ashmolean Broadway, an outpost of the great Oxford museum, occupies Tudor House on the High Street and shows objects spanning the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries in what was once a coaching inn. A few doors along, the Gordon Russell Design Museum traces the life of the furniture maker whose Arts and Crafts workshop put Broadway on the map for a different kind of beauty, moving from hand-cut oak through to mid-century modern. Between the two you can easily lose a morning, and there are enough cafés along the street to reward you when you do.
Above the village, on the second-highest point of the Cotswold escarpment, Broadway Tower rises out of the parkland. It is a hexagonal folly with corner turrets and battlements, designed by James Wyatt in 1798 for Lady Coventry, and on a clear day the views from the top are said to reach sixteen counties, from the Welsh mountains in the west across to Buckinghamshire in the east. We like to walk up rather than drive: the climb from the village through the deer park, up onto the ridge and back down, takes roughly an hour and a half at an easy pace and is one of the better short walks in this part of the Cotswolds. Do it on a bright, breezy morning and the whole sweep of the wolds opens up beneath you.
Broadway rewards an unhurried plan. Here is roughly how we string a day together.
The walled garden at Snowshill Manor is quieter and more contemplative than the cluttered manor rooms, and the two together make a proper afternoon. If time allows, Moreton-in-Marsh lies a short drive east and makes an easy pairing, especially on a Tuesday when its long-running street market fills the wide main road. Broadway sits about fifty minutes from Well Cottage by car, just across the county line into Worcestershire, so it is comfortably a there-and-back day with plenty of time to linger. One word of advice: the village gets busy on summer weekends, and arriving on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning gives you Broadway at its best, before the coaches arrive and the tea rooms fill up along the High Street.
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.