American Money Is Turning the Cotswolds Into the ‘Hamptons of England’

As locals gossip beneath the low-beamed ceiling of a coffee shop, I ask Audrey Ann Masur to speak up.

“I’m always trying to speak more quietly, so I’m not getting that stereotype,” the 37-year-old from Indiana whispers across our table with a nervous smile, her decaf coffee steaming in the autumn chill.

We’re in the Cotswolds, an 800-square-mile pocket of English countryside dotted with towns and villages. Masur and her young family moved here from South Carolina five years ago, when her husband was reposted by the US military.

Her accent has prompted older locals to corner her at the grocery store and press her on her political views, Masur says. So, she figures it’s best to keep her voice down.

I hope Masur, who documents life in the Cotswolds on Instagram for her 13,700 followers, can help me understand why this area has become a hot spot for transatlantic elites in recent years. I want to know how locals are reacting as old British money and new international money meet and — as the American “invasion” headlines in the British press suggest — clash.

Masur is neither a billionaire nor a millionaire — “I drive a Honda Jazz,” she says — but she has met some of the wealthy American newcomers at influencer events and watched businesses change in the relatively short time she has been here.

“There are a lot more places that want to please people of a certain socioeconomic status,” Masur says.

Recent high-profile visitors to the area, which straddles six counties, include Taylor Swift, Eve Jobs, who married here in July, and JD Vance, whose security checkpoints put the sleepy village of Dean on lockdown in August. Others, like Masur, are calling it home. Ellen DeGeneres has lived here since 2024, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z are rumored to be looking for property.

This is part of a lucrative boom in Americans heading to the UK. In 2024, there were a record 5.6 million visits from the US, up half a million on the previous year. Those visitors spent a record £7.3 billion, or about $9.5 billion, in 2024 — £1.1 billion more than in 2023, according to data from VisitBritain.

They’re also spending more: In 2024, adjusted for inflation, Americans spent £68 more per trip to the UK than they did in 2023.

Figures provided to Business Insider by the UK government show that the number of US nationals applying for British citizenship also hit a record high in the second quarter of 2025, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Between April and June, 2,194 Americans applied — up 50% on the same period last year.

From the sheer number of what sound like American accents I hear during my trip in late October — although I meet some Canadian ladies hurt by my assumption — it feels as though most have headed straight to the Cotswolds.

Two real estate professionals told me they are seeing the spoils of this trend: more American tech founders, media moguls, and billionaires looking for historic properties in the region.

“Once there’s a critical mass of like-minded people in the area, it draws more and more people of that profile,” says Harry Gladwin, a Cotswolder and partner at The Buying Solution, which advises wealthy foreigners on finding homes here.

Armand Arton, the founder of Arton Capital, which helps ultra-high-net-worth clients secure second homes and citizenships, says US politics has motivated a lot of his clients to seek homes in this part of rural England. But owning heritage properties — castles and country estates that many British aristocrats can no longer afford to maintain — is also about status.

“New money wants old-money trophy assets,” Arton says.

The Battle of Little Tew

Nowhere is the tension between locals and new money, much of it American, clearer than in Little Tew. Many of the village’s 500 residents have spent years protesting against plans by the billionaire Soho House executive Ron Burkle to build a sprawling estate on a 90-acre plot of land on its outskirts.

In a letter of objection, one villager described the scale of the project, which would involve building a country house, a highway, a lake, and a swimming pool, as “grotesque.”

The matter was settled at a parish meeting in October, when 27 residents voted unanimously against the plans — that is, unless Burkle lodges an appeal or submits a revised application.

“We were concerned that this house would probably, if built, be underused,” says Anthony Cripps, 59, a recruitment consultant who lives in the village and chaired the meeting.

Burkle hasn’t addressed the plans in the press, and his office did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The David and Goliath battle unfolding in Little Tew echoes others in the Cotswolds, albeit on a smaller scale.

A 2024 report by Cotswold District Council found that second homes in the area are putting pressure on an already tight housing supply. Council data provided to Business Insider shows that the number of second homes has gradually risen each year since April 2021, when it first collected data. By April 2025, there were 1,597 second homes in the district — up 3.5% on the previous year and about 6.5% over four years.

A 100% Council Tax Premium introduced in April essentially doubled the bill paid by owners of furnished second homes, with the revenue going toward affordable housing and local services in the Cotswolds. It’s one measure aimed at slowing the kind of rural gentrification that risks pricing out longtime, less affluent residents.

“It’s seen as the playground of the rich and famous, but if you strip away that veneer, you do have quite a lot of rural isolation going on and poverty,” says Paul Hodgkinson, a councillor whose constituency includes the tourist hot spot Bourton-on-the-Water.

The tension here isn’t only between Americans and locals, but more broadly about what happens when wealth of any origin starts pouring into a region.

“I don’t want to single out Americans,” Hodgkinson says.

“It’s not just about people from abroad buying second homes and holiday homes,” he adds. “It’s anyone.”

UK government data shows that in 2024, the Cotswolds was among the least affordable places to live in England and Wales, with the average house costing 13.8 times the typical yearly salary of a full-time employee in the area, at £440,000 on £31,795.

Hodgkinson worries that in addition to worsening the housing crunch, more second-homers could have a cultural impact by hollowing out village life — locals congregating at the pub and organizing village fetes risk being replaced by wealthy visitors dropping by for short, luxury breaks.

‘Americans are happy to spend more’

While some are uneasy about the changing Cotswolds, others see it as an opportunity.

In a snug four-table room up a narrow, creaking staircase at Stow-on-the-Wold’s New England Coffee House, Alison Tighe, the town’s mayor, tells me Americans are “bringing investment.”

She gestures toward a kind of trickle-down logic. “When you have more investment in this area, you’ve not just got jobs for local people, you’ve also got improved services,” Tighe says.

To Gladwin, the real estate agent and Cotswolds local, the influx of money has injected some dynamism into the area, which he says was once a “sleepy backwater” for retirees.

“Whether you want a vegan flat white, reformer classes, cryotherapy, or just a long walk with the dogs, you can do everything here,” he says.

That much is clear at Daylesford Organic — effectively the Erewhon of the Cotswolds — where I see a woman inspecting £39 collagen and açai supplements as her cavapoo sniffs at a shelf lined with £28 jars of artisan hazelnut spread. Women in activewear holding green juices head into the connecting Bamford spa, where sound healing classes are on offer, and £235 toning massages await.

It’s a far cry from the Cotswolds of old, with its muddy wellies and unpretentious tea rooms.

While the money transforming the Cotswolds isn’t exclusively American, the US influence on the area’s culture is on clear display during my trip.

Ten miles from Stow-on-the-Wold in Burford, Jack Forbes, the general manager of the Bull, a luxury hotel and group of restaurants with a distinctly Soho House feel, tells me businesses are “growing up.”

He says Americans, who now make up as much as half of his clientele, are raising the bar in the Cotswolds and bringing with it US tipping culture.

“There’s no doubt Americans are happy to spend more,” he says.

Lauren O’Brian, the co-owner of The Sweet Shop in Burford, says that in recent years, more Americans have been stocking up on traditional candy — sherbet lemons, rhubarb and custard sweets, and Turkish delight. She thinks they’re attracted by the quaint country life depicted in period dramas like “Downton Abbey.”

A few doors down, Cindy Kosmala, the owner of Hugo Lovage Patisserie, tells me that American clients, including celebrities, are keeping her business alive.

I hear a similar story at D’Ambrosi Fine Foods back in Stow-on-the-Wold, where a rustic table piled with high-end British deli items sits beneath a taxidermied pheasant. Outside, the window display features packets of Reese’s Pieces, Cracker Jack, and “All-American Pancake Mix” beneath a rolled-up American flag.

The ‘Hamptons of England’

I ask the owner, Jesse D’Ambrosi, a Massachusetts native who opened the luxury deli six years ago, what she thinks of the Cotswolds being dubbed the “Hamptons of England.” “I have said that,” she says with a smile, “because it is.”

The store’s eclectic stock reflects how the Cotswolds’ old-money sensibilities are increasingly being curated by and for newcomers with American twangs and expensive tastes.

Outside the coffee shop where we met, Masur and I prepare to say goodbye, and she gestures to Stow’s high street.

“At all of these places, all of a sudden, they’re serving more iced coffee, which I love — but this has to have something to do with more Americans coming through.”

Whether these changes are everyone’s cup of tea is a different matter.