Why Burford should be your next Cotswolds weekend away
If there was a Venn diagram between people who live in East London, have smart little dogs
in dinky little coats and are partial to pet nat, then The Bull in Charlbury would probably be in
the middle. If you draw a Venn diagram between people who live in West London, have
smart gundogs and are partial to a robust merlot, then The Bull in Burford would probably be
in the middle.
Which is to say, whatever ‘set’ you belong to, the Cotswolds will forever attract well-to-do,
stylish Londoners. It’s what it does best. And for good reason, it’s a honey-hued, chocolate
box destination with excellent hotels, pubs and restaurants. It’s also just an hour away by
train, or slightly longer by Land Rover.
The Bull Burford
The Bull in Burford, an elegant coaching inn dating back to 1536 (the year Anne Boleyn was beheaded), wears its Cotswoldsness very much on its sleeve. Reopened as a hotel by PR titan and spin connoisseur Matthew Freud in 2023, The Bull is an incredibly stylish bolthole in an incredibly beautiful village. The decor blends over 400 years of history and modern touches with effortless ease. Heavy wooden panelling and deep stone fireplaces sit totally congruously next to the frenetic, jagged angles of a Basquiat painting.
This careful jumble of eras extends into the 18 rooms, which are tasteful and cool and artsy – it’s a bit like walking inside a Toast catalogue. The penthouse suite is perhaps the pick of the bunch. Walking up to it, you catch glimpses of Burford below, higgledy-piggledy stone houses and wisps of smoke from chimneys. The room itself is spacious, but with angular low ceilings and jutting-out beams. It’s moody and intimate: slate-painted walls have a velvety, wind-brushed texture and the room centres around a huge bed draped in folds of linen. It smells of linden and cedarwood. A reading chair is the perfect place to sip on their signature white negroni and let London slip away into a distant dream.
That is until you go down for drinks, and Notting Hill suddenly doesn’t seem so far away.
Read more: Inside the ‘Venice of the Cotswolds’, a short distance from London
Where to eat and drink
The Bull’s heart is the bar. Vincent’s is set back into the building and cultivates a slouched, private quality inherent in all good cocktail bars. After dinner digestifs take on a conspiratorial vibe in the dimly lit room, with a crackling fire and hushed conversations. The staff at The Bull are young, but what is perhaps lost in polish is made up for in friendliness. This feels particularly true of Horn, one of four places to eat at the hotel. It’s a gastropub serving decent takes on the usual fare: steak and chips, custard and crumble.
There is also Wild, a fire-centric 11-course tasting menu offering; Sl’ice, a pizza restaurant open only in summer; and Hiro, a private dining omakase-inspired option. Four food offerings for an 18-room hotel feels perhaps a little excessive, and you wonder if it wouldn’t be better to focus on doing one restaurant really well (something, incidentally, The Bull at Charlbury has nailed). But perhaps it’s necessary for a hotel that needs to strike a tricky balance between appealing to Burfordians and sequestering A-list celebrities in its hidden, high-end dining rooms.
What to do
The Bull is the sort of place you come to do very little of anything. Burford is a quintessential
Cotswolds town with a honey ratio of pubs to inhabitants. Long walks followed by pints and a
fire in winter, or sloping evenings in beer gardens come summer. There are also lots of cutesy little shops, delis and cafes dotted along the high street, including The Oxford Brush Company, which sells literally every type of brush imaginable.
It’s also well worth visiting the local church, St John the Baptist, and its canopied tomb of Sir
Lawrence and Lady Tanfield. The ‘Wicked Tanfields of Burford’ were aristocratic landowners
in the 17th century who were despised by locals for their cruelty to tenants. An effigy of the
couple was burnt every year for 200 years to celebrate their deaths, and Burford myth has it
that if the water level in the River Windrush (which runs through the town) drops too low, the
Tanfields will be released from their watery grave to haunt Burford once again.
Weekending Londoners can’t be any worse than that, can they?
Visit The Cotswolds yourself
Rooms at The Bull at Burford start from around £270; go to bullburford.com/rooms-and-suites
Read more: Why the Cotswolds is perfect for an October holiday