‘There isn’t much we miss:’ The Americans moving to the English Cotswolds
Lauren Neely moved from the United States to Painswick with her family during summer 2025.
By Anna Cooban, CNN
The Cotswolds, England (CNN) — In a churchyard, about 100 miles west of London, the rain drives at a 45-degree slant, pounding the stone footpath so hard it bounces back as white fuzz that hovers just below the ankle.
St Mary’s Church is the 14th-century nucleus of Painswick, a town in the Cotswolds, a region in southwest England famed for its hills and honey-colored cottages. It is a chunk of that Jane Austen-esque, close-to-cloyingly twee England that has long attracted tourists and homebuyers — sometimes despite the weather.
Lately, though, local real estate agents told CNN, increasing numbers of Americans are calling it home.
According to those agents, some want their children to attend prestigious British schools and universities; others seek a bucolic, slower pace of life. Some feel pushed to leave the United States by the threat of wildfires or gun violence, or by political changes they oppose. Most are incredibly wealthy.
“I have this funny feeling,” Frances Shultz, a 60-something North Carolinian who bought a Cotswolds cottage in 2023, told CNN, “of being sort of dropped in the middle of a TV series, a very wholesome, sweet BBC one.”
It’s an ambition that Schultz, a journalist and author writing about homes and interior design, had nursed for years. She described living vicariously through the pages of Country Life, a British property magazine teeming with glossy photos of manor houses and their multi-acres.
A divorce in 2022 provided the necessary push: Schultz soon bought a four-bed cottage a stone’s throw from St Mary’s. “It was love at first sight,” she said of her new home.
Katy Campbell, Schultz’s buying agent — a type of realtor finding properties and negotiating their prices on behalf of buyers — told CNN that she’s seen a 20% increase in the number of American clients over the past year.
Historically, a big chunk of these clients were already living in the UK — usually London — when they came to buy their countryside boltholes. Now, Campbell said she’s fielding more calls from Americans based in the United States, and has grown familiar with their tastes.
They purchase homes — usually their second, third or fourth — for between £1 million ($1.3 million) and “tens of millions,” she said. They want cozy (think Kate Winslet’s cottage in “The Holiday,” just much, much bigger) and they want discretion. “They can wander in villages and people don’t really turn and stare,” she added. “So you can be fairly incognito in the Cotswolds.”
Naturally, Campbell won’t name names, but did say that some clients are “from films.”
The Cotswolds span several of England’s “shires” and are sprinkled with British celebrities. David Beckham regularly posts vignettes of life on his Oxfordshire estate to Instagram, including making honey and digging for vegetables. Kate Moss has been photographed tramping around the same shire in muddy boots since the early 2000s.
American celebrities have also drawn attention to the area. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres helped put the area on international radars when she moved there from California in 2024. Vice President JD Vance spent part of his family vacation in the Cotswolds this summer.
Schultz spends her summers in Painswick and the rest of the year in New York City. She once owned a cottage in the Hamptons — the see-and-be-seen vacation spot for the city’s elite that has drawn comparisons to the London-Cotswolds axis — but picked Painswick for its relative simplicity.
“This tiny town is full of characters like the tiny town in North Carolina I grew up in,” she said, noting that she allows plenty of time for trips to the local library as she expects to stop for several conversations along the way.
“The Hamptons is much more whizzy,” Shultz said. “(It’s) glitzier, it’s more social, it’s more dressy, it’s slicker. And the Cotswolds — even the posh Cotswolds — are much more low-key.”
A slice of history
According to real estate site Rightmove, the average house in the Cotswolds sold for almost £440,000 ($590,000) during the past 12 months, almost two-thirds more than the UK average.
Buying agent Harry Gladwin said he noticed the number of enquiries from America beginning to rise late last year. They are up around 30% since then, he noted, with some clients citing politics as a key motivation to move.
About one fifth of Gladwin’s clients are now American, some of whom were were already based in the UK. Typically, they have budgets between £6 million ($8 million) and £8 million ($10.8 million) and are drawn to the history of the homes on offer. Gladwin said he recently helped an American client purchase a manor house dating back to the 1300s.
“That’s what I think a lot of Americans particularly love about the UK — is that incredible history,” he said. “The story behind all these houses… and the fact that they can own a bit of history.”
Pennsylvanian Lauren Neely is a student of that history.
The 35-year-old writer of historical fiction moved to Painswick with her husband and two children six months ago. For many years, the couple fantasized about moving to the UK after an unforgettable college semester in Scotland. So when a work opportunity cropped up for her husband near Painswick, they jumped.
The family rents a four-bed former coach house in the center of town. “I think it dates from the 1700s,” Neely said. “(There are) these beautiful archways where you can see where three carriages would have been.” She describes it as “modest” compared with others nearby.
“We’re not coming from generational wealth, or the higher privilege that some do, especially here in the Cotswolds,” she added.
Neely is working on a novel set in the 1400s and takes inspiration from Painswick’s history, occasionally cutting through the yard of St Mary’s Church to indulge in writerly superstitions: “I just stop in there sometimes after putting the kids on the bus in the morning, and just take a moment and touch the stone, and it takes me back (to that time) absolutely.”
Neely is embracing her new life in Painswick. She said her husband and son are ensconced in the local football scene and believes the locally sourced food has improved her family’s health.
She doesn’t exclude the possibility of one day returning to the United States. Yet, Neely said, “there isn’t much that we miss.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
