How a Somerset art gallery put Bruton on the map

Iwan and Manuela Wirth moved to the Bruton area in 2007, and in 2014 they opened Hauser and Wirth Somerset in a converted farmstead on the edge of town: galleries, a garden designed by Piet Oudolf, a restaurant and a farm shop. It has been written about and photographed ever since, and it's the reason most people outside Somerset have heard of Bruton at all.

I've known Bruton since before the gallery, and what changed after 2014 cut both ways. There's more traffic on a high street that's very narrow, and some locals complain that visitors down from London, DFLs ("down from London") as they get called, make the street a nightmare to get along. There are also more beautiful shops, great food and a more thriving atmosphere. And there are houses plenty of locals can no longer afford, because people from London have bought in and priced them out.

Both the people who grew up here and the people who arrived bring good and bad with them. If you're one of the new arrivals, be sympathetic to the locals, because the street was theirs first.

Does the gallery fill the shops?

It doesn't, by itself. Plenty of visitors come for the art, eat on site and drive home, because the pull of a famous place doesn't automatically reach the street. Nobody keeps figures on what brings people into Bruton, so there's no number for how much trade the gallery creates. If you run a shop on the high street and know how much of yours comes from gallery visitors, you know something no estimate can tell you.

Bruton is lucky in its geography, though. The gallery sits close enough to the centre that a walk into town afterwards is easy, so a trip to see the art can turn into a wander round the shops. No shop earned that: it's the same luck a shop near a station or a school enjoys. Castle Cary gets its own version when the Glastonbury crowds come through its station.

For the shops, three things follow. The standard is high: someone who has just eaten in the gallery restaurant, or at At The Chapel, notices when a shop feels ordinary. The visitor is browsing rather than hunting, so a window that gives them a reason to step inside does more than a shop waiting for people who already know what it sells. And the trade isn't steady, because a big exhibition brings a different crowd from a quiet January. When I first asked whether Bruton was hype or the real thing, back in 2015, readers were already split on this, and it's still the right question.

If you run a shop there, what works is what works for any independent: being clear about what you do, being visibly open, and giving a passer-by a reason to come in that has nothing to do with why they came to Bruton. Bruton is one of the towns on our page for Somerset businesses, if you'd like help being found by the people searching nearby.