Bruton. Media hype, or the real deal?

The Guardian, The Times and the Daily Mail have all been down to Bruton in the last couple of years, and the town has just been called the most fashionable place to live in the UK. Read the local Facebook page on any given day and you will find the other view: Londoners invading a beautiful town, house prices going up for everyone who already lives here.

Is that concern justified?

What it looked like from the inside

I lived near Bruton until I was twenty, and like every teenager in the area I asked who would want to go there, because there was nothing there. That was a failure of attention rather than a fact. You do not know what you have until you leave it.

The town always had the schools. Sexey's, Sunny Hill and King's are each prominent in their own right, and between them they have brought people into the town for generations.

What actually changed

Two things did most of the work.

The first was At The Chapel, a Grade II listed former chapel turned into an all-day restaurant, using West Country produce with a relaxed Mediterranean approach to British food. That description comes from the reviews and, unusually, it is accurate.

The second was the old barn on the edge of town, which locals knew mainly as the barn from the film Chocolat. Hauser and Wirth took a dishevelled shell and turned it into a gallery, workshops, a restaurant and a bar. The best part is the garden by Piet Oudolf, the Dutch designer best known here for the planting on New York's High Line.

There is also the Dovecote, which gives you the view down over the town and the country around it, and about which most locals have a story they will not repeat in print.

So, hype or real?

Locals get disgruntled when new people arrive and prices rise. That is understandable and it is not unique to Bruton. But a town steeped in history has combined that history with art, food and a run of genuinely good ventures, and the exposure that came with it is something most neighbouring towns would take tomorrow.

It is the real deal. You do have to go and see it, because no amount of writing about it will do the job. It makes me proud to be from Somerset, and anyone here wishing the visitors away should look closely at what that tourism actually pays for.

First published in March 2015. Edited since: the promotional offer at the foot of the original has gone, the image captions went with the photographs, and the description of Piet Oudolf has been corrected. He designed the High Line planting; he did not create the New York skyline.