The UK town being compared to Meghan Markle’s American home | Travel News | Travel

I’m in a boutique at the bottom of the small cleft in the Somerset hills that is home to the tiny town of Bruton, and toying with a £17 recycled plastic shopping bag that declares “Our Dolce Vita bag is as close as you can get to a 6pm aperitivo”. And it’s no joke.

The bijou town of Bruton was recently dubbed “Britain’s Montecito” owing to its high count of local celebs of significant means – and is certainly the living embodiment of the good life.

On top of the hill is Osip, the uber-trendy, farm-to-table Michelin-starred former pub recently named restaurant of the year in the Good Food Guide.

Currently “going for its second star”, the venue’s stylish all-white conversion makes it feel more igloo than last orders.

With just 38 covers for dinner, the tasting menu from young chef owner Merlin Labron-Johnson starts at £125 per person.

Meanwhile, behind nearby hedges are the homes of lesser spotted A-listers, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Mariella Frostrup and Stella McCartney, as well as former chancellor George Osborne.

A three-bed end-of-terrace will set you back £525,000 in Bruton – add on an extra £125,000 for a bungalow and the prices rise from there.

Even the staff in the independent shops here are a cut above.

They include Debs Dufton, an elegant former “grey model” who is helping out owners Kath and Ahmed at trendy Smouk Interiors at the bottom of the pretty high street.

Debs was discovered after being “stopped” in Harrods a few decades ago.

She sends me on a short walk up the narrow high street to The Chapel – “the cultural hub of the town” – a stunning conversion of a former Methodist church which offers arts events and speciality baked goods from the on-site bakery.

It is here that fashionistas and “proper locals” come to nibble their daily cruffin (a £4.50 reworking in which a croissant is curled inside a muffin tin and switched-up with today’s flavour: Cotswolds Cream Liqueur mixed with mascarpone piped into dark chocolate.

“Bruton is such a cultural place to be,” raves Debs as I examine a £1,895 Beni Ourain rug from the High Atlas mountains, hanging on the warehouse-sized walls of Smouk. “I’m single and it’s full of arts events and things to do every night. There is a very interesting social mix of old hippy types and very sophisticated people, who are all creative.”

She particularly relishes the “world-class” Sunday jazz afternoons at the modern art gallery Hauser & Wirth, where top featured practitioners include Ian Bellamy, who lives in nearby Frome, “and is one of the top 25 jazz performers in the world”.

Hauser & Wirth is also home to a farm shop selling premium foodie treasures – such as Celeriac, Capers and Mustard Seeds Ferment (£12.95 for a 350g jar) and premium Wagyu fillet at £140 per kilo.

Back at The Chapel, as I dismember a hazelnut pain au chocolat (£4.50), I watch sought-after London artist Johny Midnight shifting a gigantic £7k canvas down a contemporary spiral staircase following his recent show of abstract oils in the Art Deco gallery space on the mezzanine level.

This is no typical small town coffee shop with watercolours on the walls and a bit of homemade shortbread. The shortbread here is Earl Grey-flavoured and costs £3 a slice.

Johny taught TV presenter Sarah Beeny’s four sons painting at their home in Balham, London, before she too upped sticks and moved to Bruton.

“Bruton is a market town revived by arty Boho,” declares Johny. “It’s a mix of local locals – the farming community who’ve been here for generations; the landed gentry, ditto; and incoming Londoners, plus tourists. I’d say they’ve nailed it here. The locals are living in a tourist destination without a Somerset cream tea in sight.

“Yes, The Chapel is a café, but it also stinks of a gallery. I love it.” So does Bruton live up to or exceed the “Montecito” hype?

It is certainly not a place filled with upscale clothing boutiques. In Bruton, you are more likely to bump into an A-list celebrity on their way to a local concert or seeking an artisan sourdough loaf, than one scouring the town for Prada, Versace or sunshine.

This is Somerset, after all. Rainy days and muddy walks are de rigeur in this rural landscape of farms and tractors.

But the sole charity shop, Brainwaves, has some lovely designer items – including a pair of Dino Maglini Italian leather brogues for £14.50.

And there was uproar when bakery chain Gregg’s opened a branch here 16 months ago. At the time, one disgruntled resident complained to a newspaper: “I actually can’t believe the council allowed it. It’s like putting a sex shop in a secondary school.”

However, it soon becomes clear that some of the locals are a bit twitchy about all the recent, post-Covid changes to the town. As I march down the miniature high street in my brightest coat with my reporter’s notebook in hand, I’m a rather obvious development and locals start accosting me.

“Oh, I do hope you are going to write about what it is really like,” begs Dilly Brownlow, who has lived here for 38 years. “I’m fed up with people writing a whole lot of nonsense about celebrities and Bruton.”

She then proceeds to confirm all the rumours, in particular the shift in cultural values when incomers flooded the town; a shift exemplified in the new look of the village shop, from which she has emerged to lament the past.

And the shop itself serves as a microcosm of all the changes that have rocked Bruton.

Where once it was a normal village shop “run by Cyril and selling newspapers”, it is now painted bright turquoise and called the Organic Good Community Café (in quirky black hand-lettering). It certainly looks more like a Notting Hill boutique than a place you would go for a can of beans.

The recent influx of arrivals has caused Dilly no end of problems. She is a curator of small-scale local charity arts events – but she has trouble competing with the many other cultural veins running through the Bruton scene. I glance at the shop notice board, where a poster for a typical Bruton concert is displayed: no less than Steve Jolliffe from the prog rock Tangerine Dream performing various works, including The Bruton Suite. This has caused Dilly a major diary clash with the Elvis tribute night she is promoting for a local charity.

“It’s gone from being a very sleepy village where nothing happened, to this,” Dilly complains. “I do wish they would check what else is happening locally on the same night first”.

In the past, she had no problem getting bums on seats any night of the week. “Now I’m hoping there will be two distinct audiences on the night… but I would quite like to go to Tangerine Dream myself. There is almost too much going on for a local community. This might be my last year of trying.”

The general consensus is that the Montecito label is a bit daft – not least because true Brutonites know they have something infinitely more precious: culture and class. Even the alms-house enabling independent living in the middle of the high street – which was established following a bequest from local benefactor Sir Hugh Sexey 400 years ago – looks like a small Oxford college, with original lead drainpipes and perfect grassy quad.

After all, who needs to be compared to a Californian enclave when you are surrounded by adorable hamstone cottages dating back to the Domesday Book?

This was something that John Steinbeck, the legendary American author of The Grapes Of Wrath, discovered during his eight months in the town in 1959 on a retreat to think and write. At that time, the little bookshop Ape and Eden was the town’s hardware store, and a blue plaque on the building recalls Steinbeck’s fondness for the locale. “I felt more at home in Bruton than I ever have anywhere: A fortunate accident drew me to this place,” it reads.

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, the year after his last visit to the town, and recorded his experiences there in long letters to friends.

Inside the shop, now owned by Lisa Pickering, the cashier-elect is her son Lyndon.

“For a small town, it’s cosmopolitan. It has a small city mentality and always this connection to fine art and music,” he says. And it was the 2014 opening of the out-of-town gallery Hauser & Wirth “that put Bruton on the map”, Lyndon notes.

Then it is to the Roth Bar at the gallery that I head for my final stop. It’s not a normal pub. Of course not. This is Bruton. A gigantic artwork, the size of a prone double decker bus, is elevated over the entire bar, and fashioned from an assemblage of televisions, tape recorders and other ephemera.

Beneath it, three elegant ladies – wearing real leather designer cowgirl hats, with edgy fabric trim, designed by Jessy Cowgirl – are swilling tequila.

Jessy is here with her mum, caterer and farmer Janey White, and her mum’s friends, Cordelia Plunket (an artist who worked with David Bowie and Adele) and gallery owner Mandy d’Abo.

“There was a big exodus from London to Bruton during Covid, including fashion designer Phoebe Philo, the former creative director of Chloe, as well as filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson and Stella McCartney,” says Mandy.

Adds Cordelia: “There are lots of very cool women in Bruton. Make that your headline.”

It may be only 4pm, but it’s time for more shots. “It’s always tequila o’clock in Bruton,” laughs Janey.

And so the ladies of Bruton party on.