Broadway

Broadway takes its name from the obvious thing, the broad green-fringed street that runs through the middle of it, lined with chestnut trees and honey-coloured houses, many of them sixteenth century. It is one of the showpieces of the northern Cotswolds, just over the Worcestershire line, and it has been fashionable for a very long time. In the Victorian years it drew an artists' colony; John Singer Sargent painted here, and William Morris and J. M. Barrie came and stayed.

Above the village, on the second-highest point in the Cotswolds, stands Broadway Tower, a folly designed by James Wyatt and finished in 1798 for the Countess of Coventry, who wanted to know whether a beacon on the hill could be seen from her house twenty miles off. It could. Morris later took the tower as a country retreat, and the view from it is said to reach a dozen counties on a clear day. The Cotswold Way runs over the hill beside it.

Down in the village the Lygon Arms has been an inn since the sixteenth century, and the antique shops and galleries do a steady trade off the green.

For all the visitors, the lanes off the high street climb quickly into quiet, and the houses behind the trees are not the ones in the photographs. The jewel is on the surface. The setting is where people actually live.