Soho Farmhouse

Soho Farmhouse is the reason a stretch of north Oxfordshire started turning up in the gossip columns. The rural outpost of the Soho House clubs, it sits on a working-farm estate near Great Tew, a hundred or so cabins and cottages around lakes and barns, with the restaurants and the spa and the cookery school that the members come out from London to use.

It opened the village to a world it had not seen before: the cars at the station on a Friday, the names you half recognise in the farm shop, the sense that something exclusive is happening just out of view behind a long drive. The club has been good for the local trade, and good for the legend of the place.

It is exclusive in the way the word now means, which is to say you can join it. Membership is reviewed, the waiting list is real, and the gate is watched. None of that is a secret. The exclusivity is the product.

The Cotswolds has another kind, older and harder to find, that is not sold and not joined. It keeps no farm shop and takes no bookings. You are simply, one day, within it, or you spend your life a field away and never learn it was there.