Tetbury

Tetbury is a southern wool town that kept its grandest building, the Market House of 1655, a long stone room raised on three rows of squat pillars in the middle of the street, where wool and yarn were once stapled and sold. The town made its money on the same trade as the rest, and its oldest corner is the Chipping Steps, a flight of worn stone steps lined with the cottages of the people who worked the wool.

These days Tetbury is known for two other things. It is the antiques capital of the Cotswolds, with Long Street given over to dealers, and it is the nearest town to Highgrove, the country house of the King, whose garden draws its own quiet pilgrimage and whose shop sells the estate's produce on the high street. Westonbirt, the national arboretum, is a few miles down the road.

St Mary's carries one of the tallest spires in the county, a Georgian rebuild in the Gothic taste, visible across the fields long before the town is.

It is a town used to a certain class of neighbour and entirely unbothered by it. Tetbury has seen money come and go for six hundred years. It does not stare.