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From Kate Middleton favourite Temperley to country house hotels, a gentler English design ethos grows outside London
- A slower, gentler type of English design, based outside London and seen in fashion brands and innovative hotels, has emerged after Brexit and the Covid pandemic
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Ice-cream-coloured miniskirts, punks with bright pink hair, Vivienne Westwood tartan dresses and scarlet Alexander McQueen suits; England has been home to wave after wave of fashion revolutions, but all have been firmly rooted in London.
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The most memorable took place in the 1960s, when girls paraded around the streets of Chelsea in thigh-baring skirts, skinny-ribbed black jumpers and strawberry-red ankle boots from Mary Quant and Biba. Then came punk’s subversive designs, and later the Cool Britannia wave of the late 90s, when a slew of new designers emerged out of East London, each more avant garde than the last.
London’s fashion industry grew from strength to strength this century, too, until a combination of the coronavirus and Brexit brutally cut through swathes of major brands. But with the fall of companies such as Topshop, we have witnessed the rise of a slower, gentler type of English design; one that is based outside the capital.
This is a trend that has encompassed far more than just fashion. After 18 months of on-off lockdowns and a move to working from home, the countryside has stolen much of the limelight from London.
House prices have risen more steeply in the Cotswolds 130km west of London than in the capital’s Kensington borough, and new design hotels have sprung up in buttermilk-coloured towns and on the hills and village greens of England’s prettiest shires.
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The British country house hotel in particular is back on raring form. It was born in the dark, difficult post-war years, when rationing was still rife and life had been stripped of so much of its pleasure. Like a beacon for the future, Sharrow Bay opened in the Lake District in 1948.
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