Broad Campden

The Bakers Arms and the village

The Bakers Arms has been a pub since 1724, though a photograph from 1905 shows the same honey-coloured stone building working as the village bakery and grain store. Inside there are exposed beams, bare stone walls and an inglenook fireplace, and it is a free house where the three real ales change every week. Wye Valley Butty Bach and Camden Pale Ale are the regulars, with Wye Valley HPA and North Cotswold Shagweaver turning up in the rotation.

Step outside and Broad Campden is a scatter of thatched Cotswold-stone cottages along narrow lanes, gathered loosely around a small green. Sheep graze the rolling fields beyond, streams cut through them, and the village is reached by minor roads signed off the B4081, west of Blockley and south-east of Chipping Campden.

The kitchen cooks modern British food without straying far from what a village pub should serve. King prawns come with garlic-and-chilli butter and local sourdough; there is a twice-baked mozzarella-and-chive soufflé, pan-fried hake with bouillabaisse sauce, prawns and confit potatoes, and a half roast chicken with portobello mushroom and peppercorn sauce. The Bakers fish and hand-cut chips is the plainer choice. Sticky toffee pudding and lemon meringue pie finish things off. Dogs are welcome.

A rescued pub and routes to Chipping Campden

The pub is open because Richard and Gail Smith decided it should be. When the former owners retired in 2024 and closure looked likely, the residents bought it, working with Stephen and Charlotte Gabb and the Relish Group to keep the doors open. "I know the pub is important to the village," Richard Smith said at the time. The Cotswold Morris Dancers practise and perform here, and in summer there is occasional music in the garden.

From the green, a signed circular walk of about two and a half miles connects Broad Campden to Chipping Campden and back. It takes a little over an hour, crosses fields, drops beside a stream, passes through an orchard and returns by field paths, with a few steep slopes on the way. It also passes the Friends' Meeting House.

The walk delivers you into Chipping Campden, which is where the food shopping is. The Campden Bakery Shop sells sourdough, focaccia, pastries, sausage rolls and freshly ground Kimbo coffee. Fillet & Bone, a butcher and deli in a centuries-old butcher's shop on the High Street, stocks rare-breed meat, artisan cheeses, stone-baked bread, charcuterie and pies; its vegetables come from Drinkwaters at Ebrington, four miles away. The Cotswold Way begins in Chipping Campden too, running six miles to Broadway over Dover's Hill and past Broadway Tower.

Victorian Gothic and Ashbee's legacy

Broad Campden's church, known locally as St Michael and All Angels though its statutory listing names it simply the Church of St Michael, was built in 1867–68 by John Prichard of Llandaff in a Gothic style with Decorated elements. It has a circular west belfry, trefoiled lancets and, unusually, an internal fireplace. The communion rail was designed by C. R. Ashbee.

Ashbee left a larger mark at the Norman Chapel, which he restored between 1905 and 1907. It had begun around 1130 as a chapel of Tewkesbury Abbey and spent later centuries as a house and then a barn. He restored it for the Sinhalese art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and his wife Ethel, a weaver; Ashbee moved his Essex House Press there in 1907, and lived in it with his family from 1911 to 1919. It is a private house now.

Quaker witness and village history

The Friends' Meeting House on the walk route is one of the oldest in England, dated 1663. Quaker worship stopped there in 1874; it was sold for £100 in 1931, bought back derelict for the same sum in 1961, restored, and returned to use.

Broad Campden was its own manor for centuries. Thomas Russell, a friend and chief executor of Shakespeare, sold it in 1602 to Antony Smith, reuniting it with the Campden estate after roughly five hundred years apart. A short terrace called Hull's Row remembers Jonathan Hulls, credited locally with a principle of steam navigation in 1736.

Rail, buses and nearby gardens

The nearest railhead is Moreton-in-Marsh, linked to the Bakers' Arms stop by Stagecoach services 2 and 2A; there is no Sunday bus, so plan the last leg accordingly. Two great Cotswold gardens are close: Hidcote, Lawrence Johnston's sequence of outdoor rooms, and Kiftsgate Court, made and kept by three generations of women gardeners and home to the Kiftsgate rose.

The walkers go back over the fields to Chipping Campden, leaving the Bakers Arms behind them, the pub that Broad Campden fought to keep open.