I’ve only been to Glastonbury once, and I have to admit it was done in a most convivial way. The year was 2011, when the Pyramid Stage headliners were Beyoncé on the Sunday, festival perennials Coldplay on the Saturday, and, in something of a tour de force performance on the Friday, U2, interrupting their mammoth 360 tour. The day before the gig, we had flown in on a chartered jet fresh from their show in Baltimore, been whisked to the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath. The next day we were all choppered onto the Glasto site, picked up by a fleet of Mercedes and delivered backstage.
This year, however, the cool hotel to stay in is The Newt, centred around a limestone Georgian pile, Hadspen House, which is just 20 minutes by car from the festival site. Crucially, it is only a few minutes by helicopter - when I went to stay a few weeks ago, a chopper landed on the grounds in front of the property, something which obviously happens so often that people barely took any notice of it.
During the festival weekend, the staff often have very little to do, as the busiest time tends to be around 1am, when revellers and performers arrive back from the site, hungry for their supper, or looking forward to an early morning libation. On every other weekend, the property is a hive of activity, offering one of the best customer-staff ratios in any hotel in the country (The Newt employs over 600 people, almost all of them local).
Only two hours from London, The Newt is one of England’s finest country-house hotels. Dating back to 1687, it has only been a hotel since 2019 - but what a hotel it is. They like to say it’s a country house reimagined, and they’re not wrong. It offers a remarkably rich experience, complete with beautiful suites, triple A-style food, vast gardens (which non-residential visitors can use in an innovative membership scheme), woodlands, a working cider mill, a replica Roman villa, and a honeybee megalopolis known locally as Beezantium. Its rooms are spread between the original limestone house and the nearby outbuildings, while there is a magnificent spa and a beautiful indoor-outdoor pool that immediately makes you feel like you’re staying in Beverly Hills. The back of house is also as impressive as the front of house, with the Farmyard Kitchen restaurant making effective use of produce from the estate’s vast gardens - in total the estate stretches over 900 acres.
I wandered the grounds for hours, going from one agricultural wonder to another, sampling the food that would end up on my plate later in the day. Honestly, there is an abattoir here that is more luxurious than many seven-star hotels I’ve stayed in. The room service isn’t quite as good, but the accommodation is glorious. There is even an inbuilt element of smugness, as, the day trippers have had their fill (or you’ve had your fill of them), you can sneak back to the solace of the hotel. In this respect it’s a little like Capri, when the lunchers and shoppers catch the boat back to Sorrento before the last boat leaves.
The estate was bought by the former editor of South Africa's Elle Decoration, Karen Roos, and her telecom billionaire husband, Koos Bekker, in 2013. Following extensive renovations, it opened to some fanfare in 2019 and has since become something of a cult (I’d say it’s still the cult du jour). I have friends who live in the area, and who pay an annual fee to use the gardens and the accompanying restaurant, and when I told them I was coming to stay, they told me how very lucky I was.
‘We’ve never been anywhere like it,’ they said, almost in unison, and I could see why. They’re not your typical fancy hotel people, which made their impressions even more important. On the one hand this is your standard exemplary English country house hotel, and on the other a powerhouse of local farming (the restaurant is fuelled by the produce grown on site). It is probably categorised as a luxury experience, and yet has what feels like an innately casual vibe. I’ve been to their fabulous sister property in South Africa, Babylonstoren, (a vineyard), which shares the brand DNA - quiet, understated deluxe efficiency, with exemplary service and tip-top food and drink. Complaints? Only one: the mimsy size of the TV in my room (it was the shape of a medium-sized handbag), not that I watched much on my trip.
I’m not going to Glastonbury this year (U2 aren’t performing), but I actually wish I was - not to watch the likes of the 1975 or Olivia Rodrigo, but to stay for a few days (and nights) in The Newt. There really is nowhere else like it in the country. When we left, we were transported in some style (they have branded Newt Landies) to Castle Cary station, where you are encouraged to loiter in the Creamery café until your train arrives, an upscale restaurant and shop owned by The Newt, and which acts as some kind of luxury holding pen bookending your experience. Thinking it would be rude not to, I bought two cases of the fine cider produced by the estate and started to wonder how I’m going to headline Glastonbury next year.
