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As locals gossip beneath the low-beamed ceiling of a coffee shop, I ask Audrey Ann Masur to speak up.
“I’m always trying to speak more quietly, so I’m not getting that stereotype,” the 37-year-old from Indiana whispers across our table with a nervous smile, her decaf coffee steaming in the autumn chill.
We’re in the Cotswolds, an 800-square-mile pocket of English countryside dotted with towns and villages. Masur and her young family moved here from South Carolina five years ago, when her husband was reposted by the US military.
Her accent has prompted older locals to corner her at the grocery store and press her on her political views, Masur says. So, she figures it’s best to keep her voice down.
I hope Masur, who documents life in the Cotswolds on Instagram for her 13,700 followers, can help me understand why this area has become a hot spot for transatlantic elites in recent years. I want to know how locals are reacting as old British money and new international money meet and — as the American “invasion” headlines in the British press suggest — clash.
Masur is neither a billionaire nor a millionaire — “I drive a Honda Jazz,” she says — but she has met some of the wealthy American newcomers at influencer events and watched businesses change in the relatively short time she has been here.
“There are a lot more places that want to please people of a certain socioeconomic status,” Masur says.
Recent high-profile visitors to the area, which straddles six counties, include Taylor Swift, Eve Jobs, who married here in July, and JD Vance, whose security checkpoints put the sleepy village of Dean on lockdown in August. Others, like Masur, are calling it home. Ellen DeGeneres has lived here since 2024, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z are rumored to be looking for property.
This is part of a lucrative boom in Americans heading to the UK. In 2024, there were a record 5.6 million visits from the US, up half a million on the previous year. Those visitors spent a record £7.3 billion, or about $9.5 billion, in 2024 — £1.1 billion more than in 2023, according to data from VisitBritain.
They’re also spending more: In 2024, adjusted for inflation, Americans spent £68 more per trip to the UK than they did in 2023.
Figures provided to Business Insider by the UK government show that the number of US nationals applying for British citizenship also hit a record high in the second quarter of 2025, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Between April and June, 2,194 Americans applied — up 50% on the same period last year.
From the sheer number of what sound like American accents I hear during my trip in late October — although I meet some Canadian ladies hurt by my assumption — it feels as though most have headed straight to the Cotswolds.
Two real estate professionals told me they are seeing the spoils of this trend: more American tech founders, media moguls, and billionaires looking for historic properties in the region.
“Once there’s a critical mass of like-minded people in the area, it draws more and more people of that profile,” says Harry Gladwin, a Cotswolder and partner at The Buying Solution, which advises wealthy foreigners on finding homes here.
Armand Arton, the founder of Arton Capital, which helps ultra-high-net-worth clients secure second homes and citizenships, says US politics has motivated a lot of his clients to seek homes in this part of rural England. But owning heritage properties — castles and country estates that many British aristocrats can no longer afford to maintain — is also about status.
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D’Ambrosi Fine Foods is an American-run business in Stow-on-the-Wold, the Cotswolds. Frederick Hunt for BI
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