Plum Sykes: Why the British are obsessed with the Cotswolds

The countryside idyll in Oxfordshire is having a moment, and as the super-rich descend upon it, books and TV dramas are depicting the wealthy set of this rural enclave.

The British writer Plum Sykes knows a thing or two about intense social groups.

The ex-Vogue staffer and New York It girl-turned author has spent much of her career immersed in and observing them. In her previous novels, Bergdorf Blondes and Debutante Divorcee, she's used her insider knowledge to skewer the world of Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Now back in the UK, she needed another glamorous, gossipy, cut-throat world to write about – and she found it on her doorstep in the English countryside.

Sykes's new book Wives Like Us is a satirical comedy of manners about a group of super-rich women living in the Cotswolds, an area that's having a bit of a moment in pop culture. The US novelist Armistead Maupin has set the latest instalment of his landmark Tales of the City series, Mona of the Manor, not in San

Francisco, but in a country pile in the Cotswolds. Taylor Swift is reportedly relaxing in a £3.3m cottage in the area in-between dates on her Eras tour. And later this year, a glossy adaptation of Jilly Cooper's best-selling bonkbuster Rivals – set in the fictional Cotswold country of Rutshire – will hit our screens.

A designated area of natural beauty covering nearly 800 sqare miles in the south of England, visitors have long swarmed to the Cotswolds to take in its rolling hills, picturesque villages and famous honey-coloured limestone buildings (it attracts around 25 million visitors a year – compared with a population of around 150,000).

Its quintessential rural charm and proximity to London – most of its more famous spots can be reached in less than a couple of hours from the capital – also makes it a popular spot for the well-heeled to decamp for the weekend. A-listers including Kate Moss, Elizabeth Hurley and Kate Winslet have homes there.