When weekend visitors to the village of Stoke Abbott first complained about the bells, it became obvious West Dorset was no longer entirely defined by its milking herds. For the best part of Friday night the great migration west jammed up the infamous A 303, which bottlenecks into single lanes from Stonehenge to Chard (or the ‘C’ word as this rundown border town is sometimes called). The road weary visitors wanted to lie in but instead were woken up, God forbid, by the ringing of the bells. Not long after, I went to Campt festival, a summer music festival in the grounds of Dorset’s Lulworth Castle. There, it wasn’t partying or the call to prayer that disturbed my sleep but a woman bellowing from a nearby tent: ‘Croissant or brioche?’ So maybe it should not have come as a surprise when the town of Bridport Dorset’s equivalent of Rock in North Cornwall, or Burford in the Cotswolds started to acquire the nickname Notting Hill on Sea. Although Dorset is a large country, it’s only in and around Bridport, in the country’s westerly parts, that the sleepy rural idyll evoked by Hardy has been shot through with something approaching cool. The fashionable zone more vintage tea dresses than red cords, more shredded cashmere than Cath Kidston florals radiates out some 20 miles from this former rope making town along Chesil Beach to Weymouth, inland towards the honeyed villages of Beaminster and Evershot, and west along the cliffs to Lyme Regis, a Regency resort with a curl of perfect golden sand (imported from Normandy), where Dorset borders Devon. The eclectic mix of well known locals includes Billy Bragg and PJ Harvey; more recent arrivals include architect Ben Pentreath and actor Martin Clunes.
Why did Bridport acquire the Noting Hill tag? Well, it started with the opening of The Bull Hotel in 2006, deemed relevant enough to make it into hip hotel collections such as Mr & Mrs Smith. Before long, the town’s Saturday market, which takes place on Bridport’s main thoroughfare, saw a growing number of Marni ballet pumps tiptoe round stalls of bric a brac. The Electric Palace, an Art Deco cinema converted in 2007 into a venue for live gigs, recalled the name of that eponymous Portobello stalwart 9though there’s no connection). Soon The Kills stopped in to play on a weekday night in winter and Kate Mos came to shimmy, while Mark Hix, the celebrity chef behind every decent chop house in London these days, returned to the place of his birth and opened up a seafood restaurant a mere seagull’s spit away in Lyme. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall morphed from hairy forager to television superhero; his Rier Cottage series was set in the very heart of the country’s Marshwood Vale, a perfect swathe of rural England deep lanes fronthing with foaming meandowsweet, geese roaming cobbled farmyards unfurling out from behind Bridportin undulating hills. (His current HQ, Park Farm, is just on the Devon side of the border so hasn’t made this guide’s geographical cut.) Now The Groucho Club’s tribe is feeling the gravitational pull, specifically Mary Lou Sturridge, the Groucho’s exMD who has bought an old hotel above Burton Bradstock beach four miles to Bridport’s east. Opening in spring 2014, The Seaside Boarding House, Restaurant and Bar, comprising seven bedrooms, a giant restaurant and bar, will likely account for the next run of blow ins, their Porsche Cayennes ready to brave the A 303 in the direction of West Dorset’s dramatic Jurassic Coast where, in spite of shifting proclivities, the bell still tolls on a Sunday morning at a top of the morning hour.