Antiques and shopping in the Cotswolds

The antiques towns of the Cotswolds are Stow-on-the-Wold, Tetbury, Burford, Broadway and Cirencester. The shopping villages are Broadway, Burford and Chipping Campden, each a single street of independents. And the big draws are Daylesford near Kingham, Burford Garden Company (opens in a new tab) and the Highgrove shop on Tetbury's Long Street. Two designer outlets carry the name and are outside the hills: the Cotswolds Designer Outlet is by the M5 at Tewkesbury and the Swindon one is in Swindon, so this page is not about either.

How we chose: every shop named here is one with its own website, a trade association listing or a listing of ours behind it, read at the desk in October 2026 and recorded in our sources file. Nobody pays to appear, nothing is ranked, and where a town's dealers change too fast to name we describe the street and leave the names to your feet. Opening hours live on the listings and the shops' own sites. Most antiques dealers close on a Sunday or a Monday, and some on both.

Stow-on-the-Wold: the antiques town

Stow is the antiques town of the Cotswolds, with dealers around the Square and down Sheep Street and Church Street, from single-owner showrooms to centres with many dealers under one roof. Baggott & Co (opens in a new tab), the business that traded for nearly 50 years as Baggott Church Street, has moved from Church Street to Huntsman's Yard off Sheep Street. It belongs to the British Antique Dealers' Association and deals in English furniture of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, portraits and country pieces. The antiques centres are where to start if you want a morning rather than a purchase: ceramics, silver, books and small furniture from many dealers at once.

Between the dealers Stow has a bookshop, the Borzoi in Digbeth Court, the Cotswold Cheese Company (opens in a new tab) on Digbeth Street, Huffkins (opens in a new tab)' tea room and the Old Bakery Tearoom. The Market Cross and the stocks are the landmarks to meet at. The farmers' market is on the Square on the second and last Thursdays of the month (the second only in December, the last only in January). Park in the Maugersbury Road car park, or free at the district council's Fosseway car park, and walk up. The Stow guide has the detail. Sheep on Sheep Street and the Porch House are the lunches.

Tetbury: Long Street

Tetbury's Long Street is the other antiques street, longer and lighter in its taste than Stow: painted French furniture, garden statuary, textiles and twentieth-century design rather than brown oak. Lorfords has a shop at 30 Long Street and a far larger showroom in Hangars 1 and 2 at Babdown Airfield, west of the town, where the decorative trade buys, both open Monday to Saturday from 9am to 5.30pm.

The Highgrove shop (opens in a new tab) at 10 Long Street, opened in 2008, sells the estate's food, garden goods and gifts, with its profits to the King's charitable foundation. It opens Monday to Saturday from 9.30am to 5pm and, in winter, on Sundays from 10.30am to 4.30pm. Tours of the gardens themselves are booked separately. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is at 21 Church Street, with a second branch in Nailsworth, and Hobbs House Bakery (opens in a new tab) has a shop in the town. The Market House on its pillars is the centre of everything, and the Tetbury guide has the car parks. Lunch at the Snooty Fox or the Priory Inn.

Burford: the High Street and the garden company

Burford's High Street falls from the A40 to the bridge over the Windrush, and most of its length is shops: antiques, interiors, galleries, a cheese shop, a tea room and a hardware store. Manfred Schotten (opens in a new tab) at 109 High Street deals in sporting antiques and art, Monday to Saturday (closed on Sundays and bank holidays). Antiques at the George (opens in a new tab) at 104 High Street has three floors of dealers in a coaching inn of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, open every day (Sunday from noon).

Burford Garden Company (opens in a new tab), on the Shilton Road a mile out, is the big shop of the Oxfordshire Cotswolds: a garden company the Johnson family founded in 1977 that grew food halls, a café, books, clothing, art and a furniture and homeware floor, open seven days a week. Many people come for the day and never see the town. For Burford itself, the Tolsey Museum is free, the Cotswold Cheese Company (opens in a new tab) has a branch at 113 High Street and Huffkins (opens in a new tab) started here about 1890. The Burford guide has the parking: the free Guildenford car park below the High Street, and the street itself, which fills first. The Lamb and the Bull are the lunches.

Broadway: galleries and the design museum

Broadway's long High Street is galleries, interiors and gift shops under the chestnut trees, with the Gordon Russell Design Museum in one of the furniture maker's workshops on Russell Square behind the Lygon Arms. John Noott (opens in a new tab) showed paintings in Broadway for decades, but when we checked in October 2026 its website carried only a notice of an online gallery to come, so ring before making a trip for it. The Broadway Museum in the Tudor House has the Sargent portrait.

The museum follows the firm from Arts and Crafts joinery to mid-century modern, with the furniture made in the workshops around it. The ticket lasts a year and it closes on Mondays. The Arts and Crafts movement is the reason this edge of the hills is full of makers. Broadway's car parks are Church Close and Milestone Ground. See the Broadway guide. The Lygon Arms and Russell's are the lunches, and Broadway Tower the walk after.

Chipping Campden: the Guild's town

Chipping Campden's High Street is a single curved street of wool merchants' houses that holds a silversmith, a cutlery designer, a museum of craft, a bookshop and a deli, with the Market Hall in the middle. Hart's (opens in a new tab), on the first floor of the Old Silk Mill on Sheep Street, is the last workshop of C R Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft, which moved here from London in 1902. The Harts stayed on when the Guild folded in 1908, and a team of four silversmiths still works at the benches, descendants among them. The workshop says its doors are always open and it is happy to show visitors round, though it publishes no hours, so ring ahead if you are making a special trip. Court Barn next to the church tells the Guild's story and that of the makers who followed, at £7 (2026) with a ticket that lasts a year, Tuesday to Sunday, half price if you arrive by bus.

Robert Welch (opens in a new tab)'s studio shop on the Lower High Street sells the full range of the cutlery and kitchenware the Campden company designs, is open seven days a week, and will make up a cutlery set to order. Campden has bookshops and a wine shop and deli as well, and Grevel's House and the almshouses to look at between them. The Campden guide has the parking and the buses. The Eight Bells by the church and the Lygon Arms are the lunches, and Hidcote is ten minutes away.

Cirencester and Stroud: the Corn Hall and the makers

Cirencester has the Friday antiques market in the Corn Hall (opens in a new tab) on the Market Place, a fixture since the early 1970s that the trade press counted at about 40 dealers in 2024, beside the charter market outside on Mondays and Fridays. Check it is on before a long drive. Black Jack Street and Swan Yard behind the church are the independents: Octavia's Bookshop for children's books, Jesse Smith the butcher since 1808, and the Gilbertine Deli. New Brewery Arts, in the three remaining buildings of the Cirencester Brewery, has makers' studios, a craft shop and a café, open Monday to Saturday. Its exhibitions are free, and it is a registered charity. The Corinium Museum is round the corner for the rain.

Stroud's shopping is its makers. Made in Stroud (opens in a new tab) at 16 Kendrick Street is the town's shop of local makers' work, which began as a co-operative and now works with around 190 makers and producers, and the same company runs the Saturday farmers' market on Cornhill. The town has a vintage trade, record shops and a Saturday that fills the streets. The Museum in the Park is free, and Woodruffs on the High Street is the lunch. Nailsworth, 4 miles south, has William's food hall and the Yellow-Lighted Bookshop's second branch, on Fountain Street.

Antiques fairs and markets

The fairs run on rules. The Cotswolds Decorative, Antiques and Art Fair, run by Cooper Events, is held in the Great Hall and Orangery of Westonbirt House at Westonbirt School near Tetbury. Its 2026 fair runs from Friday 30 October to Sunday 1 November, from 11am each day, at £7.50 on the door or £5 bought ahead. It has been held in August in other years, so check the organiser's page for the next dates. Cirencester's Corn Hall market is on Fridays, and the town council lists antiques and collectables markets among its markets. We have not confirmed the current dates of the racecourse and Three Counties fairs, so check the organisers before a long drive.

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Galleries and bookshops

Broadway has the most galleries, Chipping Campden and Stow the next. Tetbury and Nailsworth share the Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Stow has the Borzoi and Cirencester has Octavia's, which is mostly for children. The Wilson (opens in a new tab) in Cheltenham holds what it calls the leading Arts and Crafts Movement collection, and entry is free. Its Arts and Crafts gallery closed on 1 June 2026 for conservation and repairs to the floor, with key pieces shown elsewhere in the museum until it reopens, which the museum does not expect for some time. Our guide to the Arts and Crafts movement explains why so much of it was made within ten miles of Campden.

Christmas shopping

From mid-November the towns put on late nights and markets. Broadway's late-night shopping is reached by steam train on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway, Cogges at Witney holds a Christmas market on a weekend at the end of November (28 and 29 November in 2026), and Cirencester has advent markets on 28 and 29 November, Christmas markets on 5 and 6 December and gift markets from 13 to 22 December 2026. Daylesford and Burford Garden Company are the places for the whole list under one roof. Our Christmas in the Cotswolds guide has the light trails, the markets and the dates as rules.

Parking and getting around while shopping

Every town here has a main car park and a street that fills first. Stow's are Maugersbury Road and the free Fosseway car park, Tetbury's is the Chipping, Burford's the free Guildenford car park and Broadway's Church Close and Milestone Ground. Each area guide carries the car parks, the toilets and the bus. Moreton-in-Marsh and Kingham have the stations, and the 801 bus links Moreton with Stow and Bourton for a day without a car, as our guide to the Cotswolds without a car sets out. Ask a dealer about carriage for anything that will not fit in the car.

What to buy

The things the Cotswolds have always made are stone, wool and the work of the Guild's heirs. Cotswold stone goes home as a garden trough or a bird bath from the reclamation yards. Wool goes as a throw from Cotswold Woollen Weavers (opens in a new tab) at Filkins, which wove cloth there for 44 years and has now closed to the public, selling its remaining cloth by appointment, or as blankets, throws and knitting wool from the flocks of the Cotswold Sheep Society (opens in a new tab)'s members, the only wool that comes off the Cotswold Lion itself. Silver comes from Hart's, made in Campden, and cutlery from Robert Welch, designed there. Emma Bridgewater pottery, which fills many a Cotswold gift shop, is made in Stoke-on-Trent. Local pottery is thrown at Winchcombe Pottery at Greet, where Michael Cardew restarted pottery-making in 1926, and at Whichford Pottery near Shipston-on-Stour, which has made frostproof terracotta flowerpots by hand since 1976.