Broadway
Broadway in Worcestershire is widely regarded as the most beautiful village in the Cotswolds, a broad main street of honey-coloured limestone buildings extending for over a mile through the village with a quality and consistency of architecture that creates one of the finest streetscapes in rural England. The village has been celebrated as a picturesque ideal of English village life since the nineteenth century when American and British artists of the Broadway Colony, including John Singer Sargent and Edwin Abbey, made it their base and established its reputation as one of the finest landscapes in England.
The broad street from which the village takes its name is lined with buildings of Cotswold limestone in styles ranging from the medieval to the Georgian, the consistent use of the local warm stone and the characteristic Cotswold vernacular of steeply pitched roofs and mullioned windows creating an architectural harmony that absorbs buildings of very different periods into a coherent whole. The village green and the individual buildings of exceptional quality, including the Lygon Arms, one of the finest Cotswold coaching inns, punctuate the main street at intervals.
Broadway Tower, a folly tower on the Cotswold escarpment above the village, provides exceptional views from its position on one of the highest points of the Cotswolds, the panorama extending across the Vale of Evesham to the Malvern Hills and beyond on clear days. The Cotswold Way national trail passes through Broadway and the walking to the tower from the village is one of the classic short walks of the national trail.