Great Tew
Great Tew in Oxfordshire is one of the finest estate villages in England, a settlement of thatched ironstone cottages of the seventeenth century arranged around a village green in a composition of English village perfection that was created by the landscape designer J C Loudon who laid out the Great Tew estate in the early nineteenth century with a comprehensive plan that included the arrangement of the village buildings, the planting of the estate woodland and the improvement of the cottages in a unified aesthetic programme. The result is a village that appears entirely natural but is in fact a designed landscape of considerable sophistication.
The ironstone cottages of Great Tew, thatched and draped in climbing plants in a condition of perfect maintenance, provide one of the most photographed and most consistently admired village streetscapes in Oxfordshire. The estate cottages were designed by Loudon with a consistent architectural character that gives the village an unusual unity of appearance, and the subsequent care of the estate has maintained this character against the pressures of modernisation that have compromised similar villages elsewhere.
The village pub, the Falkland Arms, is one of the finest traditional village pubs in Oxfordshire, its interior of ancient beams, clay pipes and numerous ales providing the character of a genuinely traditional English inn in a building that has served this function since the sixteenth century. The combination of the village character and the pub creates a destination of considerable appeal for those seeking the authentic English village experience.