The celebrity town with soaring house prices ahead of the general election
04-18-2015
Home to David Cameron and Jeremy Clarkson - the star-studded countryside botlhole with house price growth that has outstripped the UK average
Chipping Norton: Britain's crappest town?
Chipping Norton's house prices rose 16ps last year thanks to its star homeowners - Jeremy Clarkson, David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks Photo: ALAMY
By Anna White, Property correspondent
David Cameron's policy promises to help young renters get on the home ownership ladder, along with limited supply, are not the only factors behind booming property prices in the Oxfordshire town of Chipping Norton.
The Prime Minister's mere presence in the town, the location of his country residence, along with other celebrities, has driven house prices in the OX7 postcode up by 16pc in 2014.
The disgraced Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, sacked from the BBC show last month for punching a producer, and named as a "friend" by Mr Cameron, also lives near Chipping Norton.
The town, where the average house price has risen from £340,000 in March 2013 to £395,500 12 months on, has also been linked to former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, PR guru Matthew Freud, and Alex James the former Blur member and cheesemaker.
The typical price of a detached pad home is £602,000, Land Registry statistics have shown.
Publicity surrounding the bustling town, which sits in the Cotswolds hills, has boosted local house price inflation, dwarfing the average growth rate for the whole of the UK - 8.1pc last year, according to official data from the Office of National Statistics - and the average for the whole of Oxfordshire (9pc).
Transactions - a leading indicator for house prices - spiked in the OX7 postcode, which includes the popular village of Charlbury, in 2010, the year in which David Cameron, the MP for Whitney, was named Prime Minister.
The town fell under the spotlight again in 2011 when Mrs Brooks was arrested under phone-hacking allegations. She was subsequently cleared of all charges in 2014 after a lengthy trial.
According to Johnny Morris, head of residential research at estate agent Hamptons, the "Chipping Norton set" of celebrities could be linked to moving property prices in the area.
"When a specific area gets publicised it can often translate into more buyers looking for homes there. But equally those homes would have to have been sold by someone too, so it may also have been the neighbours wanting to get away."
Either way the headlines could have generated activity in and around Chipping Norton.
Wealthy people choosing to live in the town - dubbed the gateway to the Cotswolds - also pushed up transactions in the luxury end of the market.
The jump in average prices in 2010 was partly due to a spike in the sale of homes worth more than £1m in 2010, from five sales in 2009 to 11 in 2010.
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In fact, a property was bought for £8m in the year that Mr Cameron came to power - the most expensive on record for the postcode.
Giles Lawton, a director at Savills and an expert on the area, said: "Back in the 1980s Chipping Norton was seen as the back of beyond with the elite buying in Woodstock or Oxford. The publicity over the last five years has really put it on the map."
A £1.35m home for sale in the OX7 postcode on the outskirts of Chipping Norton
The town is now attracting Londoners either buying a country retreat as a second home or commuting from nearby stations, such as Kingham, as a wave of families continue to cash in on high house prices in the core of the capital and go in search of better value for money and more space.
"The buyer is usually British," said Mr Lawton. "But I have just sold one home to a man from south-east Asia who wanted to be near to Oxford."
However, he also said that 2010 was a "fantastic year" in the UK property market - coinciding with the Conservative Party's election win.
"There was a real feel-good factor after the election and a general sense of relief that people could move on with their lives. We had experienced a couple of hard years before 2010 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and it's been relatively tough ever since. Let's hope we see the same thing again after this election."
David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks both owned property in Chipping Norton