Overtourism has become a big thing in the past few years. Cities such as Venice and Florence have been overwhelmed, and there have been mass protests in some Spanish resort areas. But it is often a two-edged sword. Locals tend to become frustrated by the disruption caused by tourists, but the local business community and the city itself benefits enormously from the cash brought by tourists.
It’s a conundrum that, somehow, has to be solved. So, in a small way, I decided to do some ferreting around in the English Cotswolds area that has long been a magnet for visitors.
My investigation took place in Bibury, one of the most popular Cotswolds villages. I picked a weekend, hoping for shots of throngs of visitors, but I was to be disappointed. Despite the car parks being full, I began to wonder where all the passengers had gone. Yes, there were many people in the village, but not at the overwhelming levels I’d been led to believe.
I made a beeline for Arlington Row, the achingly beautiful line of cottages that are one of Bibury’s most striking features. Sadly, the occupants of all those cars were already there. Despite hanging around for an hour, I was unable to get a pedestrian-free shot of Arlington Row. In the end, I settled for the least-busy shots I could find.
Back in November 2025, Andrew Tobin wrote about overtourism in Florence, where the situation is even more dire than in the Cotswolds. He emphasised his impressionist-style photographs captured with his Ricoh GR IIIx HDF. It is well worth a visit as a salutary lesson to accompany this overview of the situation in the Cotswolds.
Breaking point
Bibury has around 630 residents. Yet on a peak summer weekend, it is said to absorb up to a staggering 20,000 visitors — a ratio that would strain any city, never mind a small village in the Cotswolds, let alone one built on narrow lanes designed for foot traffic and the occasional cart. Think of it another way. It’s the equivalent of 300 million visitors flooding London over a weekend. The situation in the capital is bad enough, but not that bad.
Forbes named Bibury the world’s most beautiful village in 2025, which sounds like a compliment until you consider what that kind of global attention does to a place this small. William Morris, the visionary designer and craftsman, called it the most beautiful village in England more than 150 years ago.
And for most of that time, the description was accurate. Beautiful but quiet. Now it’s a bucket-list stop for “influencers” and for coach tours running a Cotswolds circuit in a single day. The village is buckling under the weight of its reputation, although it seemed to have had a respite when I pitched my tent.
Not just a Bibury problem
Bibury, of course, is not a one-off problem. The same complaints can be heard from Bourton-on-the-Water, Castle Combe, the Slaughters, Burford, and many others.
It’s for broadly the same reasons: longer seasons, opportunistic bank holiday spikes, and a rise in short-notice domestic breaks that together stretch visitor pressure across most of the year rather than confining it to a few summer weeks.
Bourton-on-the-Water is another prime example of tourist overload. Nicknamed the Venice of the Cotswolds for its low stone bridges and the River Windrush running gently through its centre, Bourton is precisely the kind of place that photographs beautifully and travels well on social media — which is part of the problem.
Local councillors increasingly describe the pressure as a mix of traditional overtourism and something newer: visitors arriving specifically to create content, treating a residential village as a backdrop rather than somewhere people actually live.
A 2024 motion asking the council to formally recognise tourism as a concern for the village failed by a narrow margin. This tells you plenty about how contested this issue still is locally, even among people who see the same traffic and the same crowds every weekend.
Bibury, up close
Bibury deserves the closer look, partly because it’s become the emblem of this whole debate, and partly because it’s where I was standing with my Fujifilm X-E5 and Fujinon XF 16-50mm f/2.8-4.8 zoom. This combination is used in all these images except the picture of Castle Combe.
On the busiest days, the village can see up to 50 coaches passing through or parking nearby, funnelling visitors onto pavements that were never built to take that kind of footfall. Moreover, Gloucestershire County Council reports over 4,500 cars crossing Swan Bridge in a single day.
I was fortunate to pick one of the least-suffocating weekends of 2026, despite it being sunny and hot. I’d expected to get shots of throngs of tourists, but, instead, had a reasonably clear run. But I see this as the exception to the current rule of overwhelming visitor numbers.
In 2024, photographs circulated showing tourists climbing garden fences and leaning against centuries-old stonework to get a better angle for their pictures. It’s also where the friction has turned physical. A resident was assaulted last year during a dispute with visitors over parking, an incident that crystallised just how frayed patience has become in a village that’s meant to represent rural English tranquillity.
Gloucestershire County Council has now committed £175,000 to a Bibury Overtourism and Safety Mitigation Scheme, developed jointly with the district council and shaped through consultation with the parish council, local businesses, coach and tour operators, and the police.
This is a genuinely collaborative effort, which gives it a better chance of actually sticking than most top-down traffic schemes.
What residents are saying
I chatted to a few locals in Bibury, including shopkeepers, and a pattern emerges quickly: frustration that isn’t really about tourism itself, but about losing any say in how their streets function.
Over in Bourton, a residents’ campaign group ran a survey earlier this year that captured just how strongly local sentiment has hardened — not against visitors as people, but against the sheer volume and the sense that nobody’s really controlling it.
Castle Combe adds a different dimension to the same complaint. Residents there report drones flying over gardens and homes, a level of intrusion that goes well beyond crowded pavements and parking headaches.
“No drone zone” signs have gone up around the village, a small but telling sign of how far some visitors’ behaviour has drifted from ordinary courtesy. More than one long-term resident has described feeling like their home has become a film set rather than a community — which, given Castle Combe’s genuine filming history, carries a particular sting.
A complex issue not set in stone
It would be unfair, though, to present this as villagers versus visitors with no complications. Local businesses in these same villages often take the opposite view, worried that any serious restriction on coach access or visitor numbers threatens trade that’s already running on thin margins after a difficult few years for hospitality.
Cafés, pubs, and gift shops in Bibury and Bourton depend heavily on the same visitors that residents want reduced. Any workable solution has to keep both sides happy. It must acknowledge that the crowding is genuinely unsustainable, and that tourism income genuinely matters to the people living there too.
The parking problem, specifically
Strip away the sentiment, and a lot of this comes down to something mundanely practical: there simply isn’t anywhere to put all these vehicles. Bourton’s situation worsened sharply after a privately owned coach car park stopped accepting coaches at the end of 2022, pushing vehicles onto streets that had no capacity to absorb them.
The village has since trialled routing coaches to a designated drop-off point, with buses moving on quickly to park at a nearby industrial estate rather than sitting in the centre.
Not everyone’s convinced it’s the right fix — some residents have raised safety concerns about the drop-off arrangement — but it’s a genuine attempt to separate the drop-off function from long-stay parking, which is the crux of the issue. Alongside that, the council extended parking charges to run until 8pm, partly to free spaces for residents in the evening and partly to generate revenue that can fund further measures.
Consult, test, refine
Bibury’s approach follows a similar logic. A trial closed the coach bays that used to sit in the village centre, replacing them with new bus stops for safer drop-off and pick-up near the Trout Farm. The scheme currently under consultation goes further: extended yellow lines to stop opportunistic parking, a pay-and-display system with exemptions for residents, and raised kerbs intended to help pedestrianise parts of the centre.
None of these individually solves over-tourism, but together they start to separate through-traffic from parked traffic, and visitors on foot from vehicles looking for somewhere to stop.
Where this might be heading
Across the wider district, the conversation has reportedly moved beyond individual villages patching individual car parks. Cotswold District Council and Gloucestershire County Council are now running joint workshops covering traffic-calming, improved public transport links, and tighter regulation of short-term holiday lets.
This last measure is aimed at the slower, structural side of over-tourism, where second homes and Airbnb listings hollow out permanent communities even outside peak season. A workshop in Bourton earlier this year reflected growing political appetite to treat this as a region-wide planning issue, rather than something each parish council has to solve alone.
Longer stays
There are commercial responses emerging too. Some hotels and guest houses are positioning group stays and longer visits as a lower-impact alternative to the day-trip model. Day trippers clog villages during the day before draining away entirely, leaving behind traffic and rubbish but comparatively little economic benefit for the time residents lose.
Encouraging visitors to stay overnight, spread their visit across a fuller day, or explore villages beyond the well-photographed handful could do more for the region’s sustainability than any single parking scheme.
Getting the shot
And what about those shots of Arlington Row? I waited and waited, but there was no let-up in the flow of visitors. Imagine living in one of those charming cottages, with tourists peering in to see what’s happening. I suspect many tourists think this is a sort of Disney set and would be surprised to find people actually living inside.
Photographers, day-trippers, coach parties, and residents are all descending on the same handful of streets. No single measure — a coach ban here, a pay-and-display scheme there — resolves that tension on its own. What is encouraging, though, is that the current initiatives, however incremental, are being built with residents, businesses, and operators at the same table rather than being imposed from above.
Whether that’s enough to protect what actually drew everyone here in the first place remains the real question hanging over the Cotswolds right now. Next time I go back to one of the picture-postcard villages, I’ll arrive even earlier (or better still, I’ll stay overnight and contribute to the economy), but even then, I suspect I won’t have Arlington Row to myself. That, more than any statistic, tells you everything.
All images in this article (except for the photograph taken in Castle Combe) were captured with my Fujifilm X-E5 and XF 16-50mm f/2.8-4.8 lens.
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