Thanksgiving in the Cotswolds is no small affair. Every November, Americans flock to the English market town of Stow-on-the-Wold to collect glazed turkey breasts, green bean casserole and a traditional sweet potato dish covered in marshmallows.
It is, by Jesse D’Ambrosi’s own admission, “bizarre”. The chef, owner of D’Ambrosi Fine Foods, is one of the many Americans who have made the Cotswolds their home in recent years. Here, her Thanksgiving and Fourth of July food hampers are highly coveted.
Now as Donald Trump settles into his second administration, the lure of the rolling Oxfordshire hills has grown stronger for many of her compatriots.
“I’ve seen a lot of Americans scoping and checking out the area,” she said. “Obviously it’s political. Why wouldn’t you want to leave where that guy is in action? It is very scary times, especially for women.”
It is an increasingly common view as Trump’s authoritarian clampdown and attacks on academia, civil society and political opponents send shock waves through the US and leave some Americans reaching for their passports.
US applications for UK citizenship hit a record high last year at more than 6,100, a 26% increase from 2023. There was a 40% year-on-year rise during the final three months of the year, around the time of Trump’s re-election.
In the prime London real estate market, which covers areas such as Knightsbridge and Mayfair, the number of American buyers overtook Chinese buyers for the first time last year, analysis by the property agent Knight Frank found.
But the prospect of an idyllic life in the English countryside is also growing increasingly popular. Harry Gladwin, from the Buying Solution estate agency in the Cotswolds, says a significant proportion of his clients are now Americans hoping to plot a route abroad.
“Since the re-election of Trump there has been a big rise in Americans looking at the UK as a place to anchor themselves,” he said.
“There are multiple draws: it is a safe place to hold properties; young families often want to have a holiday home with a view to spending more time here in the long term; and older couples who want to spend more time in the UK use it as a stepping stone into Europe.
“Many of them are younger people who made money in tech and want to have some property elsewhere. There are finance people from the east coast, as well as people in media, especially in film.”
There is no shortage of Hollywood glamour in the Cotswolds, with its chocolate box villages and honey-hued cottages providing a bucolic setting. Some scenes in The Holiday, the 2000s romcom starring Cameron Diaz and Jude Law, were filmed close to Chipping Norton. The Oxfordshire town of Bampton was the location for village scenes in the hit period drama Downton Abbey. Last year the former chatshow star Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, Portia de Rossi, relocated to the Cotswolds, reportedly because of Trump’s return to the White House.
Luxury brands and lifestyle businesses are following the money. The Gallery at Aynhoe Park, an outpost of the luxury American furniture brand RH, reopened the Grade I-listed landmark two years ago as an extravagant showroom. The private members’ club Soho Farmhouse and Daylesford Organic, which has expanded from a farm and furniture shop to a campus-style, five-star experience with pool, spa and padel courts, also cater for the influx. Estelle Manor, a country club in a Grade II-listed hall in Eynsham, charges a standard membership of £3,600 a year, plus a £1,000 joining fee.
D’Ambrosi, who lived in France and Amsterdam before settling in the UK, opened a fine foods store in Stow-on-the-Wold a few months before the pandemic hit in 2020. She has amassed a loyal following for her colourful, healthy cooking, as well as shelves dedicated to American staples including grape jelly, pancake mix and pickles, which she describes as her “hillbilly section”.
“We have a tremendous number of American clients who are based between the Cotswolds and London,” she said. “We are in the Hamptons of England. We have gastropubs on every corner, high-end shopping in Daylesford and there is the accessibility factor of being able to get to London within an hour and 20 minutes.”
Daniel Holder, at R Scott & Co, a menswear shop in Cirencester, said most Americans investigating the area wanted to stay in the UK as long as possible as they do not want to go back to the States.
“They spend a lot of money,” he said. “It’s mainly tweed sports jackets, flat caps and knitwear. They watch Peaky Blinders then come in and ask for a cap.”
Nathan Hanafin-Smith, of Cirencester Antiques Centre, says American shoppers often arrive with a particular interest in Roman coins found in the area. “These coins are 2,000 years old or more in some cases,” he said. “It shocks them, as a lot of our coins are older than where they come from. It puts things in perspective for them.”
Wealth managers report more queries from Americans aiming to move their assets away from the country. Sean Cockburn, of the tax specialist group Forvis Mazars, said there had been a notable increase in interest in relocating to the UK over the past three years.
“While some are concerned about the potential tax exposure resulting from the abolition of the non-dom regime, others will welcome the new exemptions that have been introduced for those coming to live in the UK for a shorter period,” he said.
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“In particular, the ability to exempt foreign income and gains from UK taxation for the first four years of UK residence will make the UK very attractive for short-term visitors,” he said. In most cases, however, Americans will still be expected to pay towards tax in the US.
“The IRS will continue to apply federal income tax on their worldwide income, even when they have ceased to be resident in the US,” Cockburn said. “So whilst a US person might initially be elated at the prospect of avoiding UK taxation on their foreign income and gains, the benefit is likely to be significantly eroded by having a larger US tax liability.”
But political fears are potent enough to keep driving wealthy Democrats away, says Armand Arton, of Arton Capital, an international citizenship specialist that advises high net worth individuals.
Many American families are now thinking about a plan B, he says. “The Democrats are fleeing. The higher the profile, the higher the anti-Trump rhetoric they expressed, the more serious they are about taking those steps.”
Trump’s attacks on academia also appear to be fuelling the exodus. US clicks on British job listings were up 2.4 percentage points year on year to 8.5%, the sharpest increase from any country, according to the job search site Indeed. That rise was largely driven by Americans looking for roles in scientific research and development.
Trump has gutted funding for medical research in universities, hospitals and other scientific institutions, targeting Harvard in particular. In February, the National Institutes of Health said it would reduce the amount of “indirect” medical research funding by $4bn a year. Universities across the country have reduced their intake of PhD students, medical students and other graduate students, introduced hiring freezes and in some cases rescinded offers of admission.
This has created a “massive opportunity” for the UK to actively recruit American scientists, according to Sir John Bell, the renowned immunologist and president of Oxford’s Ellison Institute of Technology.
Speaking to the House of Lords science and technology committee last month, he said leaders in the biomedical research field in the US were already asking when they could move.
“Do the thought experiment: you are an outstanding scientist, you are sitting in an American institution, and things are not looking good,” he said. “You know for sure that they are going to be bad for four years, they are probably going to be bad for eight years, and it will take another four years to get the thing back on its feet again.
“If you are a great scientist in your late 40s or early 50s, there is no way you are going to sit it out.”
About 6,680 American students applied for UK courses for the traditional deadline at the end of January this year, according to Ucas, the national universities admissions service. That marked a 12% increase compared with last year, and the highest number since records began in 2006.
But Americans making the leap may have to accept lower pay in the UK, especially in tech. The average salary advertised for a software engineer in the US on Indeed is $123,530 (£93,030), compared with £48,796 in the UK.
American firms are waking up to the threat posed by Trump’s second term. Doug Winter, the chief executive of the tech firm AI Seismic, based in San Diego, California, is actively preparing to convince his workers not to leave the States for the UK.
“The UK and other international markets are dangling a carrot that US tech workers may be tempted to bite,” he said. “This is largely owed to the ongoing uncertainty throughout the US, as well as broader economic instability.
“Historically, the US tech ecosystem has been resilient, and many US workers trusted that their employers would see them through uncertain times. But that confidence is being tested.”
