Clarkson’s Grand Tour plan stalls

JEREMY CLARKSON’S attempts to bring his high-octane motoring show home to Chipping Norton have backfired. Locals have branded plans to locate The Grand Tour’s iconic tent on the Great Tew estate in Oxfordshire in the autumn as ‘totally inappropriate’.

Clarkson’s TV company, Chump Productions, has faced calls for the project to be blocked because it is ‘detrimental’ to the community.

His furious neighbours say the traffic created by the 80-strong film crew and 350 guests invited to each day’s filming could cause a fatal accident for the walkers, cyclists and horse-riders who use the country lanes around Great Tew. They also fear that filming the £35.8million Amazon Prime show will create excessive noise.

Neighbour Frederick Hill wrote in one of the eight objection letters sent to West Oxfordshire Council this week: ‘This is a totally inappropriate use of a rural countryside estate location. People should not have to sacrifice their rural lifestyle in West Oxfordshire so that big business can make more money.’ Another neighbour, Michael Holland, wrote: ‘The Ledwell Road is already overloaded. When will [the council] recognise that this cannot continue, when one of the many local riders on horseback is killed?’

The Great Tew estate, owned by Old Etonian Nicholas Johnston, has been dubbed ‘the hippest 4,000 acres outside London’ by Tatler, and is home to celebrity haunt Soho Farmhouse.

But locals are revolting against the hordes of wealthy Londoners staying in the hotel’s £350-per-night fauxrustic huts. They complain the influx of Chelsea tractors has turned the country lanes into a ‘Soho racetrack’, and that Clarkson’s temporary film set will aggravate the already ‘significant’ traffic problems.

One wrote this week: ‘The development of the Great Tew estate has gone from a rural idyll to an outpost of metropolitan London.’