An invasion of Downton Abbey fans has turned the village where the hit television series and films are shot into "a zoo", an angry resident has claimed.
The success of the period drama has brought about 30,000 fans on tour buses to picturesque Bampton in Oxfordshire, says Mark McArthur Christie. A resident of the village for 20 years, he is now thinking of selling his cottage in one of the areas most targeted by the fans.
Mr McArthur Christie says the cast and crew, as well as many individual tourists, are "lovely people". But the sheer volume of visitors has left him "living in a zoo". He added that fans keep knocking on his door, recite lines at him in the street, put selfie sticks over into his garden, and even steal bricks from his walls. With the new Downton film due for release at the end of this month, he fears it will get worse.
He said: “On a ‘bad’ day it’s now about 20 tours a day, which is a lot when the village is about the size of a postage stamp.'' Mr McArthur Christie lives near St Mary's Church, where Lady Mary's wedding to Matthew Crawley was filmed for the show. His cottage is just down the lane from the library, which doubled as the Cottage Hospital.
Mr McArthur Christie said: “The tourists do all sorts of stuff. They stick selfie sticks up to people’s bedroom windows – that happens all the time. Recently someone had his girlfriend on his shoulders with a telephoto lens taking pictures over someone’s garden wall. They have knocked on our windows and asked, do you live here? I used to have a motorbike with a sidecar but people were putting their kids in it to take pictures so in the end I gave up and sold it.
"They took a brick off my garden wall as a souvenir. These are old houses and right on the street and it feels as if every time you look out there is someone looking back at you. We have met some lovely people – as individuals the tourists are delightful, but we are simply a profit centre for the tour companies. There was a major uptick when the last movie came out.
''The tourists are not here long enough to spend money in the shops and there's not much to spend money on.
A minibus would roll up with somewhere between 15 and 18 people on board, plus a tour guide. 'The guide would stand outside the library, the church or on the corner of the green by our cottage to give her tour, all within easy earshot of the houses on the south side of the church – even on a Sunday morning."
Mr McArthur Christie said his neighbours had become "pretty fed-up" too since the village was first approached to be a filming location in 2009. When the filming first started in 2010, he said, it was a "pleasure". "The crew and actors were delightful, they got on with everyone and even organised a wrap party for the village.
"We should have realised by the third series that its popularity, demonstrated by offers from paparazzi of big money for access to upper windows during filming, meant trouble."
Mr McArthur Christie claimed that by the summer of 2019, the "worst year so far" he was unable to leave the house between April and September without "fighting through hordes of tourists". He named them "Downton Peeries because of their habit of cupping their hands against private house windows and peering inside".
With Downton Abbey: A New Era – the sequel to the 2019 film Downton Abbey – due for release on Friday (April 29), Mr McArthur Christie is certain it will create a new surge of interest. And he is not very keen about that. He said: "We’d support any move by Bampton village council to restrict group sizes, numbers and frequency, and would be happy to offer any advice that would help."
For more stories from where you live, visit InYourArea.
