The King of the High Street
The latest venture by George W. Davies
If you shopped anywhere in Britain between 1981 and 2010, you wore George Davies whether you knew it or not. He founded Next at the start of the eighties, created George at Asda in 1990 (the first proper supermarket fashion label, now one of the biggest clothing brands in the country) and then, at an age when most people slow down, built Per Una for Marks & Spencer into a billion-pound business. Broadway has been his home for over thirty years, and when the doctor's surgery on the High Street came up for sale, he bought it. Not to develop and sell on. To keep it for the village.
Three years of restoration later, House of George W. Davies opened in the summer of 2025: ten bedrooms in a 17th-century limestone building a few doors from the Lygon Arms, with a fine dining restaurant called Moda, a bar, a snug with a fire and a backgammon board, and George himself, who lives locally, drops in most evenings and likes to open with the same three questions, the first of which is always: where are you from?
The rooms
Ten in total, six in the main house and four in a courtyard annexe, each individually designed by Arlene Davies with Laura Cole of The Cole Collective. In the historic rooms, beams and exposed stone sit alongside shutters wrapped in floral fabrics, stained glass and televisions that rise out of the footboard at the end of the bed. Nearly everything is British-made and much of it local: hand-printed fabrics from Rapture & Wright, Abraham Moon upholstery, joinery by Cotswold Fine Furniture and Cotswold Oak. Even the coathangers carry the House of George mark. Two ground-floor rooms are fully accessible, and there is private parking behind the building, which anyone who has tried to park in Broadway in August will understand is worth mentioning.
The food
Moda is a 30-cover restaurant and the first solo opening for Head Chef James Wilson, formerly of The Newt in Somerset, with earlier years at Grön and the two-starred Palace in Helsinki and Oaxen Krog in Stockholm. The heart of the offer is a nine-course tasting menu that changes with what the suppliers bring in: Cornish lobster with potato, dill and lobster butter sauce; duck with boudin noir, spices and squash; a sea buckthorn, Earl Grey and white chocolate dessert. His hand-cut beef tartare, mixed with a hay-smoked oil emulsion and finished with smoked bone marrow and lovage vinaigrette, is the dish people talk about afterwards. A full nine-course plant-based menu runs alongside, built on foraged and seasonal ingredients. À la carte and set lunch menus run Monday to Friday, and Sunday brings a field-to-fork roast with dry-aged Longhorn beef and Gloucester Old Spot pork from Martins Meats in Toddington and vegetables from Worcester Produce.
The bar deserves its own paragraph. Exposed Cotswold brick, deep red chairs, and a cocktail list built around George's career: The 1981 (the year Next launched) mixes vodka, gin, rum, reposado tequila, Cointreau, Earl Grey syrup and milk. The Kop is for Liverpool FC. It is a menu with more autobiography in it than most memoirs.
Moda, The House of George
The terrace in summer
The dining room opens directly onto a sheltered terrace surrounded by greenery, and from late spring it becomes the best seat in the house: lunch stretching into the afternoon, drinks before dinner, the last light on the honey-coloured stone of the High Street. Broadway is at its busiest in summer and the terrace is set back enough to feel removed from it, which is exactly the trick a good hotel terrace needs to pull off.
The Good Hotel Guide's inspector summed the whole thing up in one line: it might look traditional on the outside, but inside it is a million miles from Cotswolds twee.
Bedroom at The House of George