“Hell”, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his play Huis Clos, “is other people.” My wife’s dad, another lifelong socialist, put the same sentiment differently. “I love the working class,” he used to say, “I just don’t want to go on holiday with them.”

Between them, the father of existentialism and my father-in-law pretty much sum up what most of us would characterise as the standard British middle-class attitude to the kind of company – or lack of it – we like to keep when we go away.

Above all, whatever our politics, we are terrified of finding ourselves surrounded by people wearing replica football shirts and baseball caps. It is not an attitude we are necessarily proud of or even admit to owning, but own it we mostly do. And to be fair to ourselves, most of us have an equal fear of being besieged by honking Hooray Henries.

The defining characteristic of a real holiday, for most of us, is widely assumed to be privacy – the joy of not having to say anything to another British person of any socioeconomic class for two weeks beyond a gruff, grudging “morning” when we are unfortunate enough to bump into one while picking up our baguettes from the boulangerie.

But there is a growing segment of the British middle class – led, possibly, by those who enjoyed boarding school – that craves communality on holiday. We had a glimpse of this jolly, sporty world, albeit in the saddest circumstances possible, from the endlessly examined details of life at the Mark Warner holiday village in Portugal from which Madeleine McCann vanished last year. Mark Warner has been exploiting the middle-class desire for an upmarket Butlins for several decades, with meals served communally and an endless round of activities for the company’s distinctive demographic of well-heeled, professional “campers”.

And now the yearning for, you might say, a bit less privacy on holiday is growing. The vacationing and weekending middle-class Brit is starting to buy holiday homes in purpose-built, socially homogenous villages in the UK, where – unbelievably – strangers not only speak to one another, but enthusiastically muck in with communal activities, from barbecues and Easter egg hunts to art festivals, literary lunches and teenagers’ dances.

Far from being as stuffy and standoffish as we always imagined, substantial numbers of the British middle classes appear to be hankering for communities. And since community life of any quality is hard to find, either in cities or in traditional rural second homes, they are seeking it in these second-home developments, which have the clinching bonus of being peopled not by the usual social pick’n’mix of holidays, but by like-minded people of similar income and education – a consistency that speeds the community-building process to the point where distinct “villages” are swiftly emerging.

I was struck by the counterintuitiveness of what is going on last New Year’s Eve when I was invited to Lower Mill Estate, a development of newly built, upmarket holiday homes on a former brownfield site (now a globally regarded nature reserve) in Gloucestershire, to witness what its serial enthusiast founder, Jeremy Paxton, had described as the birth of a “genuine village community” among its well-heeled buyers of houses, which range in price from a typical £500,000 to, in one extreme example so far, more than £7 million.

I had been to a summer festival at Lower Mill before and appreciated that its residents are a jolly, good-spirited bunch, given a warm evening, an idyllic setting (which Paxton has styled “the village green”) and copious quantities of M&S picnic foods and white wines. New Year’s Eve went further to proving Paxton’s point, however, that a new community really has grown up here organically. The founder didn’t even need to be there – he was away skiing. The event was entirely organised by Lower Mill residents.

And it was a hoot – like a nice family wedding in a marquee, where everyone knows and likes one another. Dads danced embarrassingly with little girls, in-jokes were guffawed over and everyone sang Auld Lang Syne with gusto and a tangible sense of togetherness. Even difficult-to-cater-for teenagers seemed happy and integrated, with a temporary skating rink brought in, fussball tables, air hockey and a computer-games room set up.

When I passed by again on one of the spring Bank Holidays, the same people were having lashings more boisterous, communal fun. Fishing, boating, cycling, playing tennis, larking about in the smart outdoor pool, going on organised nature walks. It was hard to imagine they had all been back to work and school all over the country in the intervening months.

Lower Mill has increasingly been building a name as a celebrity hangout, and a stream of arts and even Hollywood types have been seen around the estate. But excited media reports of Brad, Angelina, Kylie, Madonna and others being spotted there completely miss the point – that most of Lower Mill’s 200 households comprise sophisticated but nice middle Englanders, bankers, lawyers, senior corporate types and their families, all relishing the kind of communal activity you would think they’d hate. These are people who in many cases have long since been through the idyllic-cottage-in-the-country phase and found it a recipe for social isolation and boredom, as well as a maintenance headache.

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