The traditional village is changing. It may still look as it has for centuries, with a Norman church, a duck pond and a cluster of cottages fringing the green. Increasingly, though, the people living there aren’t traditional village types at all. Some places may still harbour the odd blue- rinsed parish councillor or horny-handed son of toil, but dreams of a bucolic life have attracted new urban blood – though the nearest some of these new village people have been to the country before is a walk in Hyde Park.

The Kensington weekenders

Every Friday night, Beth and Alex swap the delis and designer shops of Holland Park for weekends in the cottage in Wellover that his bonus has bought. They paid only a little more than the asking price, so why don’t the locals like them? Alex says she’s being paranoid, but there were muddy tyre marks all over her latest Cath Kidston mail-order delivery, as if someone had deliberately driven over it. Bijou Cottage is all stripped wood, artfully distressed paint and genuine rustic touches – framed pictures on easels, underfloor heating and real, old-fashioned aluminium dustbins, painted Farrow & Ball sage. Sadly, the family in the next house have a three-piece suite rotting out the front, next to the permanently installed skip. “It’s like living next door to the world’s smallest council estate,” Alex grumbles. Neither parent seems to work. “People shouldn’t be allowed to live in nice places if they can’t appreciate them,” Beth says.

The gastropublican

Toby is an ex-City boy turned chef who has transformed Wellover’s gloomy boozer, the Plough, into the Peppercorn, a fixture on “Britain’s Best Pubs” lists. In its former incarnation, it hosted a collection of morose locals who spent all night nursing pints of Stella beneath the strip lights. Now it’s all candlelit corners, stubby oak stools and waiters in long white aprons. Toby has 20 whites, 20 reds and three rosés by the glass at any one time, and the food is modern traditional. “If this isn’t Britain’s best sausage, I don’t know what is,” he says of his “witty modern take on classic nursery toad-in-the-hole”, which will set you back £17.25. “Witty? Bloody hilarious,” grumble the farmers who supply the bangers for £5 a kilo. A bowl of chips (“hand-selected Maris Pipers, lovingly fried to order in award-winning beef dripping and served with a scattering of Maldon sea salt”) is £5.95 – too pricey for the teenagers sniffing glue in the bus shelter opposite. Or, indeed, for The Plough’s former patrons. And that’s how Toby likes it. The “locals” he’s after are anything but.

The singleton

Kate, a subeditor on a London lifestyle magazine, spends the week in Palmers Green, but on Friday nights she heads for Paddington and the overcrowded train to her own corner of paradise. Emerging into the starlit night at Wellover station, she throws a leg over the sit-up-and-beg bicycle she keeps there and sets off to her tiny cottage. It used to be the village shop, which Kate feels a bit guilty about, but it was cheap, and now it’s bathed in Farrow & Ball, it looks a treat. Desperate to be accepted, she has joined everything from the bell-ringers to the allotment society; unfortunately, her plot is next to that of an unreconstructed sexist septuagenarian who sneers at her floral wellies. Kate is 36, single and was hoping for better things, but decent men seem even rarer in the country than in the city. It would be so much easier if she were a lesbian.

The green policewoman

Morag hates 4WDs and incomers, even though she arrived from Surrey just two years ago. She’s also the only person in Wellover who cares about the planet. Despite her leafleting and street protests, the Kensington weekenders refuse to swap a gas-guzzling people- carrier for one that runs on corn oil. Morag has kept her transport carbon footprint low with a converted ambulance, although it takes 10 minutes to start and exudes toxic black fumes. Now on the village allotment committee, she has outlawed pesticides and is pushing for plots to be ploughed in the traditional way, with a horse, although there is resistance to this among the mini-tractor-owning classes. Nor is this the only resistance Morag is facing: her daughter Merlin, nearly eight, wants a Disney birthday party with patterned plastic plates, McDonald’s and the type of pink nylon princess dress that takes four centuries to biodegrade.

The village celeb

Nat was big in the 1990s – well, the Britpop band he drummed for was. He’s certainly the highest-profile of all the lads now he’s reinvented himself as a country gentleman. He, Damien Hirst and Kate Moss were having a laugh one day when they came across this, like, ancient bread oven in one of the outhouses on his farm. Six months on, Nat’s running his own speciality bread business, BreadHead. Authenticity is its USP – Nat may have been permanently out of his box in the 1990s, but he gets his biggest kicks now from a really banging stoneground wholemeal. BreadHead’s products have been a huge hit – bigger than some of his old band’s originals – and are on sale in Harvey Nicks, and in Trudie Styler’s hampers. He’s looking forward to bringing greater prosperity to himself – sorry, the area – when the series Rising Star (a joke about the yeast, apparently), which follows a year in his life, goes on air.

The London widow

Oliver wasn’t happy at school in London, and Anna and Henry weren’t happy with the cost of living there, so they flogged the W3 terrace (just after house prices plunged) for a former vicarage, three times the size, in Wellover. Olly goes to a local prep school – well, it’s a 40-mile drive, which didn’t seem far initially, not at the speed Henry drives, anyway. But Anna now spends up to five hours a day in the MegaCruiser, ferrying him around. There is a bus that goes past it, but only once a week.

So, Anna and the other yummy mummies who’ve swapped Acton for arcadia are now blocking up the lanes around the school in their off-roaders. It’s worse than Chiswick roundabout. It was all going to be so wonderful – gardening in the sun, stews on the Aga, new friends – but, thanks to the time taken by the school run, the lawn is as much a rambling wilderness as Anna’s social diary. It’s all Henry’s fault, flouncing off to London every Monday-till-Thursday and having all that fun and social stimulation (and he then has the cheek to moan about it) while she’s home alone. She never thought she could miss Pret A Manger sushi like this.

The skint lord of the manor

Monty is the last of the Longshott line, holders of the ancient estate of Wellover Manor. There’s been a Longshott here for 600 years, enduring the worst history could throw at them. But nothing’s been as bad as the Noughties. The place is falling down and they can’t afford to repair it. They live off marked-down ready meals from NicePrice, and new clothes are a distant memory. But they’re determined to stay, and are raising funds any which way. Themed weddings in the Great Hall have been reasonably successful, although fat Birmingham bikers dressed as King Arthur (not to mention Guinevere) are hardly covering the heating costs. There is, Monty thinks, a certain gallows humour in the fact the poorest people in the village are those at the manor.

Wendy Holden’s Filthy Rich (Headline Review £12.99), a comedy set among new-style villagers, is out now. To buy it for £11.70 (inc p&p), call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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