Abbots Ripton: Beautiful British village ranked as one of the best places to live | UK

It’s not every day you see a rock star in a quaint English country village, but in this corner of the country you might see more than most as it’s also home to a great hidden music festival.

Abbots Ripton, in Cambridgeshire, is packed with rural charm, thatched cottages and a busy village calendar with lots of wonderful countryside activities.

But it is also the unlikely location for a music festival where artists such as Florence and the Machine, Blondie, The Gorillaz and Jarvis Cocker have performed.

The Secret Garden Party has been organized for more than twenty years at Abbots Ripton Estate, one of the country’s largest private estates with 400 hectares of woodland.

The event is the reason for the experience ranking website Muddy Stilettoswhich rates ‘the best food, walking, boutiques, day trips, hotels, interiors and events for smart, fun-loving women living outside London’ has named Abbots Ripton one of the best places to live in 2025.

CambridgeLive reports this year the festival was split into several days, with a few days dedicated to “getting back to our roots” with live and electronic music, a few days dedicated to “healthy camping with the whole family”, including “activities for wild children” , and a 36-hour invite-only rave.

For the rest of the year, ‘wild’ children and partying adults are replaced by 68 species of breeding birds in the woodlands of Abbots Ripton Estate.

These include marsh tits, a species of conservation concern due to a decline of more than 50 percent in the UK population over the past 25 years.

On certain days of the year, locals or visitors can enter the estate’s grand Abbots Ripton Hall or wander the gardens, which boast more than 2,000 different species of plants and 60 oak trees.

The estate is also home to a much-loved pub, the fifteenth-century The Elm. Complete with a thatched roof and a roaring fire, this spot offers seasonal dishes made with produce from local suppliers.

Customer reviews on Google testify to the quality of the pub’s food, with one person describing his meal as “absolutely delicious” and its presentation as “impeccable”. The Elm has an average rating of 4.5 out of five stars, from 542 commenters.

For those days when locals choose to dine at home rather than at The Elm, Abbots Ripton has just one village shop. All essentials can be found here, but for more choice, villagers can head to Huntingdon, a ten-minute drive away.

Huntingdon has direct trains to London, which usually take just under 50 minutes. Abbots Ripton is also a thirty minute drive from both Cambridge and Peterborough.

According to property site RightMove, house prices in Abbots Ripton averaged £315,000 last year.