Christmas in Gloucester

This Christmas we headed to a cottage in Gloucester for a cosy week away with Tom’s family. We packed far too much food and drink into the car, grabbed our warm layers and headed up to the Cotswolds to relax for the week. We started the road trip with a Starbucks – as every good journey starts – and we had glorious weather for the journey down!

Our cottage was called ‘Lock Cottage’, with water on two sides and situated at Gloucester historic docks – which, unexpectedly, was an absolutely fantastic location!

After settling in and getting a fire going, we spent our arrival night drinking prosecco, having dinner at the cottage and relaxing by the fireplace – perfect!

The next morning we set off into Gloucester Quays to explore our local area and find a coffee. As it happens, Gloucester Quays has a fantastic outlet shopping centre – so it would have been rude to ignore the bargains! We headed into the outlet shops several times during our week away, after discovering that there was a great range of restaurants – including a Wagamamas, our favourite!

Our cottage was the white one below – dwarfed by the warehouses surrounding it!

The docks around Gloucester are full of industrial warehouses that have been converted so that they house apartments, restaurants and shops – making it an attractive and interesting place to explore. We love anywhere by the water, and Gloucester was unexpectedly a really, really great place to stay! We’re definitely planning on returning and seeing more of the city, as we enjoyed staying so much.

We found that Gloucester didn’t really feel like a city – crossing the little bridge next to our cottage brought you out into a lovely slice of countryside, which made for a very pretty golden hour walk.

If you’ve ever thought of visiting Gloucester – or even if you hadn’t – I’d recommend considering it! We found there to be lots of things to explore, there were lots of restaurants – plus an outlet shopping centre. What’s not to love?!

If you do visit Gloucester, I’d love to know what you think!