A Small English Village Is Furious at Kelsey Grammer

Photo: Aldara Zarraoa/Getty Images

Portishead is furious with Kelsey Grammer. No, not that Portishead — the English village of Portishead, a little town in the idyllic countryside of Somerset, where Grammer purchased a 200-year-old cottage in 2023. The Frasier star has just been given permission to knock the cottage down, and the villagers are incensed.

It all seems to have started when Grammer and his wife bought the place — a quaint two-bedroom stone cottage with a wooden gate that looks straight out of Midsomer Murders — to be closer to her family. The cottage, which looks out onto the Welsh channel, supposedly dates back to the 1800s and, per the Daily Mail, “lies near a scheduled ancient monument” — what the British government calls an archaeological site — containing “a hillfort, saucer barrow, and banjo enclosure.”

First, Grammer applied for permission to add an extension to the cottage that would have doubled its current footprint, but those plans were rejected by the local council for being too large. Now it seems that he has found a workaround in demolishing the entire thing. Grammer’s company submitted new plans to knock down the two-bedroom cottage and build a four-bedroom modern home complete with a games room and gym. Because the new designs wouldn’t increase the footprint, the council has deemed that Grammer doesn’t need prior permission and can bulldoze away.

This has outraged the neighbors. “They think they’re rich and famous and they can just do what they want. I don’t even know who he is,” one 74-year-old resident named Wendy told the Mail. They have sent a whopping eight letters of objection to the local council. The villagers seem to be worried about a host of issues in the classic vein: For one thing, their children cannot afford to live in the area because the prices are going up, they say. For another, the cottage sits on part of a protected “green belt” and they are concerned about conservation. There are also more nebulous complaints like rich people in the area are increasing crime and that they don’t want to encourage “modern design.”

Enraging an English village seems to be a celebrity pastime at this point. Ellen DeGeneres, who decamped last year for the U.K., recently clashed with locals in her town for proposing an extension that would potentially disturb ancient Roman remains. Recall when Ed Sheeran was castigated for lying about his bean-shaped pond at his country mansion (which locals accused of actually being a pool). Hopefully Grammer can figure out a way to pacify his neighbors — perhaps an open invitation to the games room.