Speaking as a local, this genuinely is bizarre.<p>Three miles from Kidlington is Woodstock, which is a picture-perfect village with stone cottages and quaint shops. Ten miles away (where I live) you're into the genuine Cotswolds.<p>The theories advanced in the BBC article don't stack up. Kidlington is not a "folksy cultural stop" or "a beautiful English village". It's really average suburbia - the fact it's formally a "village" is just an administrative quirk, it's not village-like in any way.<p>It's incredibly unlikely that people are "mistaking Kidlington for Kirtlington" because the latter has a population of eight people and a dog, nothing really to look at, and is less pretty than a hundred other villages nearby.<p>And it's not "on the way to Bicester Village shopping centre"; you have to take a detour to get there, and if you want to detour into a pretty village between (say) Oxford and Bicester Village, there are prettier ones to visit.
This was really frustrating to me, because it felt like treating the Chinese visitors not as people, but a natural phenomenon (locusts) or some such. It's natural that the locals would be baffled, and if this had been a short notice in a local newspaper, then fine. But I read it in a Norwegian newspaper, and later saw it on Metafilter, Hacker News etc. By that time, surely someone must be able to talk to the visitors in Chinese, do a little bit of research with tourist agencies from China etc?<p>I decided to see if I could find any Chinese sources writing about this, since they might be more clued in. Sohu.com's article (<a href="http://news.sohu.com/20160708/n458318443.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://news.sohu.com/20160708/n458318443.shtml</a>) says that the rumor was spread that this is where parts of Harry Potter (the Dursleys) was filmed.
Inevitable by-product of a highly networked society?<p>I saw a similar, though somewhat more interpretable, situation at Alamere Falls (1.5 hrs north of SF, south end of Point Reyes): a thousand high school students from all over the Bay Area out in a National Seashore where you generally expect to see a hundred hikers tops, heavy on the retired profs in Audobon t-shirts and NPR-steeped Marin mushroom enthusiasts. According to one of the park guards, it is now like this all the time. The park guards get asked all the time by the new visitors 'where is this?'as the visitors point to an HDR, oversaturated picture on Snapchat or Instagram. And every weekend new pictures are posted, and the next week another cohort comes.
When I was traveling in rural parts of China, locals seemed equally baffled that a <i>laowai</i> was interested in their lowly village. Also, I assume most Chinese who have money to travel abroad live in large cities where such single family homes are quite a rare sight and sell in the millions of dollars. Now, why that village more than another I have no idea.
Oxford Parkway railway station (<a href="https://goo.gl/maps/UKa1rz18pN92" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/maps/UKa1rz18pN92</a>) has opened in the past 6 months which is practically in Kidlington and the stop before the mentioned Bicester Village retail park as you travel from London Marylebone. I suspect the tourists are thinking they can squeeze a little Oxford visit on their way back to London, not realising that the dreaming spires of Oxford city centre are a fair old way away from Oxford Parkway station.
I suspect some tour guide lied to them and told them the town was famous for some historical reason. Like King Richard III was born here or something crazy.
Here's a Facebook page on the phenomenon: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SpottedKidlington/posts/1279050525453590" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/SpottedKidlington/posts/12790505254...</a><p>And this is the Daily Mail article: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3676849/Residents-baffled-coachloads-Chinese-tourists-descend-unremarkable-Oxfordshire-village-ask-selfies-told-used-HARRY-POTTER-films-rogue-tour-operator.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3676849/Residents-ba...</a>