Advice on moving out of London

Caterina

In recent years I have become more and more restless and disillusioned with city life. In these last couple of years especially I have experienced a sense of despair in being cooped up among concrete and crime and rude drivers and all the negatives of living in London. Positives aside, I have almost managed to persuade DH, nearing retirement (3 years at most, possibly just over 1 year if he decides so) to consider a move, after a lifetime of resisting my wish to decamp to a gentler pace of life.

We have absolutely no idea where to go and how to go about it, we thought it might be best to let out our house and rent somewhere to try out a different lifestyle, but it is all up in the air. We only know we don't want to go too rural in the middle of nowhere, just maybe at the edge of a town, and want a small house/cottage/bungalow with a large enough garden to grow veg and have a few chickens.

I would really love to read others' experiences of this, the positives but also the negatives and pitfalls. Thank you.

Ken68

Norfolk seems popular, Caterina. Good thinking renting first.
Learn the geography, main roads and rivers, where they lead to and join. Then the streets. And the buses and times. Then you won't feel so lost. Plenty of ex-pat clubs here, though all in one place is a bit disconcerting to the locals. I had one chap from London say I talk funny, then he said there aint nuffink to do. lol

GreyQueen

Hi Caterina, the best quality of life is reckoned to be in market towns, of which there are many. The slower pace of life but with enough stimulation. The edge of a middling market town should give you what you require.

Villages are a different kettle of fish. Disclaimer, I am a village-born, market-town raised, small-city dweller. Villages can be very clannish and to integrate, you need to be a good mixer, with involvements in things like the bowls club, the church. Younger families may have an 'in' via the children, but older people really have to work at it. Also, a lot of villages are sadly dormitories for town and city workers, and some have up to 50% second homes, so not enough life.

Rural life is different to city life and not all the differences are positives. You're unlikely to be on mains gas, broadband will probably be slow, mobile signals sketchy, public transport laughable/ non-existant, access to healthcare not easy. The costs of the same lifestyle rural vs town are easily 20% higher. Plus you'll have kittens when you hear gunshots (the birdscarers going off in the fields) and the muck-spreading don't half whiff.

Also, consider the longer term, as in what will happen if one or either of you are no longer able to drive, and how you'd manage then.

Here's a few thoughts:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/property/strutt-and-parker/10425492/market-town-properties.html

thriftwizard

We left the 'burbs for a small market town in Dorset over 20 years ago, and the only regret I personally have is that we didn't go more rural so we could have a bigger garden; like GQ, I am village-born & raised. But OH would move back to Town tomorrow and finds the pace of life here very slow; he's not a mixer or joiner, he finds it very annoying to have to drive everywhere as opposed to hopping on the Tube, and although he likes to look at wide green spaces (he was born & raised on RAF bases) he's very suspicious of all the lunatics & criminals that lurk in the countryside, in his imagination!

Where I live is a village by population numbers but a town by functions; we have doctors, dentists, a fair range of shops, banks & a post office, a town hall, a little cinema/theatre, lots of pubs & eateries, an annual Festival that pulls in 20,000-odd people. We do live close to the edge of town, but the edge that's closest to the city boundaries, rather than the (very expensive) green fields to the north. 5 minutes walk & we're in deep countryside, 10 minutes drive & we're on the beach. But that's an hour on the bus, because it stops everywhere. We have mains sewage & gas, but we're at the end of the line & will be the last to have services restored in an emergency; any further north & you're on your own.

One downside is that our kids cannot afford to live here. Property prices & rents are pretty high and there aren't that many well-paid jobs to go around. But it's not that different elsewhere, is it?

warwicktiger

I moved out of a town earlier this year.

I live on the edge of a peaceful village with fantastic views, the traffic is so light that a queue of four cars is a traffic jam, there were four crimes in the village last year, two were parking offences! Great neighbours, large garden being turned into veg patches, two bed semi with garage and central heating for under £60,000.

[Deleted User]

Look at somewhere like the East Midlands, beautiful countryside and quick links to London by raod or train if you need to go.

We live in a market town on the edge of the countyside, its quiet, but we are only 15 - 20 minutes walk from the town. Massive cattle and general market on a Monday and we have a lidl opening next year as well as Tesco, Morrison's and Sainsbury. Several butchers in the town, green grocers as well as veg stalls on the market on Tuesday.

Drs and a small cottage hospital locally too.

[Deleted User]

We came from a small market town in mid Kent some 20 years ago on a job move due to redundancy, I should have been grateful to still have a job for He Who Knows but we moved to a large village in south Hampshire and for the first 5 years it was so unbearably lonely I was in despair. Then I grew angry with the world and it wasn't until I got a part time job in a village shop that I 'found' people here. I've learned that in a village you can't just arrive and have a place, that people who already live here might not feel that it's a good thing you have arrived to enrich their lives and that you actually have to EARN a place in the village heirarchy before you are accepted by the locals. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else now, home is here and my friends and my place is here. He Who Knows has earned his place too and we are now both very settled and very content. It does take time though and those first few years when you know no one and have no 'chatting' aquaintances are bleak and very lonely. Don't look for Utopia, you will have to seek and earn your own place in any community but when you do, it's most definitely worth it!!!

moneyistooshorttomention

A traffic jam where I am here is several tractors at once:rotfl:. I'm in a big enough place to have supermarkets within walking distance/some entertainment facilities/some places to eat out and the bus service has been described to me by several people as "good".

The truth of the matter is the bus service is appalling - about once an hour and basically nothing at evenings and Sundays. Its being described as "good" by people because theirs is even worse (eg between 1-3 buses a day or possibly having to walk a couple of miles before even being able to catch a bus at all).

The thing I notice most is that I hadn't realised I used I am to being able to "vote with my feet" and doing precisely that. If a service isn't good enough, then I've not been used to thinking twice about "voting with my feet" and finding some other firm and its not been a problem. So I've been able to keep "moving on" and "moving on" with firms/shops/medical people until I found one I was happy to regard as "mine". That is harder when there are only a few alternatives to choose from.

Eating out is more problematic (not that I do that so much these days) but, when you've lived somewhere bigger, you are used to a great long list of places to choose from.

There are prevailing common mindsets to at least some places. You may not necessarily realise until you move that that is so. In hindsight...I can see I took for granted a prevailing academic/questioning/middle-class mindset as a very common one (even just down to the everyday assumptions about tv as a last resort time-filler and housework being "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom" and theres more 'important' things to do) and its taking some adapting to an area where I can always understand every conversation going on around me (provided its in English) but it seems to be common to want to do things the way "everyone else does" and some workmen have probably noticed the puzzled look on my face when they have told me that "most people like things like such-and-such", as I don't understand why that would apparently be a recommendation to me to do the same:cool:

My overall point being that it takes more adapting than people realise sometimes to swop to a different type of place. It's about more than swopping from a decent-size Marks & Spencers a walking distance away, to the nearest M & S is about an hour away and is a lot smaller than you are used to.

EDIT: I am the sort who volunteers for things, so that has helped a lot here, as I duly have a couple of places where I am "doing my bit" and meeting people. So I tend to advocate doing that..though you do need to be aware volunteering opportunities will also be less available than you have probably been used to.

gilly1964

I can tell you the experiences of my aunt and uncle.

They moved away from East London (Bethnal Green) in their late 60s for a better quality of life. They lasted 10 years by the seaside but did not have the same level of friends. Then my uncle started to lose old friends and it was too far to travel and he realised that he missed London, his mates, the banter on the street.

That part of London is vastly different to what they left behind, but
my uncle passed away himself two years ago and now my aunt is grateful for the transport links, buses, underground, nearby supermarkets without having to go too far.

Based on their experiences I would say think about how you would make friends, what you like to do, your level of activity, would you be reliant on public transport (if not now, in the future).

Good luck with whatever you decide.

FrugalinShropshire

We moved from North Kent last year. OH is from SE London and he was able to take early retirement. We had the whole country to chose from! We wittled it down , first by affordability, then amount of open countryside near by, then facilities for my 20 year old son, along with many more! We ended up in Shropshire on the border with Wales in a hamlet, a mile from a village and 3 miles from a market town. The bus route is great, there is a college bus for DS and we have a doer uper of a house with a 250ft garden!
It took nearly 3 years of research and holidaying to find our perfect area but it was so worth putting the effort in to do this. I read local papers online, read planning developments and got a real feel for the area before we finally moved.
It was so worth it:j:j

Caterina

Thank you all, so far you are telling me things that I had already thought about, but it is really interesting to read the individual experiences, including Gilly1964's uncle and aunt, the issue about transport and familiarity with the facilities of a city. It will all go on the weighing scales when we finally decide.

Above all, I am grateful for your responses because I shall show DH all of them and he can also use other people's experiences to think about this. He is village born and bred but lived in London most of his adult life. I was city born and bred (Rome) and lived in London longer than I have lived in Italy, so our experiences are mixed.