Dear Fiona,
My husband is keen to move to the countryside; he says it’ll be better for the children, we’ll have more space, our mortgage will be smaller, he always imagined that we’d end up in the countryside, yada yada yada. You’ll have heard it all before. I’ve heard it all before, from so many people - and I can see the logic in lots of it. I’m London born and bred, but I’ve enjoyed the odd weekend in the Cotswolds (the villages are so pretty!) and a couple of really happy holidays on the Devon coast, and maybe I do want a vegetable patch, and chickens, and to be tending them on a Saturday morning instead of pushing a swing in an inner-city playpark while averting my eyes from the litter of cigarette butts and empty gas canisters? And I’d love more time to paint, or write – à la Vanessa Bell or Virginia Woolf (I’m a bit Bloomsbury obsessed!) But, but . . . . while some of our friends who have moved out really do love it, others have struggled, and I’ve recently read a lot of articles about people moving back.
The thing is that my husband, who grew up rurally, probably isn’t going to change his mind. I feel like I’ve either got to listen to him talking about it for another thirty years, or we’ve got to do it – so I guess my question is: how do you do it right? For I have noticed that a lot of the houses featured in House & Garden are the homes of people who have done a similar move – and I’m wondering what it is that makes such a move a success, and if you’ve got any tips as to where we should move to? Bearing in mind that I’m not really so into going for walks, but I do really love theatre (not that it’s easy for me to go when my children are the age they are.) For if we make this move – and technically we can, our jobs are flexible etc., the children are young enough for school changes not to be an issue - I really do want to ensure that it does benefit us all. And I reckon we’re up for a renovation, too, though we’ve never done one before. I just don’t want to be among the statistics of those who hate it – so how do we ensure that we don’t make a mistake?
Thank you so much,
Love, In Search of The Good Life XX
Dear Good Life,
I’ve picked up your letter, but it could easily have been another, for it seems moving to the countryside – or at least, out of London (or another major city) - is one of life’s eternal quandaries. Indeed, my fellow House & Garden columnist, Eleanor Cording-Booth, confesses to having been pondering it for three years now. I don’t know if the desire is innate, or if it’s more that we’re influenced by the romantic idea of ‘the good life’, a philosophical concept that fascinated Socrates long before it was co-opted as the title for a television sitcom about self-sufficiency, thus forever drawing association with the ability to grow your own vegetables – and therefore space, and the countryside. Either way, as you correctly observe, many act on this desire – but then, as you say, some move back, and I’m not sure that there’s a satisfyingly absolute answer to your question of how to get it right.
I do think, however, that we could examine the whys of moving – and note that for many it’s less a decision than an inevitability, or kismet, as was the case for Phoebe Dickinson who found she and her husband were in a position to purchase the house she’d dreamed of owning as a child. When Lucinda Griffith moved from London to Wales, it was from a longing to return to her roots - and her cottage is in sight of the mountain that was the view from her childhood bedroom. Sometimes, the inevitability is gradual: Bunny Turner spent three years renovating and spending weekends at the Oxfordshire rectory she and her family now live in full-time. They decamped at the start of Covid, “and we settled into life so quickly that it felt incredibly hard to imagine how we could go back to London,” she says. Worth remembering – regarding your Bloomsbury admiration – is that it was an unhurried transition to East Sussex for both Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf too, and they only ever lived full-time in their country abodes during the wars.
But the simultaneous running of two houses isn’t an option for everybody, whether due to cost or convenience or both, and plunging in without a sense of inevitability (your husband’s having it doesn’t necessarily translate to you) is undoubtedly harder – because it comes with the sort of second-guessing that you’re applying to the situation now. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” is often quoted by those who decide not to make the leap – along with Samuel Johnson’s observation that when a man is tired of London, he’s tired of life. But equally, “an unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates – and until you’ve tried something, how do you know that it’s not going to be better?
Besides which, we have dreams. Journalist Flora Watkins moved from Brixton to Norfolk a couple of years ago in search of “a false hiraeth” for the childhood home that didn’t entirely satisfy her literary-led ideals; “I always longed to wake up somewhere older, with more character. It’s what I’m trying to create for my children: collecting eggs, picking sweet peas, laying the fire. When I came to look at this house, the walled garden reminded me of Sissinghurst, and favourite childhood books.” I moved to Hastings – because, similarly to you, my husband was exceptionally keen to leave London – and I imagined weekends spent sailing and paddleboarding, long lunches in the garden, and I figured I’d finally have time to write a book (or three) and take up ceramics. It occurs to me that your reasons are pretty much in line with Flora’s and mine, and these are also, incidentally, the reasons stated by so many city-leavers - with some variance for individual character.
Individual character – along with individual circumstances – isn’t a bad place to start when it comes to figuring out where to move to. For while I can’t tell you where to go, I can urge you take your wants and needs into consideration. Exchange of contracts doesn’t come with a personality swap, and it’s good that you’re sufficiently self-aware to know that you don’t enjoy walks, but do enjoy theatre. Other things to think about include how much you mind driving, how much land you want to be responsible for, whether you need a shop within walking distance, and how far you can possibly be from a station that takes you to a city. However, alongside this, I want to underline the fact that when moving – even to where you once went on holiday - you take all your life with you: your job, the endless laundry, your children’s needs and social commitments and medical appointments etc. What’s more, if you add to the list of daily chores, via chickens or maintaining a vegetable patch - or having to take the children further to get to school, or moving into a wreck that you need to renovate - you lose time. “I have the ponies I always dreamed of as a child, but often they feel like another source of overwhelm,” confesses Flora (knowing such a first-world problem isn’t going to garner much in the way of sympathy.) I realise the time thing sounds obvious, but it still came as a surprise to Flora and me, and I can assure you we are otherwise intelligent and rational. And it’s important, for if you become frustrated by lack of time, you can find yourself blaming it on where you live, instead of remembering that you didn’t have time before, either – and resenting where you live is the beginning of derailment.
And ultimately, derailment is what drives people back. While it generally boils down to experience not living up to expectation (see lack of magical extra time, again) there are many other strands. There’s getting children’s schools wrong (a big one, and especially difficult if you were happy with the school that you’ve removed them from in order to relocate – to which all I can say is research, research, research, and if you’ve got children with special educational needs, also research the associated funding for where you’re moving to, and the waiting time for CAMHS.) There’s straightforward loneliness and isolation that can come from moving somewhere everybody else is longer established, and where you have a smaller pool of people from which to find friends (having younger children does help, but if you can additionally move somewhere close to friends or family, that is a huge bonus. Also, perhaps be reassured by Virginia Woolf having struggled to find immediate common ground with her neighbours.) There’s depression caused by under-connection to your environment, which can occur when you move somewhere you don’t know well, and into a house that needs serious work before you can comfortably live in it - a genuine condition explained by Philippa Perry in The Book You Want Everyone You Love To Read. (It doesn’t affect everybody, but it’s something to be aware of, a bit like post-natal depression.) There’s the growing realisation that life is slightly less convenient than you were accustomed to - that there’s no Uber, the Deliveroo pickings are slim, and that if you want to see a more niche film, you’ve got to travel for it. Finally, there’s discovering you need to spend more time in the city-based office than you thought you did, the commute is a killer, and, because of all the above, you’re no longer sure that it’s worth it, after all.
Having read a slew of accounts by people who moved out of London, and then back (probably the same accounts that you’ve read) the time frame for boomeranging seems to be about two years. This is relevant, because having consulted a number of other people who have made the move, besides Flora and myself (though it probably still wouldn’t stand up to scientific statistical analysis) it isn’t until the third year that the majority start to feel settled in their new, less urban homes; i.e. it takes so much longer than you think it will, to find yourself part of a community, to grow to love the rhythm of the changing seasons, to start shooting your own roots and discover that, maybe, this was an inevitability for you, too. Even then, “it feels insanely good at times, but still desperately wrong at others,” admits Flora. For me, the balance is tipping in favour of ‘insanely good’ – I’ve made time for ceramics, we’re building a garden studio (shed) this summer, and I’m counting down the days ‘til we have the warmth and light for post-school sea swimming – but there have been moments of misery, and I have occasionally wondered why we do it.
For I know that Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty,” – but really? What about the less masochistic among us? Perhaps it’s back to Socrates, and the opportunity a move gives you to learn about yourself, and humanity in general, even through the struggle. “I saw a view of life in Britain outside the major cities; you may find that small town living broadens your mind in a way a big city never could,” says the writer Kia Abdullah (who, incidentally, moved back to London.) Of course, in the grand scheme of an entire lifetime three years isn’t long - but are there ways of reducing the interim pain?
And the answer is yes. You can rent first, to test the waters, which is then easy to undo but also has its successes (see the earlier explanation of gradual inevitability.) You can lessen the chance of moving house depression, via lack of connection, by not buying a wreck that you then decide to live in with your small children (though by all means aim for a renovation in the future.) You can take heed of my colleague Charlotte McCaughan-Hawes’s incredibly helpful timeline, and to that, add Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler Managing Director Emma Burns’s advice; “designate one room as a storeroom for pieces and boxes that don’t need to be unpacked immediately so you can concentrate on getting important areas under control, and vital to get bedrooms and bathrooms sorted first thing” – which will give you an immediate sense of stability, which matters. For what you are considering is brave, and will take a realistic approach, a positive attitude, and you are going to need your energy. “If one lives in a village, one had better snatch at its offerings,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary.
And then, let’s finish with good news: the upcoming April issue of House & Garden is the country issue, which is an excellent source of information and inspiration. I also suggest pre-ordering Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker, which I have no doubt you’ll enjoy – and it shows how a move the countryside changed the lives of those three writers – and then branching out from Bloomsbury via Barbara Pym’s A Few Green Leaves, which is the story of an anthropologist’s adjustment to village life, and hilarious. But the last thing I want to say is that, in The Good Life (the television series) Tom and Barbara don’t leave London – instead they turn their front and back gardens of their Surbiton house into allotments, i.e. there’s more than one way of achieving the vegetable patch of your dreams.
I hope that this has helped – or at least given you some ideas,
With love
Fiona XX
