ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY
AN OBSESSION WITH THE RURAL IDYLL IS INSPIRING MORE PEOPLE TO ABANDON CITY LIFE. BUT WHAT IS IT ACTUALLY LIKE TO LEAVE BEHIND YOUR METROPOLITAN EXISTENCE AND, IN Sasha Wilkins’ CASE,
The ultimate city-dweller, Sasha Wilkins explains what drove her to pack up her London life and move out to the countryside – and why the rest of the fashion pack are following suit
IT’S QUITE HARD TO DRIVE A TRANSPORTER VAN when you are crying so hard that your chest is heaving and your nose is running so much you can’t breathe properly. I discovered this as I left my beloved London flat for the very last time in July this year to follow the removal lorry containing all my furniture. I was headed to the Cotswolds to start a new life in the English countryside, at least two-and-a-half hours from London, where Deliveroo doesn’t operate, and you can’t buy a lemon at 2am.
This isn’t the first time I’ve made a life-changing move. In the spring of 2OO7, I uprooted myself from London, the city where I was born, to move 3,455 miles across the Atlantic to the US. I had one bag, six pairs of vertiginous Manolos, no permanent visa and no job offer, yet it seemed like a thrilling adventure.
Thirteen years later, I am making a lifestyle change that seems vastly more significant, more permanent and entirely ridiculous to someone whose entire adult life has been spent in London, New York and Los Angeles. On paper it doesn’t sound such a big deal compared to moving to Manhattan but, back in 2OO7, I owned a flat in London so I always knew that there was a return escape option if New York didn’t work out.
This time around, that flat is long gone (sold partly to fund the beginnings of libertylondongirl.com when iPhones were a novelty, Instagram
“MY COUNTRYSIDE ESCAPE STARTED TO LOOK MORE LIKE A SENSIBLE action plan and
LESS LIKE A RUDIMENTARY FANTASY”
didn’t exist and I had no online revenue stream), I have relinquished my current lease, put much of my furniture in storage, eBayed those Manolos and committed to a new (muddy) way of life. There’s no going back and I am, frankly, terrified that I am leaving behind a support network that’s seemingly made of steel hawsers for a fragile web constructed from connections of friends of friends.
I have been writing online as LibertyLondonGirl for some 14 years now; what started as a random name for a fledgling blog has since come to represent an identity rooted firmly in an exciting London existence. I started the website as an anonymous online diary and, over the following years, have developed it into a business through paid collaborations with brands (fashion shoots, sponsored posts, public speaking, recipe development and more) and a constant stream of content. Whether that was photographing my urban walled garden, hanging out with family and friends, exercising my dog on Hampstead Heath, reviewing new restaurants, buying plants at Columbia Road Flower Market or attending London Fashion Week, nearly everything that I wrote about reflected my fulfilling life in the capital. City living gave me everything I wanted: the perfect combination of novelty (access to ‘new’ everything), ease (hello, black cabs and efficient public transport) and culture on tap. I built a life and a career where London was integral to my identity, and everyone – from my followers to the brands I worked with – knew that.
During four months of the pandemic lockdown, my Camden flat was the safest of safe havens. I had a much-cherished garden, my sister a mile away, shops around the corner (which were always stocked with loo roll and flour) and a legion of close friends who lived nearby and who could be waved at from garden gates when the isolation of living alone started to grind me down.
But, much as I loved my north London life, thoughts of moving to the countryside had been nagging at me for some time. Last December, when global pandemics belonged solely in sci-fi horror movies, I posted on Instagram: ‘Sometimes I think what I need for happiness is just a small dog and the countryside. It’s my birthday today, always a time for reckoning, and I’m giving a lot of thought to the idea of moving out of London in the next year. I grew up in a rural village, I want more space, and I’m fed up with seeing most of my income disappear in covering London-weighted living costs. (Single person living is astonishingly expensive.) I’m all ears for any advice anyone might have to give...’
It was my most-commented-on Instagram post in five years. Between people who had already made the move and those who were buying into the fantasy, nearly everyone was overwhelmingly positive about the idea. And every time I’ve mentioned the move since, I had an inbox brimming with strangers offering good advice and encouragement who were, like me, wondering about a slower, more rural pace of life after years of high-octane city living.
AND THEN, TWO MONTHS AFTER that fateful Instagram post, Covid-19 spread to the UK. My countryside escape started to look more like a sensible action plan, and less like a rudimentary fantasy. That London garden meant that lockdown was almost bearable, but the financial pressure was not. By the last week of March, it was clear that I would have to cancel every single one of my upcoming projects: a series of sponsored literary dinners in
my garden, as well as cookery lessons for private groups and a supper club series at home. Several external clients also put their influencer projects with me on hold. That was an entire six-month, at the very least, revenue stream down the pan, with no replacement income.
I think the moment I cracked was when I realised that if I lived with a partner – something I haven’t actively been seeking for years now – with whom I could split all the bills, I would be a depressing £2O,OOO a year better off. That is a deposit on a house/private pension/no credit card debt/new car/multiple Chanel handbags, if you are that way inclined, kind of money.
So, with all this in mind, and a marked desire for big skies and a slower pace of life, I decided to up sticks to rural Gloucestershire, where rents are less than a third of London’s. Gloucestershire wasn’t my first choice – pre-pandemic I might not have moved so far from London. I always imagined myself within sensible – and affordable – daily commuting distance, so I could easily return for client projects and meetings. But, with the rise of Zoom and teleconferencing removing the need for face-to-face interaction, a longer commute and higher rail fare once every week or 1O days is a very fair price to pay for reduced rents or mortgages and a lot more space – mentally and property-wise.
But what really convinced me to move to the edge of the Cotswolds was quite simply a combination of access to trains and motorways (I will still need to get to London occasionally), availability (there were a lot of very affordable two-bedroom cottages for rent) and privacy. There are a lot of fashion and media types in the Cotswolds, but they tend to congregate about an hour north of where I’ve chosen to settle. (I can’t think of anything worse than continually bumping into old colleagues in a local farm shop.)
And how fashion people love the countryside. In recent months, we’ve seen Instagram feeds flooded with a vision of pastoral life that is both aesthetically beautiful and attractively simple, free of care and pollution. Whether it’s the carefully curated box of organic, locally sourced fruit and vegetables that Gucci sent out this summer as an invitation to its Epilogue show or Jacquemus’ L’Amour SS21 collection shown on a 6OOm-long wooden runway in a wheat field an hour outside of Paris (following on from his SS2O show in a Provençal lavender field), the fashion world is increasingly inspired by a rural idyll. Some – such as Alice Temperley, who has spent the past five months renovating a derelict Victorian mansion in her local market town in Somerset to move her entire brand, including her atelier, out to the countryside – are abandoning London for good.
Just don’t get me started on the twee ‘cottagecore’ trend, where perky barefooted girls dressed in (otherwise lovely) O Pioneers dresses clasp perfect apple pies to their frilly aproned chests in country kitchens. There appears to be an overwhelming belief in fashion-land that the countryside represents a wholesome and pure world, a Marie Antoinette-ish Petit Trianon construct where troubles magically disappear and everything bad can be solved by a frolic in a field and a ripe peach in one’s hand.
And here I should explain that, although I was born in London, I spent my childhood in very rural Kent. Our best friends lived on a farm in the village, and our mothers would open the back doors in the morning, shoo us out and we would return, tired and
muddy at the end of the day. I know my slurry from my silage, can drive a tractor (if pushed) and can identify most of the flowers on the verge of a country lane.
This knowledge and love of the rural way of life has always been part of me, deep inside, however much I have enjoyed my city privileges. Equally, I’ve always believed that I’d live in the countryside again, because I couldn’t imagine building a family anywhere else.
However, I seem to have forgotten to have children. Last year, I realised that I was subconsciously waiting for something that, in all likelihood, was never going to happen and that there was nothing to keep me in London anymore.
I’M NOT UNDER ANY ILLUSIONS that country life will be a utopia where all of my existential problems magically disappear, as I skip off to drink cider at the pub in my wellies. Committing wholeheartedly to the pace of country life after years in the city is hard, and I would be a fool to pretend otherwise. As my friend and fellow influencer Emily Johnston – having recently moved to Hampshire from Shepherd’s Bush – says, ‘It’s been a saving grace being out of London while in lockdown, but my current dilemma is that it’s hard to commit to the country when you need to return to the city for work once a week, as it does make the adjustment just that bit harder. At heart I loved my London life, and I really, really miss it.’
Oh god, do I hear her. I miss being able to see my friends at an hour’s notice, daily swimming in the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath, being at the centre of, well, everything. But, while I have agonised over being geographically and mentally so far from London, and worried about lack of immediate access to people (especially those working in fashion, which moves so quickly), I have come to the conclusion that the truly inconceivable changes brought about by Covid mean that everyone will be working differently for the foreseeable future. It’s clear that no one needs to be at fashion week in the same way, that personal contact is lessening and that often digitial communication is just as effective. And all the things I loved to do, which mainly revolved around being in busy and crowded places, just aren’t possible both now and quite conceivably for the next year or so anyway.
Is it the beginning of a new identity for me? Am I changing my name to LibertyCotswoldsGirl? The answer is a categoric
WHERE the FASHION SET ARE MOVING NOW
“I MAY NOW BE HAPPILY RENTING in the countryside,
BUT MY HEART WILL ALWAYS BE IN LONDON – IT SHAPED MY PERSONALITY AND FRIENDSHIPS”
no. I may now be happily renting in the countryside, but my heart will always be in London because that’s the place that shaped my personality, interests, friendships and career. Even if my head does say that I need to be somewhere less expensive and more rural to stay sane for the time being. I know I’ll sometimes be lonely, however many people I meet around here, that there will be flat tyres, frozen pipes and septic tanks with which to deal. But I also know this Christmas, when I open the kitchen door straight onto a frosty lawn bounded by a stream, hear the running water and see my little dog bounce around with joy while church bells ring in the distance, I will know that I have made the right decision for me right now.