No wonder they’re fleeing the city... but are they ready for country living?

FAMILIES all over the United Kingdom are quietly abandoning cities for a new life in the country – for much cheaper, larger homes, for a sense of community, for friendly village schools and more accessible healthcare and, really, an easier pace of life.

Such downshifting has long been the choice of many in middle age, at last mortgage-free, able to cash in and move to some pleasant smallholding or an old manse and live the rural idyll.

of course, with the internet, it is now much easier to hold down lucrative and even high-powered employment from the comfort of your own home, be it in Surrey or the Cotswolds, rural Galloway or the Isle of Skye.

But the trend is undoubtedly growing. Almost 94,500 people, according to a survey this week, have in the past 12 months quit Britain’s cities for the countryside – 16 per cent more than last year and the highest number in a decade. even more intriguingly, 30 per cent of them are still only in their twenties.

The shortage of affordable property, especially in Greater London, is a big factor for young couples. An unexpected and unsettling fall in house prices has rattled older people already in possession of one. There has also been a distinct economic shift, with many new businesses – especially in technology – choosing to start up in the provinces.

one can understand, too, how the Greater London lifestyle can pall after a few years – this sticky city with scummy air, where the tap water is undrinkable and where you must rise at a ridiculous hour of the morning for a protracted and unpleasant commute to work.

But even edinburgh is shedding young families, weary of a city long enmired in mean and incompetent local government – a municipality where untold millions have been squandered on vanity trams, even as your bins can go uncollected for weeks and which for years has harassed and tormented its motorists with a sort of bleak spite.

The links and beaches of east Lothian, the wooded dales of the Borders or the dozy ports of Fife’s east Neuk now lure many away from the Athens of the North.

We have been here before. If you think of the Sixties, it is instinctively of a hard, glossy and very urban lifestyle – fitted kitchens, loud colours, pounding music and synthetic fibres, where everything rustic seemed fustian and perfectly good Georgian and Victorian buildings were taken down the length of the land.

But reaction set in and, by contrast, memories of the Seventies – not least the memes of much TV advertising of the era – are much more bucolic.

environmentalism and conservation took off. Afternoon television oozed with such programmes as Jack Hargreaves’ out of Town or Yorkshire TV’s Farmhouse Kitchen.

There was renewed interest in country crafts. People started campaigning to save village ponds and hedgerows.

The young Ridley Scott’s 1973 Hovis commercial, all cobbled lanes and nostalgia (and much parodied at the time) is now remembered fondly as one of the greatest ever made.

By the mid-70s, as shows such as The Good Life were all the rage, couples did indeed and in large number move out to the country, all brown corduroy and macramé plant holders. These, too, were anxious times, with high inflation and incessant strikes and a sense of failing government.

There were whole new worries too. There was real public anxiety about pollution. The maria Colwell tragedy opened our eyes to the reality of child abuse and neglect. The Provisional IRA began a campaign of mainland terrorism. For millions, life seemed uncertain.

Hence a drift back to the land, for those with the means and the inclination, especially to places like the Inner Hebrides, where property could still be found cheap and where agencies such as the Highlands and Islands Development Board were apt to look kindly on anyone with a crazy scheme and an english accent.

The environment now is eerily similar. There is a whole raft of new fears, from internet predation on our children to identify theft.

many are in near-hysteria over Brexit, especially under one of the most rudderless and divided governments in living memory or the real possibility of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime minister.

our cities, after years of public spending and council cuts, are increasingly unkempt – weeds growing in gutters; road signs obscured in trees un-lopped this decade. Nor, in Scotland, do we appreciate how immigration on a very large and rapid scale has left many in england feeling strangers in their own community.

People yearn for the cosy and the certain; they increasingly question the hamster-wheel lifestyle and the strains of ‘affluenza’. For tens of thousands each year, a new way of life in the country, on perhaps a lower income but with greatly reduced costs and stress, is suddenly very attractive.

NoT that such a move ought lightly to be enterprised. In the outer Hebrides we have dozens of new arrivals every year, many of whom fail to last.

A common error – by people desperate for some sort of wilderness experience, eager for a bit of ‘remote’ after years of the standing room only commute – is to buy an extraordinarily isolated house.

Another, be it to Shetland or the West of Ireland, is to move somewhere after just a handful of visits in the tourist-clotted bonny days of summer. The realities of winter only kick in when they become manifest – gales that may endure for weeks; incessantly cancelled flights and ferries; the cafes and restaurants that only open for the summer. For many, it is a traumatic experience.

Up to 10 per cent of those who flee the city for a new beginning duly wilt and return, according to one analyst. But few are so daft as to abandon ealing or Liberton for a sea-sprayed Hebridean headland.

They seek, instead, life in or near a pleasant country town – Callander, Beauly, Peebles, Portree – with shops and churches and decent schools and nice places where they can eat out, and tend to last much better. I can attest from my own experience (and a couple of false moves) that I function best within walking distance of shops and amenities and with plenty of trees around me.

Behind this slow migration may be a deep cultural shift: a backlash against decades of consumerism and growing social division.

London sales analyst Nick Christian, 39, is planning a move to a much bigger house near Bristol with his wife and daughters, after years with a prodigious mortgage.

‘It’s not just us, there’s a massive shift in people’s mindsets,’ says Nick. ‘People are realising there are more important and meaningful things to life than earning money.’