Peter STANFORD and
As the city exodus gathers pace, there’s more to making the move than many realise, explains Peter Stanford
It is the topic that the cosmopolitan chattering classes have been busy discussing at socially distanced gatherings on their narrow townie balconies, or in their pocket-handkerchief suburban gardens, ever since lockdown began to ease. Should we stay in town or move to the country?
The big question is whether, post-covid, the city has lost some of its lustre, and if unease at living Box and Cox with so many potential carriers of coronavirus could be mitigated by home-working somewhere more rural.
Right now, there is such a disparity between property prices in cities, This week, they hit an all-time high, according to the Nationwide, after the highest monthly rise in 16 years of 2 per cent; economists had forecast just 0.5 per cent growth. In the countryside, however, you can get so much more for your money both in terms of space and lifestyle
But those city-dwellers wishing to cash in their chips for a place in the country will need to move fast, because estate agents outside the smoke report that they’ve never been so busy.
“It has been so frantic these last couple of months that we don’t even get round to producing marketing materials for some properties that move to sealed bids,” reports Spencer Cushing, manager of Sowerbys in the countryside hotspot of Burnham Market in north Norfolk, where sales are double last year’s levels.
The shift he is seeing in what sells confirms surveys that show a whopping 57 per cent of people now favour remote working and a better lifestyle over crush and commuting (rising to 62 per cent in London).
“Pre-covid, properties with big gardens or in need of work were hardest to sell, because buyers here are mainly secondhomers wanting to move straight in and have low maintenance. Now, these are the houses selling for a premium. They are precisely what the new demographic wants,” he adds. In the rush for a picture-postcard, family “forever home” away from the metropolis, there’s no shortage of popular destinations being bandied around. For those in need of the occasional fix of the capital, quaint Petersfield in Hampshire, Ipswich (with its new fancy waterfront) and trendy Margate are especially popular. If total immersion in the country or on the coast is on the agenda, then Cardigan in west Wales scores highly, with its lively arts and crafts scene, while Port Isaac in Cornwall is reassuringly familiar after it featured in ITV’S Doc Martin. But before getting carried away with location, location, location, there are tougher choices to make. And I speak as one who grappled with them for a good five years, when our children were young, and who has ended up fudging it, with one foot in both camps: family home in the city, tiny bolthole in the country. The pluses, I can report, are as imagined. For the price of your standard Victorian city terraced house, you can double or even triple (depending on distance from the bright lights) your square footage by decamping to the country. And get something that doesn’t look like every other house, plus a garden, and usually outbuildings that will make a decent home office.
So far so good, then. But pause a moment to consider the cons – what I call the “five Cs”.
Connectivity
For city types who have grown accustomed to there being another bus or Tube behind the one you have just missed, you are signing up for negligible public transport in rural areas, and one-every-hour service at best in those handsome market towns. Our village, with no shop and a closed pub, has just one bus in the morning and one in the late afternoon on weekdays, and none at weekends.
Prepare to spend as much time in the car in your new life as you did on the Underground. And that is before you start ferrying your children everywhere because their mates will be spread over a much bigger radius.
With connections of a different kind, rural broadband has got much better in recent years. No longer do we walk up to the Iron Age fort above the village to wave the mobile around and try to catch a decent signal. Speeds are still slow, though, and on occasion that bulky file, on which your employment prospects depend, just won’t send.
College
Inner-city schools undeniably have their challenges, but at least there is a choice, with comprehensives, grammars, free schools or academies within striking distance. In the country, there will most likely only be one state school.
However good it is at the precise moment you move your family there, things can change quickly. If they go the wrong way, your only option is the nearby independent, with crippling fees of up to £30,000 a year. Or, if none exists, then boarding – the very opposite of what you intended by moving out to have more family time.
Culture
In the summer months, coastal and country towns, quaint villages and stately homes stage all sorts of cultural highlights to woo visitors. In our corner of Norfolk, there’s a Sea Fever literary festival, a series of high-grade classical music events in stunning medieval churches, and major-name recording artists doing mini-glastonburys at the local “big house”. Even in this year of Covid, our nearest,
Houghton Hall, put on the UK’S largest display of outdoor sculptures by Anish Kapoor, and you couldn’t get a ticket for love nor money.
Beware the holiday romance, though. When the nights draw in and you are down to permanent residents only, Barbara Dickson at the Princess Theatre, Hunstanton, may be your only option.
Community
A few weeks back, I was passing the time – I thought amiably – with a long-time local resident, who was bemoaning the likely impact of the Covid property boom on Norfolk. “I’ve seen so many changes in my 20 years...” I began. He cut me short: “I’ve been here 80, so I know all about change.”
You will always be an incomer. There are kindred spirits to be found, but it takes longer than in the city because the pool is smaller. If you are used to one great big melting pot in a city, then you will be opting for a hall of mirrors, where most everyone looks like a version of yourself, albeit bigger or smaller, taller or thinner.
And older class-based structures, and the expectation that go with them, are more in evidence. Urban middle-class arrivistes can be harder to process for those who have lived and farmed the countryside for generations. “What did you do before you were married?” a fellow guest asked my wife recently at a dinner. When she replied she was still doing it, he looked momentarily puzzled, and then embarrassed. “I’m all for more women on boards…” he reassured her.
Coming back
Covid may have changed everything forever. Or it may not. The jury is out. The experience of recent decades, though, shows that selling up in the city is a one-way street, financially. Growth in urban property prices has outpaced those in countryside areas, and so – when your children have flown your spacious rural nest with its stunning views and vegetable garden, or when you get older and all that driving is harder to manage – your buying power if you want to return to once familiar cosmopolitan haunts is likely to be much reduced.
All of which may sound too gloomy. We’ve never had a moment’s regret, and talk of one day making the switch permanently. But there is an air of unreality about the current buzz around the unlimited benefits of escaping to the country. If something seems too good to be true, as they say, it usually is.
Our village, with no shop and a closed pub, has just one bus in the morning