Meet the midlife relocaters starting afresh in a new town
Thinking of upping sticks? Sam Baker reveals why your 50s is as good a time as any to do it
‘YWe’ve window-shopped estate agents everywhere, but there’s always been one city we come back to
ou’re doing what?” That was the main response when my husband, Jon, and I started telling people we intended to move several hundred miles to the other end of the UK, back in the spring of 2019. “You’re moving where?” was the next one. And then, the big one: “But why?”
We weren’t decamping to a smallholding on the Hebrides or halfway up a mountain in North Wales, although I’m sure both those are fabulous places to live. We were moving from the middle of one city, Winchester, in Hampshire, to the middle of another, larger city, Edinburgh.
Who hasn’t played, Could I Live Here? We’ve window-shopped estate agents everywhere from Paris to New York, to Kefalonia to Reykjavik, but there’s always been one city we come back to in our hearts and heads. A city we’d both been in love with for pretty much as long as we’d been in love. (The city, as Jon says, where we realised there was an “us”.)
Not only had we spent a lot of time in Edinburgh, but we had walked its streets, hung out in its cafés, bars, restaurants and bookshops, explored its neighbourhoods and already had a few friends there. It had a thriving cultural community, an incredible food scene and its own vibrant identity as a capital.
We could also afford, more or less, to buy a biggish flat near the city centre, five minutes’ walk from the tram and 35 minutes from the airport (when planes
are running) and be down south, where my family lived, in an hour. To satisfy any rural cravings, we’d have a fifteenminute drive to mountains or sea.
There are as many reasons for relocating in your 50s and beyond as there are people who decide to give it a go. Divorce, bereavement or health can all play a factor, as can moving to be near friends and family; or conversely, moving away because your kids are now safely grown.
Fifty-somethings might move to downsize, release equity or pay off their mortgage, or they might upsize to a dream property, or even a dream location, as we did. For the lucky ones, their 50s is a chance for an adventure that work, responsibility and life have denied them permission to have until now. The cliché is that 50-somethings only up sticks for the country or the seaside – and some do – but there are many who see their kids moving on as an opportunity to re-embrace city living. Researching this piece, I spoke to people who had relocated from suburban locations to Brighton, Glasgow, Bristol and Edinburgh. London, too, is getting in on the act. According to research from Hamptons International, the number of 50-somethings moving to the capital has risen by 9 per cent in the past year.
The other myth is that over-50s are all about downsizing. Research carried out by Cambridge University suggests the reverse is true. Of people relocating after 55, 80 per cent bought houses, nearly half of which had four bedrooms or more, while less than 3 per cent bought a property with only one bedroom. So much for going quietly into our dotage.
And yet, when we decided to go for it, the just-about-unspoken assumption was that we were opting out. Retiring. There was the occasional, wistful “lucky you”, but those were outnumbered by the sidelong glances and inferences that my career was over. No one would employ me if I lived there. (They were reckoning without a pandemic that was about to throw all our notions of what work looks like up in the air.)
Partly it was our ages. I was 52; Jon 10 years older. Both, theoretically, ready to start thinking about putting our feet up. Anyone who knows us knows that isn’t likely to happen any time soon. Jon writes thrillers as Jack Grimwood, and until a few years ago I was a magazine editor. I edited Cosmopolitan and Red, and then co-founded a digital platform for women called The Pool. It was the shock of that business going down in early 2019 that made us take a hard look at our lives.
In part, this was necessity – our savings were gone, our finances in tatters. We had to sell our house to regroup; but equally importantly, for the first time in my professional life, I was not tied to London. Much as that represented an identity crisis, I was also surprised to recognise a glimmer of opportunity. It was years since Jon had worked in an office, and now, if I wanted, I was free from the daily commute, too. I could earn a living from home as a writer, editor and broadcaster. And home could be anywhere. The truth was, there was no rule that said I had to live within an hour’s radius of London.
Yes, the collapse of The Pool threw us into crisis, but it also gave me an unexpected gift: freedom. At Jon’s suggestion, I took a step back and asked myself what I wanted from the next 10, 20, 30 years of life (and also where we felt we should spend them).
I don’t say we did this all without reservation or hiccups. It’s important to go into a big move with as much information as possible; and don’t be afraid to rent first before buying if you feel you might need a safety net. We certainly had our ups and downs – you try selling a house under English law and buying one under Scottish law without a hitch! But life threw us lemons like grenades and we had a choice: suck on them or make lemonade. Yes, we ended up living in my brother’s spare room for months because the first lockdown meant we couldn’t move into our new home. But we’ve been in Edinburgh 10 months now and haven’t looked back.
The Shift: How I (lost and) found myself after 40 – and you can too by Sam Baker is out now in paperback, £9.99 (Coronet)