Wish you weren’t here... what the locals really think
As the capital-to-countryside exodus continues, Rosa Silverman and Poppie Platt explore what welcome they can expect
Inge Hunter grew up in the “pretty little village” of Dullingham in East Cambridgeshire. A historic settlement within wooded countryside, it’s easy to see the appeal. Add to its aesthetic charm its location, a handy distance from Cambridge and London, and you may start to wonder why you haven’t moved there yourself.
Plenty of other people certainly have. Dullingham’s prettiness has, it seems, been its curse in some ways, too. “It is inundated with people from the city flocking to the area for a commutable village lifestyle,” says 31-year-old Hunter, who lives in a rental property there. “It has pushed up property prices and now I can’t afford a home in my own village.”
Her lament will sound familiar to many lifelong denizens of Britain’s loveliest villages and market towns. Those whose families have lived in an area for generations are now watching, sometimes uneasily, as disenchanted city dwellers move there to build a new life, away from the bright lights.
While such migration predates the coronavirus pandemic, the trend has accelerated since last March. In
December, Hamptons said the number of homes bought by Londoners outside the capital had risen to the highest level in four years. “While leaving London has been a rite of passage for many, often families reaching life stage milestones, the effects of lockdown and the desire for space seems to have heightened this drift,” the estate agency said.
Collectively, Londoners bought £27.6billion worth of property outside the capital in 2020, the highest amount since 2007, when London outmigration peaked. A similar exodus from other urban centres has also been taking place. Rightmove, the property website, said city residents contacting estate agents to buy a home in a village rose by 126 per cent in June and July compared with the same period in 2019. The shift began in April, and gathered pace, with the biggest increase in village inquiries coming not only from London but from
Edinburgh, Birmingham and Liverpool.
Hunter, a mother of two and director of her own digital marketing strategy company, says the popularity of Dullingham has spiked since the pandemic started – and it can leave those like her struggling. “I have friends who are local estate agents and they say, ‘We always add £50,000 on because it’s Dullingham,’” she says.
Her daughter’s school in the village now has 34 children in a class, while the closest property she could buy is 15 miles away.
Laura, 42, a secondary schoolteacher whose family has lived in the picturesque Dorset town of Christchurch since just after the First World War, feels similarly frustrated.
“I grew up in Christchurch and my entire life is here, but I can’t afford to buy a house because city big-spenders think it makes a nice holiday destination,” she says. “Dorset isn’t a beauty spot to people like me who were born here: it’s home and it’s where I want to raise my children. “People moving here from London to be near the sea are pushing us out of our own communities.”
She and her husband, an accountant, and their two young children are currently living with her parents while they save for a deposit. They need to put down a minimum of £40,000 to buy a family home, she says. It rankles. “I feel lucky to have been born somewhere as beautiful as Christchurch, but its natural beauty shouldn’t mean I’m unable to build a life here because of tourists or city dwellers moving here for a break from London.”
In some small towns and villages, tensions are spilling out into the open. While television shows like Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country may help popularise the idea of embarking on the rural life, this aspirational content hasn’t found favour with everyone. Before they were revised, Beeny’s plans for her new, redeveloped farmhouse home on the edge of Bruton in Somerset originally attracted a series of objections from local residents, centring on the risk of road accidents. But posts from a Bruton Facebook page suggest road safety isn’t the only concern locals have about newcomers moving into the increasingly fashionable town, where former Chancellor George Osborne bought a £1.6million Georgian home in July.
“They were not local,” one woman posted about a group of families she spotted apparently failing to respect social distancing rules recently. Then came the killer caveat: “If they were, they were the ‘new’ locals’.”
In a more welcoming spirit, another said that “new locals are still locals.”
Laura says of her area: “I’m open to making friends with newbies … and as such a close-knit community we want to make everyone feel welcome and at home. Lots of the other teachers at school aren’t from here originally and it brings a diversity that is definitely a good thing.”
Jonathan Bramwell, head of The Buying Solution at Knight Frank estate agency, was born and bred in the Kingham area of the Cotswolds where he currently lives.
“I’m nearly 50 and in my lifetime it’s gone from being a rustic, rural area to very much a cosmopolitan one with a very close connection to London,” he says. “There are pros and cons to that... A lot of people would have driven in and out of Oxford and it would have been easy when I was a teenager. There was no traffic. Now it can take you an hour. That’s had a huge impact.
“At the same time, the village shop and local pub are less likely to close because there’ll be more people using them.”
In the past year, he has seen a doubling in inquiries to the buying service he runs, which sells properties within a two-hour radius of London. “Seventyfive per cent of that would be people moving out of London or looking for a second home.”
Many local primary schools are now shrinking their catchment areas, he says. “The benefit, fingers crossed, is for those that aren’t doing so well, there’ll be pressure on them to get better.” Complaints about pressures on local infrastructure arise frequently, however, when a village or small town expands. In Horsham, 40 miles from London in West Sussex, locals have mounted a campaign against a council plan to build at least 750 homes on a golf course that currently provides well-used green space. “It will probably be commuter housing because it’s within 20 minutes of the station,” says Sally Sanderson, a member of the campaign steering group. “The golf course was built to protect a reservoir with a nature reserve on it. It’s a lovely facility for local people [and] a great green buffer. People are horrified at the loss of the golf course and potential damage to the nature reserve.”
She also warns about the loss of local identity that might ensue. “What everyone’s worried about is Horsham has already lost the market-town charm that was why people moved here. It will become a city in the next 20 to 30 years. If it’s not planned properly it will join up with Crawley and be just one big urban sprawl. What looked attractive for people moving out of London will no longer be attractive.” For anyone.