Rural locations – for life or just for lockdown?

A place in the country has never sounded so appealing, finds Rupert Bates. Just so long as it really is keeping the wolf from our doorsteps...

ESCAPE to the country, that mustard cord cliché much loved by rural agents, is running wild as a sales pitch in the teeth of COVID-19. Town mouse dirty; country mouse squeaky clean. The hamster wheel of the London commute will surely have the cage left open when this is all over, as people reset their working lives with or without the ongoing constraints of social distancing. Lockdown rules may change according to the path and plans of the virus, but you sense mindsets may have pivoted permanently.

“While the head says the market will fall, there is an expectation from some countryhouse sellers that they can take advantage of the pent-up urgency of buyers, who might be thinking with their hearts, to get out of London,” says George Burnand of buying agent Jmchase and Partners.

There is likely to be a big increase in the number of people working from home in the future and, in turn, impacting on commercial space in urban areas, which could actually see some canny residential developers spotting opportunities to reinvent town centre living.

If I had a pound for every person extolling the joys of birdsong in the absence of traffic and children skipping – two metres apart – through meadows picking dandelions, I could easily buy a second home in the West Country with the proceeds.

It is as if we have just discovered a thing called wildlife. A wolf has apparently turned up in Normandy and if we can get over our Little Red Riding Hood complex about our lupine friends, let’s put him on the Eurostar as we get rewilding.

Political journalist Isabel Hardman has written a book called The Natural Health Service – what the great outdoors can do for your mind and the solace Hardman found in nature as she struggled with her mental health.

If this all sounds rather sentimental that’s because it is. Forecasting house prices is a national sport. But our property astrologers are often more self-fulfilling prophets than forensic data scientists. Talk the market down and sentiment will run down the hill with you like a greyhound after a rabbit in the valley. For every estate agent saying that his or her phone hasn’t rung for two months, there’s another claiming it’s ringing off the hook.

A period cottage just outside the middle of nowhere might seem quite attractive right now. Maybe not a wolf on the patio just yet but lockdown has forced us to stare at our walls, ring our relations and reassess ambitions and lifestyles.

Debt, divorce, death and location, location, location have never been knocked off the top two spots in the estate agency cliché league table, but has the way we look and engage with our homes changed forever?