We moved to the countryside in droves – do we now regret it?

A year ago, I left London searching for a new country life. I’d spent lockdown despairing in a tiny one-bedroom flat: mourning the end of my relationship with my fiancé, having lost the job I’d had for a decade, I was gripped by something many of us felt during the pandemic: a sense of my own mortality and a craving for a better life. 

So, while some people changed jobs, took up knitting, made sourdough or got a dog, I decided on more drastic action – selling my London flat to move to Land’s End.

Having grown up in rural Wales and Somerset, I’d long dreamt of country living; Covid gave me the push. In lockdown London’s streets were either disconcertingly empty or worryingly full. The city culture I loved dissipated overnight. By contrast the country seemed free and fresh.

Setting off, I didn’t realise so many people were on the same path: fleeing cities with dreams of rural farms and rose-covered cottages.

In early 2021 the number of Londoners who had left the capital during the pandemic was estimated at 700,000, according to a study by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence. Meanwhile, a report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers indicated Londoners were leaving at such speed the city’s population would decline for the first time in the 21st century.

Yet as London has reopened, and city life regains normality, will some regret running for the hills? Can the muddy reality ever live up to the pastoral dream?

Before lockdown, Adam Day-Lewin, 48, wife Charlotte, 39, and their two children India, five, and Rafferty, three, were living in London’s East Dulwich. Adam, a magazine executive, commuted daily to Soho and Charlotte to her luxury brand marketing consultancy in the West End. Life was stressful. 

‘Leaving for nursery or school, racing back for bath time, sweating profusely both ways – just to not miss your kids growing up,’ Charlotte says. In lockdown they ‘had this epiphany’: technology meant ‘the world skipped forward 10 years,’ Adam says. Now able to work from home, they sold up, moving to a beautiful period manor house with four acres in the New Forest, with family nearby.

‘It’s amazing the lifestyle you can have if you sell a house in London,’ says Charlotte. ‘It was all about lifestyle,’ Adam agrees. ‘Charlotte loves riding. I’d always fantasised about a boat.’ They love the fact that their children’s class sizes are so much smaller, and the school’s ‘forest classes’ and vegetable patch.

While Charlotte moved her business to their home, Adam quit his corporate job – the headspace led him and a friend to develop an interactive documentary series, The Uncertainty Experts. Do they miss anything about London? ‘Sushi!’

But some who moved to the countryside are now filled with regret. Louise (who’d rather not give her surname) had lived in New York, Dubai, then London for 12 years before relocating to a village in South Wales to care for her mum. 

‘It was a massive shock to my system,’ she says. She misses city life terribly: the energy and anonymity, the possibilities, the drive she thinks it gives people. ‘Having the balls to get around London by yourself shapes your personality,’ she says, ‘People’s mentality outside the city is very different: they go to work, come home and hunker down – they don’t want to do anything in the evening. I think especially if you have kids it’s better to stay in the city and give them that interesting, cosmopolitan life.’

Others have found a happy middle ground. When the pandemic began, Nicola Slawson, 37, was paying £800 per month to live in a studio annex with a shared bathroom in Muswell Hill, north London. During lockdown, she returned to her parents’ Shropshire village home. 

‘It was fun and novel at first,’ she says. She had video calls with friends, and posted Instagram pictures of lush walks. But as time passed, she felt the culture shock. She doesn’t drive and ‘went from being independent in London to being trapped in a village a mile’s walk to the nearest shop’. 

In London she’d been a self-described ‘social butterfly’: after-work drinks, launch parties, boozy book clubs, weird exercise classes. In the countryside, ‘it’s pitch black at 6pm’. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, she says, ‘I wouldn’t go back. I didn’t realise how much things in London were stressing me out – the commuting, the Tube, the living situation. I feel like a weight’s been lifted now. I sleep better. And it’s just so good to have space.’

Now she’s found a compromise, renting a two-bed garden terrace in the market town of Shrewsbury for £675 per month, and has found cute shops, a co-working space and other young people nearby. Meanwhile Nicola, who writes The Single Supplement newsletter, has begun exploring country dating. ‘I met a farmer who said I could have a go on his tractor,’ she laughs.

As city dwellers fled to the countryside, Cornwall replaced London as the most-searched-for place to live on Rightmove, while searches for the Cotswolds more than doubled. Rightmove also reported that enquiries about village homes from people in cities rose 126 per cent in June and July 2020 compared to the same period the previous year. 

Fuelled by the stamp duty holiday and low interest rates, estate agent Hamptons saw registrations to buy in their rural offices double. Andrew Marshall, regional sales director for the company’s western region, tells me he’d ‘never seen this level of demand’. Near Cheltenham one house had 40 viewings in three days. 

In north Oxford one property had 26 viewings and five offers. ‘The prices blew us away,’ he marvels, citing a house on the market for £1.2 million that went for £300,000 more.

Best and final offers and multiple bids became commonplace. Hamptons’ latest figures show rural house prices in England and Wales increased three times as fast as those in cities, with the top four hotspots being Daventry, Denbighshire, Rutland and the Vale of Glamorgan.

Katie wears: wool/cashmere coat, £379, Karen Millen; viscose dress, £70, Monsoon; leather boots, £250, Jigsaw; suitcase, £1,745, Globe-Trotter (pictured above) 

On the ground I saw the frenzy unfold first-hand, as houses sold overnight, viewings overbooked and gazumping was rife. Meanwhile the rental market became fraught. I moved between short-term lets: a fisherman’s cottage, a tiny barn, a sofa bed at my friend’s house. One couple I heard about who had sold their London home before trying to buy in the country moved seven times in six months, renting astronomically priced Airbnbs.

For me, it has been a steep learning curve. The first house I tried to buy in Land’s End fell through when it emerged it didn’t have listed buildings consent. The second Cornish property had a mineshaft nearby. I have taken crash courses on septic tanks, rodent prevention, air-pump heaters, electric Agas, damp proofing… And I wasn’t the only one struggling.

‘I’ve got dodgy signal here – and that’s just one of the problems,’ Sophia* laughs as she answers the phone in Dorset. She and her husband were living in central Brighton – in a ground floor flat with no garden – before the pandemic hit. Having spent the first lockdown with Sophia’s parents in Gloucestershire they decided they couldn’t go back, opting to buy in Dorset instead. 

‘It was mad how quickly things were snapped up,’ Sophia recalls. ‘It felt like everyone was doing the same thing and moving to Dorset.’ When they found an idyllic thatched cottage, they jumped at it. Only after the removal van drove off on a wet May weekend did Sophia get a worrying feeling of ‘take me back to Brighton!’

In the cold and damp, they quickly learnt their house was a project. ‘The first morning there were three different leaks in different parts of the roof.’ Things that looked charming during the viewing rankled: ‘The ceilings are low so my husband walks around with a stoop. We spend a lot of time finding new problems with the house and talking about how much money we need to save.’ Still, she loves village life: picking blackberries and finding cosy pubs at weekends; she is adamant they’d never go back to city life.

Panic buyers throwing the market into mayhem infuriated locals. As people flooded to exercise in (and litter) beauty spots, fled (illegally) to second homes or bought up property, tensions grew. In Cornwall I faced comments about not being ‘from around here’ and accusations of gentrification. But even those who were essentially coming ‘home’ found they weren’t welcome.

Barnes Thomas, 35, was living in Knightsbridge and setting up a fine art gallery when lockdown began. He relocated to his home town of St Just in west Cornwall. At first, he moved in with his parents, before – on something of a whim – moving into his late grandmother’s house, buying 40 acres and six saddleback pigs. 

He made a surprising farmer, with his Gucci pumps and ‘no eye contact’ rule with the pigs (so as not to form an emotional connection). But he was enthusiastic about Cornish life.

‘I thought people would be welcoming, he says. ‘I thought maybe I’d be an honorary member of the WI.’ The opposite proved to be the case. Locals objected to every change he made on his land, and he admits he perhaps got carried away reading about the landscapes of Capability Brown, building a lake and getting a flock of peacocks (which were immediately eaten by foxes). 

But he was upset when, he says, a Facebook group was set up ‘to beat me’. Out shopping one day, a local man told him to ‘f—k off back to where you came from’.

‘When I moved here I had so many visions of what I wanted to do but I’ve been firefighting the whole time… The locals love a witch hunt.’ When he had a secret dinner party in lockdown, his guests’ tyres were slashed and the police called. Last week, his pigs went to the abattoir. ‘The most tasteless sausages that have ever passed my lips,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I’m going to do it again – this farming life isn’t for me.’

Professor Stephen Palmer, chartered psychologist at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, suggests, ‘Psychologically, moving to the country may have increased a person’s sense of control over a challenging situation [lockdown].’ 

But, he notes, ‘Although living in the country may bring an agreeable lifestyle, enhancing your well-being, psychological adjustment to the new environment can take some months.’

His advice for people feeling they moved hastily is to wait – and adapt. In counselling he often suggests sticking a situation out, if it’s safe, ‘to learn to develop coping strategies. Once the emotional response is under control, then make a decision.’

So has the exodus to the countryside reached its peak? Although house prices are cooling, Rightmove’s director of property data Tim Bannister doesn’t think the green-rush is finished. ‘As society started to unlock we saw some of the demand shift back to cities again, but we do think more people looking to live in rural areas will continue as a longer-term trend now that they realise they can set up their desk anywhere.’

But will that still be true in six months’ time, or a year? Last month, a BBC survey showed that 70 per cent of British workers polled predicted that we’d ‘never return to offices at the same rate as before the pandemic’. 

More than three-quarters of those surveyed believed their boss would allow them to continue working from home some of the time. But are they right in that assumption? In February, the boss of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, described remote working as ‘an aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible’. 

Meanwhile the most recent survey from the ONS found that only 24 per cent of businesses intend to keep up the level of increased home working in future. As a result, those ex-urbanites who were counting on working from home may end up needing astronomically expensive rail cards (and facing countless hours lost to a commute). 

It’s a phenomenon Wired magazine christened the Great Office Unknowing: the anxiety of ‘anticipating the email that finally announces a firm return-to-the-office date’. How long the hybrid model that’s still in place in many workplaces may last is something no one can predict with any certainty.

As London reopened, others who have left during lockdown have developed FOMO (fear of missing out). Lynn Enright, 37, a journalist who left London with her husband for Dublin during lockdown, already has regrets. She misses London’s parks, and the great public transport. 

‘Social media makes me miss restaurants and bars and contributes to my FOMO – but I know that’s not real life.’ Most of all she misses the people: ‘I always found it so easy to make friends in London. Strangely, I find it harder in a smaller city: I think a lot of people here live near old friends and family so they don’t necessarily need new friends.’

After eight months fruitlessly searching for a home, I left Cornwall for Somerset, the county where I’d spent five years of my childhood. I wanted to be closer to the things I missed about city life: galleries and theatres, which are plentiful in nearby Bristol and Bath. I also wanted to be near to people I knew, in a place I felt a connection with.

Despite currently living in a caravan, and being consistently unlucky with the properties I’ve tried to buy (or perhaps the sellers saw me coming), I still love being in the countryside. I’ve been lucky to experience different rural ways of life. I’ve discovered I don’t want to live alone on a desolate cliff. 

I’ve discovered I hate the gossipy claustrophobia of villages even if I enjoy throwing myself into community projects and meeting new friends. I panic about rats. I complain about phone reception – although secretly like being hard to contact. But I love the peace of being surrounded by endless green, walking through woods feeling my mind open up, watching murmurations of starlings over corn fields at sunset.

I left London running away to the ‘middle of nowhere’ (as I rudely once called any green place). I found what I was looking for when I started aiming at something. In the end I realised that – whether in London or Land’s End – it’s not so much about finding a house but finding people, and a community, I could call home. 

*Some names have been changed.