Five years ago, my Instagram feed was flooded with friends and influencers sharing “exciting personal news”. These announcements were more-often-than-not big house moves: doer-uppers bought in Margate, Frome, or Hove, their keys to a new life, a life which they were convinced would treat them better than the exhausting one they currently had in London.
It’s not unusual that as generations grow up, they want to settle down, buy property, have children – and perhaps try their hand at a vegetable patch – so are likely to gravitate towards the suburbs and away from the buzzing (expensive) cities of their youth.
But a mass exodus from the capital was undoubtedly triggered by the Covid pandemic and the rise of flexible working, which allowed those with London-based jobs to consider living further afield. In the first half of 2022, Londoners bought 40,540 properties outside the capital, 19 per cent above the pre-Covid average of 34,140, according to research by estate agents Hamptons.
For me, this moment also coincided with my peers growing tired of London (thankfully not of life… just yet). People wanted more space and a local wild swimming spot they could use to make their friends green with envy. I was one of those people.
In 2018, after 16 years, I fled the capital, buying a terraced house in Bath, an hour and 15 minutes away. It felt like the perfect solution to our cramped flat in Brixton, with such noisy upstairs neighbours we nicknamed them The Clomps, and a local crackhead who had taken to pooing in our bin shed. For less than the price of my badly soundproofed flat, with no outside space, we bought a three-story house in my hometown of Bath with a 50-foot garden and gorgeous views of Somerset hills.
We were smug: we had the stability of London salaries (I was working as an editor at a glossy magazine, my husband a graphic designer) with a lower cost of living: our mortgage had halved, the council tax was cheaper. We crucially also had a much better quality of life, the countryside on our doorstep, and family close by for when we had our two children in 2022, and 2024.
Bath was one of the big focuses for the influx of DFLs (down from Londons) or “blow-ins”, prompted by Covid. We had four DFL neighbours who moved onto our street alone in 2020. And it’s easy to see the attraction: a World Heritage Site, it has some of the most beautiful architecture in the country, with the Roman Baths, Royal Crescent and the Circus drawing millions of tourists every year.
It’s also seen a regeneration of its shopping and restaurant scene, with far more to offer than I remember as a teenager, when the Moles nightclub was my main focal point (Moles has sadly closed down: Bath residents are now more interested in small plates than small clubs).
But our smugness wasn’t to last.
As the years have progressed, and we’ve moved further from the pandemic, the tide seems to be turning. Recent data has shown that hundreds of previously popular commuter towns such as Weybridge in Surrey, and Petersfield in Hampshire, have seen their property prices tumble as housebuyers are choosing to remain in the capital (which has once again become the most searched-for location on the property website Rightmove, with more than half of the people living there looking to stay rather than leave).
‘Eyewatering costs of living aside, our schools are exceptional, it is one of the safest cities in the country and it’s where my parents are,’ says JessicaThings like higher interest rates, the end of working from home flexibility (JPMorgan Chase, for example, last year rolled out a full, five-day return to office mandate) and expensive railfares mean that London life perhaps isn’t looking quite so unappealing after all. Things have certainly taken a turn for us in the past year, leaving me wondering if we’d made a mistake upping sticks.
First, our mortgage interest rate more than doubled thanks to that 2022 “mini-budget”, meaning our monthly payments skyrocketed and we weren’t able to even consider moving into a bigger house with a third bedroom once we had our second baby.
Then, when I went back to work after maternity leave earlier this year, with the return to office mandate in full flow, I found that the train tickets had gone up so much it was financially crippling for me to get to the office once a week, let alone the three times that was now expected.
A flexible day return between Bath and London Paddington will now set me back hundreds of pounds. If I needed to go into the office tomorrow at short notice for a meeting, it would cost £260 (not including the Underground fare when I get there). Of course, advance tickets are cheaper but still – even booking a couple of weeks ahead – would be around £100 for a return, versus the £47 I was paying before I went on maternity leave in 2024.
Because of this financial reality, I eventually had to admit defeat and leave my job to go freelance (and stay at home) as the combination of nursery fees, train tickets and Pret lunches in London absorbed my pay cheque with depressing ease each month.
Even when staying within Bath, the cost of living is expensive. With hot spots like Landrace Bakery charging up to £5 for a coffee (I recently paid over £25 for two coffees and pastries), £8 pints in the pubs (surely a price that should be reserved for a bustling Soho pub?), and a three-bedroom terraced house threatening to set you back £900,000, would we be better off back in London after all?
While the idea of moving back to London has crossed my mind, as I’ve battled with the cost of commuting, we are staying put. Eyewatering costs of living aside, our schools are exceptional, it is one of the safest cities in the country and it’s where my parents are. I want to raise my family here. But if you’re expecting to free up any cash by checking out of London, think again: the grass isn’t always greener.
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