Is this village life?

[Hocuspocusnonsense]

I’ve moved from London to a village in Surrey to raise a family. I have 3 young children

The village has a duck pond so I took my children to look at the ducks and an elderly couple spoke to me and my children, all nice and friendly until they asked if I’ve always lived in the village and I said no I’ve moved here from London, to which he replied ‘We’re sick of you Londoners moving here’ and walked off.

I joined the local toddler group and it quickly became apparent that everyone knew each other, most had grown up in the village, went to school together etc and no one was interested in chatting because they had their friends there.

Since being at the local village school I have lost count of how many times I’ve been asked which road I live in....I know it’s to size up how much my house is worth. And to top it off just before the Easter hols I had a mum ask me in front of another mum “Do you receive the holiday club vouchers, you’re low income aren’t you?” I was really taken aback. I actually have a good career not that I broadcast it (earn £40k) but I drive a Fiat and my car is 9 years old, most mums drive newer, bigger beast cars.

Is this normal village life?

That all sounds awful.
I'm not sure what th answer is

Ha were in a Surrey village/small town and were in the ‘council end’. The fancy part of town has tiny old terraces with shit gardens or you’re paying a mill for a bit more space. We have lovely plots up our end, big gardens and a newly-brilliant school which all the snobs are out of area for 😂
If you’re anywhere near Guildford I’ll be your buddy!

As an ex Surrey girl, in my personal experience, that’s Surrey life.

Moved to the coast as soon as I could, totally different experience. People actually want to talk to you! Took me a while to get used to.

Yes it is some village life.
There are villages where unless your grandparents were born and bred there you will always be an outsider.
Villages with a mixture of incomers and people born there that are friendly.
And villages with all incomers where anyone born there has been driven out.

My family were all born in a village we can no longer afford to live in. My nephew moved to a new places with his wife. I had not been to this village but when I mentioned it mums at school were saying it is rough. I was surprised when visiting to see a village of mainly new build estates with ordinary families. It is not at all rough!!

I understand how this may sound, but in one sense I understand this. Not the HA type of people part, but the estate part. It can have a massive effect on house prices and general life of the village.

Developers don't care if the local infrastructure will be able to handle all these new families; whatever type they are. The reality is, families being house by HA will most often have additional social needs; it's so hard to get on any housing list so the threshold they have to meet is pretty high. I doubt they'll also build a citizens advice bureau, increase public transport, local adult education, employ additional GP or create additional jobs. There is a ripple effect on these sorts of developments and although the wording of this is awful and this village doesn't sound nice at all, I understand why they may be opposed to this.

Was this a village v near to Pershore??
I spent millennium eve smiling nicely to people and saying Happy New Year in a village just outside Pershore and they looked at me as if I were mud on their shoes. Am Worcestershire born and bred and in many ways would love to return, but my DH would need a lot of persuading because he finds so many people bloody rude.

@Bauhausstolemyhair my reply would be "yes we do get holiday club and food vouchers but we are not even entitled to child benefit " that would baffle people and probably infuriate them

I managed to stay fairly local because they built an estate with a good mix of HA homes, shared ownership and private ownership.

It is now one of the more sort after estates.

Without it I'd have had to move a significant distance away.

This always throws the local Nimbys if I tell them this.

@RedToothBrush That's really good. I think those are best, a good mix is what should always happen. OP just mentioned a HA estate being built which is why I said what I said.
I do think of the new builds weren't all being built to look like a red brick replica of a 60s estate, less people would be opposed to them. There should be a rule that they should match local architecture. It is really sad that this is what we're leaving behind amongst beautiful Victorian and Edwardian homes. On top of being quite uninspiring and at times ugly, most of them aren't insulated much better than the Victorian ones.

It is a bit like this where I live. I absolutely believed people asked me where I lived to work our wealth, social standing etc. which is ridiculous. It was usually older women at the baby groups, ones who helped run it. Another favourite question was what does my husband do.

The place is full of people who are closely related, large families from the past with large extended families of cousins etc. so you always have to be careful what you say. Locals use the term 'incomer' and many of them have never left the area, it makes their worlds very small.

It's handy for schools but as soon as my children are older I plan to move. I hope things improve for you, I have found it easier not to have much to do with too many people. After a while you find out who your real friends are!

If they had built in the style of the local area, they would have built a load more 60/70s style bloody bungalows mixed with red brick council style semis! There are some Victorian buildings but the majority aren't.

Reality is that parish councils just block everything for just daft reasons even if the proposal is a decent one imho. Cos of this stupid outsiders are evil mentality. It's so short sighted because I do think it's locals who often end up coming off worst with it.

Yep this is village life. Maybe less so these days. We moved to a fairly big Sussex village from South Yorkshire, and the original residents had a massive stick up their arses about “the new development”.

I was made to sit separately from the other children “so they didn’t pick up my horrible accent”. The teacher sent me to the speech therapist multiple times about “my speech impediment” - when the speech therapist discharged me yet again, saying I had no impediment whatsoever, just a northern accent, my teacher sniffily told my mum (who also had a northern accent of course) that “in polite society, she will find that accent a significant social impediment”

DM also had problems making friends, as everyone’s parents were either related to everyone else’s, or had been to school with them. We focused our social life in the nearest town. Brownies, swimming club, gymnastics, etc, and not in the village. It became less of a problem as more “incomers” joined the school, and by the time I finished primary, a good 50% of the class were born outside the sainted shores of Sussex. There was still social separation though, all of my friends were fellow incomers, and the old families stuck together as they were all inter-related and their families were friends with each other.

Anyway, I got into the local grammar, none of my “local family” school colleagues did, and I am now a consultant at a London teaching hospital and speak like Melvyn Bragg (unintentionally, my accent has just drifted up the register over the last thirty years). Nothing would ever induce me to move back to a village.

See to me large chinks of surrey are commuter villages with a near permanent churn of new arrivals for the communte and older people retiring off somewhere else when they dont need the trainline and can cash in on their house. So i find it a place that that isnt particularly where people are from or are staying in forever.

• chunks

I have lived in lots of villages over my lifetime. In my experience, no, this isn't normal village life. However, when I lived in Surrey (many years ago) it was certainly Surrey life......the county is full of folks who measure each other up by jobs/housing status/monetary worth and/or where the person has come from. It's also the only county in the UK I've come across where people will show you round their new house and actively discuss exactly how much they paid for it!

I wouldn't touch Surrey with a bargepole these days, but I still live in villages, they are normally welcoming and lovely, friendly places.....

We moved to a small village about 3 years ago (cotswolds). We have a small primary school, a community shop and a rugby club. The church is in the next village over and we have a post office that visits on a Friday when it isnt cancelled
I certainly don't recognise what you've described, although perhaps a version of it.

1. Asking the street - this for us is completely normal. "Where do you live" is usually a conversation starter and gets narrowed down to your specific house, and often what works have been done to it recently, or not recently! We've also been introduced to past residents of our house as a result if they still live in the village. People also tend to talk about sizes of houses and gardens but not from a snobby pov, it's just observations.
2. Anti new housing - our village is generally.ahainst any new developments. Its proud of being a small village and new, often inferior housing (ie. Small, terraced, minimal gardens) are looked at as a sign we are being swallowed up by nearby towns and thay we will lose everything that comes as part of living in a small village.
3. Anti-london views are fairly normal because of 2nd homes, or londoners who come and then complain about country ways of life (animals, shooting, tractors on the roads, church bells etc). Many also don't participate in village life in the same way and they are seen as being aloof in some way.
4. There is a joke in our village that you only start to belong when you have 5 generations buried in the church yard. It is a joke but there are a lot of people who have been born and bred here. As "outsiders" we don't have the position in the close knit community as the people who have grown up knowing each other, but we have thrown ourselves into community activities, working in the village community shop, participating in church fetes etc and frequenting the rugby club

All of that has meant we aren't seen as "aloof" outsiders, we are contributing to the village way of life rather than trying to change it etc so we've been accepted very readily (not saying you haven't, but preconceptions mean if you aren't obviously doing these things it can be hard to break into fixed groups)

1. Snobbiness about income and cars - I don't recognise this at all. We have some phenomenally big houses in the village and some very normal ones. We live in the countryside so we all drive a total mix of vehicles in varying states. We get comments on ours (people knocking on the door) because we have two electric vehicles, but no one would raise an eyebrow about a shabby clio or similar. The manor house probably has an identical one!
2. HA prejudice - this isn't village specific. Everywhere I've lived or visited has been Anti HA properties - they're associated with noise, mess and anti social behaviour. That's not to say its true, but is a very wide spread opinion. We have a permanent travellers camp near us and any additional development there is met with the same horror and scepticism.

Oh you would hate me. I love saying Hello to new people I see walking around the village, it particularly amuses me when they try not to meet my eye and pretend I don't exist, they then look horrified when I speak. Mostly they manage to utter a Hello back before quickly walking away from the mad village lady who dares to greet them.

I grew up in a small village, and your experience doesn't surprise me at all.
Where I lived no one cared which house you lived in, but you weren't a true villager unless you could trace your ancestry back a few generations within the village. 30 odd years mean nothing...you weren't a local! 😂

Where I am, the toddler group thing is true-ish... in that people who've met and bonded when theyve new borns wont necessarily be as welcoming as they should be to new faces. It varies by individual, though. I didnt emjoy toddler group as it felt cliquey.

School parents asking about your finances....! Wankers. Thats just awful behaviour.

People "not liking Londoners" is also shitty. Id assume theres a crazy assumption that if you sell your 1-bed London flat you can buy an 18-bedroom mansion even if you're a lazy feckless muppet whos never worked a full day in their life... which some people would be jealous of. But on Mumsnet there are plenty of posts about "if I move outside London will everyone be racist bigots with 8 fingers and webbed feet due to the inbreeding?" So I guess it goes both ways.

People who've lived in the village I stay in for more than 25 years will often be anti any new development now: the village has literally doubled in size over the last 30 years, and those who chose to live in a small village would rather it didnt become a small town. Theres also been no increase in facilities to match the increased size, if anything a reduction - eg part of the park built on, part of the school playground built on and portacabins added for overflow classrooms, etc. Its not always just small-minded parochialism.

And there really are people who move to farming areas who bitterly complain about smells, tractors, not being able to walk the dog in lambing fields, game birds in thd road, local clay pigeon shoot, etc. Thoigh theyre mostly on Facebook.... Itd be like moving to a city and complaining about street lights and traffic.

I think that very much depends on the area tbh. I live in the North and the town mentality is that if you haven't live here since birth you'll always be a 'white settler'

I’ve noticed the toddler group thing - NCT groups or groups of nannies turn up together and so it feels like everyone already knows each other and it’s hard to even strike up smalltalk in that situation if you’re attending by yourself. It’s been ever thus - or at least since I had my eldest ages ago.

I do this in my village too, it amuses me no end 😂

I am a reluctant village committee member - not all of us want to show off about it, or even do it at all, we just had a conversation with the wrong person once and a guilt complex!

Love this! 😂