Where is your dream village in the UK to call home?

[flutterbye88]

Hi everyone!

After a year of googling, reading posts and mini breaks to check out areas - we're still lost in our search for a forever home/area. It's so hard to get a feel for a place in a short amount of time!

We've discovered many beautiful villages, but we're holding out for 'the one' - one with like-minded sociabe folk and utterly charming!!

So I'd love to put the question to the Mumsnet Hive -

Where is your dream village in the UK to call home?

Who we are and what we're hoping to find:

We’re a family with young children (aged 6, 3, and 1½). hoping to find our forever place, somewhere we can put down roots and be part of a warm, lively community.

We don’t have much extended family around us, so we work on building that sense of belonging from within, for us, and for our kiddies.

We’re the kind of family who love travel, adventure and a bit of fun, but we’re also very grounded and homely.

We love the idea of raising our kids somewhere they can have a proper childhood - muddy knees, village fêtes, neighbours who become friends for playdates AND wine!! Somewhere, the children will feel they have proper roots and people who know them, once we pass.

What we’re looking for:
✨ A beautiful, friendly village with a really strong sense of community. Somewhere where people get involved and look out for one another.
✨ Good schools
✨ Close enough to a safe, interesting town so they’re not climbing the walls as teenagers!
✨ Somewhere that feels special/charming - pretty, welcoming, with that hard-to-describe “spark” that makes you fall in love with it.
✨ A place where, one day, our children will feel proud to come back with their own families.

We work remotely, so we’re flexible on location and can choose anywhere in the UK. Our budget is up to £850k (for a 4-bed house)

Do you live somewhere like this, or know a village or small town that sounds this dreamy? We’d LOVE LOVE LOVE to hear your suggestions, stories, or tips.

We’re ready to build a life somewhere special. 💛

Thank you so much in advance! x

lol, how funny Chatgpt led you here!! Yes! We spent the last year doing recce's and short listed Totnes and Stoud .. mostly Stroud though. Lovely, creative vibes and friendly people, great house prices, really pretty valleys, lots on for families.

Stroud -
Look up these areas - The Uplands, Chalford Hill, Nailsworth, Bussage all have great vibes and lots of families.

Totnes -
Dartington has great vibes. Look up 'Things Happen Here' it's a really cool bar/socil club with a pizza place attached - playground, pump track & school next to it. Loads of young families and cool parents hanging out.
Broadhempston - A really cute village with lots of young families.

Good luck with your search! Let me know where you land! x

@flutterbye88 if you liked Stroud - didn’t you like Frome? Similar vibes - I like Stroud too by the way -

Frome seemed very ‘hip’, lots of East London hipsters, and what felt like a wave of a similar 'late 30 something' demographic moving there post-Covid. We spent five days there, I went to loads of toddler groups, chatted to lots of parents, and we tried some of the cool pizza/bar/bakery places around the station. It’s pretty in parts and definitely has a cool vibe.
I did find some of the newcomers to Frome a little stand-offish - too cool for school!! that didn’t really appeal to me, maybe once upon a time!
But then there were also some genuinely lovely people, so I’m sure it’s very much about who you happen to fall in with... I did only have a snap shot of it!

Stroud just has something special about it. There are loads of creatives, but somehow far fewer ‘try-hards’, if that makes sense. The people feel grounded, warm, friendly and genuinely diverse and across all ages, rather than being dominated by one particular demographic.
For me, Stroud has a really special and authentic energy. It feels like something that has grown organically over a long time, rather than a particular ‘scene’ that has arrived. There’s a real sense of community and character that I found quite hard to replicate elsewhere xx

Yes I get that too - my father in law at 85 moved from Kent to Frome and he really appreciates the fact it’s very ‘community ‘ -he has a great over 65 friendship club! What you describe is the difference in my opinion between Bath and Bristol ( we live in Bath) Bristol has a lot of wannabes who haven’t necessarily got there, Bath has a lot of creatives who actually have got somewhere and picked it and yes I think you have

spotted the difference.Stroud was always quite nice, Frome wasn’t and has worked really hard to give it an edge. We often pop to Stroud - I really like Cheltenham too

Yep, I was slightly surprised too that old chatgpt had a thorough knowledge of chat threads on mumsnet! Thanks for your reply. Funnily enough both Stroud and Totnes both came up a few times on my research too. I was mainly looking in the Wye Valley kinda area, but still haven't felt that I've found a stand-out option there. One question - have you decided that you want to be IN a town/village, or more out in the countryside NEXT to a town/village? That's a big point of confusion still for me. The other big question is where will really have a bunch of people keen to make friends, but I don't think there's a magic answer for that - probably wherever we go the work will be down to us to make that happen.

If you like South Devon and don't want to be too isolated, both Totnes and Teignmouth are nice places, albeit for different reasons. But both have railway stations and are well connected.

The main issue with Newton Abbot is that they are building more and more houses (I know that's an issue in lots of places, I was amazed at what was going up around Aylesbury a few weeks ago, though part of that was HS2 rather than new houses) and I think they want to add on a load to Ipplepen too and the roads just can't take them.

I am somewhat flabbergasted about all the houses that have gone up in Wokingham district (eg Shinfield) but at least they've made some effort by building new roads. Newton Abbot only has the "new" Kingkerswell bypass which is about 10 years old now. Both Abbotskerswell and Ipplepen have country lanes and too many cars - it's madness to build more houses there without building the infrastructure first.

When I think of Stroud I still think of the meningitis outbreak n the 1980s, showing my age there!

Where did you end up OP?