To be surprised at how everyone knows everyone in small towns?

[thissemicharmedlife]

Well obviously I am BU because it’s such a given, but has anybody found this aspect a bit of a culture shock when moving from a bigger city to a smaller town?

I grew up in a biggish city then moved to a lovely market town about 12 miles away (population about 30,000) at 20. However me and DP continued working in our home city for the first few years so never really got to know anyone locally. Anyway since having a child (so experiencing baby groups, nursery and school start) as well as getting a part-time job locally it’s really hit me how everybody knows everybody. There is no separation at all, if you mention where you work to your neighbours then they inevitably know or are related to half of your colleagues. If one of the school mums adds you on Facebook then they are mutual friends with everyone else you know in the town. You can’t go round Sainsbury’s without seeing a dozen people you know. I kind of miss before when I was anonymous.

I do wonder what it will be like longterm for my children to grow up and go to school here. If you’ve grown up in a small town did it feel a bit claustrophobic to know everybody? I used to bus to secondary school in a different area of my city and my parents didn’t know anyone else’s parents at my school. I would bet there’s at most one degree of separation between everyone round here.

I moved from Manchester to a small town in Scotland. Everyone knew everyone and it was the kind of place where everyone would say hello and stop to coo over my baby. I hated it at first and then started to enjoy it somewhat. I have since moved to a bigger town in Scotland and there is a mix of people who have lived here for 3 generations and others who are new to the area having moved when the new housing is built. I do like it here but I prefer living in a big city (I am an introvert, getting stopped for a chat when I am trying to do the school run or get to work on time is annoying). That is probably more to do with my personality though.

I grew up and still live in a village - a reasonably big village though. It's not that I meet people who know people I know, it's more that I actually know almost everyone in the village. This is a bit different to the situation you're in obviously! But I love it.
When your dog takes itself for a sneaky walk people phone and say 'I've just seen your dog going past the house'. You go rescue your dog before it gets run over. The same applies to your toddler/ancient mum with dementia etc.
If there's a problem like vandalism (pretty rare) the culprit is inevitably found out, because someone will know who it was, and soon everyone will! They don't do it again...
When you have a loss, you tell two people and within a few days everyone knows. You don't have to explain over and over about how your loved one died.
I could go on. Obviously some of this doesn't apply in a town, but the point is that a smaller place is a community which cares about you, not a big city where sometimes even your immediate neighbours don't want to speak to you. I stayed in a city briefly and while it had many benefits, the anonymity was awful for me. I had close friends, but other them literally nobody cared if I lived or died - what a horrible feeling!
Hope that helps!

I grew up in a small town on the outskirts of a city where everyone knew everyone else.
It was claustrophobic. I couldn’t wait to leave. I moved to London and the one concern my family had was that I wouldn’t know anyone. I love the freedom of being anonymous

It's why I left my hometown!

Live in a city now, beautifully anonymous haha. I know my neighbours who are very nice, but I never bump into anyone I know in Tesco and I much prefer it.

Jeez, this sounds awful.

We’ve just moved out our naive Mumsnet-favoured city suburb partly because of this, although most of the kids that our son went to school with end up scattering far and wide during and after uni.

I do think there is a class element to this. It’s not just small towns. It’s small towns where everyone stays.

Seems like you either love it or hate it

I grew up in a small town. I now live in London. Enough said.

I'm moving to a rural village with a population of 894.

Never mind the school gate, I think everyone is going to know when I go for a poo.

I grew up in Edinburgh and we then moved back to a small town (population just over 5,000) that my mum grew up in and it is very much a case of everyone knows everyone. I was still in school when we moved here and I did have teachers that taught my mum etc.

I moved away to Glasgow when I turned 18 for uni but moved back again straight after, I love living in this little town now and yeah everyone knows everyone but I think it feels like much more of a community than a big city. I'm pregnant with my first and can't wait for them to grow up here

Everyone round here is a cousin of everyone else or went to school with them. Before I even think about moaning about anyone I always have to carefully check this isn't the case first!

It depends. If you're happy to fit in with the culture of the place its great I'm sure. If you're not, by nature or by circumstance, it's fucking horrendous.

And I think it was why my children were fairly well behaved. We always pointed out to them that they were known to almost everyone in the village and if they put a foot wrong, I'd know immediately. They had a lot of freedom to play outside unsupervised with their friends because of this, so it was mainly positive for them.

@HandyBendySandy A friend of mine grew up in a village of 60 people. Everyone literally knows every move you make. I recently most to a large village, a couple of thousand people, and I’m sure everyone knows me by sight, given I go out for a walk round every day.

We live in a town of 8000 and dh really does appear to know every single bloody person. A quick nip to Sainsbury's etc is NEVER quick. Random folk that he knows chat to me a lot, I've not got a clue who the heck they are.

He grew up in a village of no more than 200 people, my town about 3000.

@bridgetreilly

I do wonder what it will be like longterm for my children to grow up and go to school here.

It will be brilliant for them. Why wouldn't it?

claustrophobic.

Also, make a mistake and the whole world knows, and 20 years later someone will STILL comment on it

I grew up in a town like this and left fir a big city ASAP. I've reconnected to some old friends from primary school and so many of them are married to boys who were in our class and they still live in the same area. I much prefer a bit of anonymity.

I grew up in a small town and didn't know anybody except my next door neighbours and obviously friends from school. My parents live in a village of 400 people and know about 4, so maybe we are just an antisocial family.

I do think there is a class element to this. It’s not just small towns. It’s small towns where everyone stays.

This. I've lived in small places, and in London and other big cities, and enjoyed both. The only small place I really didn't enjoy was a Midlands village where no one ever seemed to move away, or, if they did, they quickly came back to 'settle'. It was incredibly insular, curtain-twitching, and low on social skills. People in their 40s and 50s were stuck with the nicknames and identities they'd had at school, and newcomers were just too much of a faff, because people hadn't known them since the 70s, and probably their parents before them -- I had the impression people wouldn't have known how to start to get to know complete strangers whose life histories were not in the village, because they'd never had to. Novelty was strenuously resisted. I thought it made people incredibly lazy, and reliant on an almost inherited sense/majority hive mind view of who someone was. Only local people and issue actually mattered. 'Elsewhere' was somewhere you went on holidays, and wasn't real.

Let me be clear, though, that was this one place. I've lived in far smaller villages elsewhere which were much less claustrophobic, where people came and went, and which managed a nice balance of community feel and openness to new people and things.

I do think there is a class element to this. It’s not just small towns. It’s small towns where everyone stays.

Yes, that was certainly the case in my home town. Back in the 1980s, when I grew up there, almost nobody left to go to university. I was one of the very few.

I live in a rural area and until recently worked in the nearest small town. I wouldn't say everyone knows everyone else, but there are a lot more connections than in a big city, particularly as we are fairly isolated geographically and there are lots of families who have been here for many generations. Lots of people are related to each other. As we had moved from a major city I did freak out a bit at first when people I didn't know seemed to know quite a bit about me, like being addressed by my name in the post office when we'd only been here a few weeks, but I soon got used to it.
I keep myself pretty much to myself so haven't really had any problems, but you do need to be a bit careful about what you say in public. I remember one of my ex colleagues ranting quite loudly about someone in another department who had annoyed him. It turned out that the other guy's wife, sister and cousin were all in the room at the time. Rather awkward...
But the other side of the coin is, as others have said, there's a great community spirit and people really do rally round if help is needed. I wouldn't want to go back to city life now.

I think a small town is probably the happy medium for me.

I grew up in a very small village - less than 400 people. Not only did I know everyone but I was related to many of them! Because very little happened there, when there was anything even the slightest bit gossip-worthy it would keep people going for ages. Very claustrophobic for a young person. Luckily I got to leave home for University when I was 18 so I could do all my disreputable stuff far from home and maintain the squeaky clean good two-shoes image for the limited periods I was at home! I swear if anyone had a bit too much sweet cider after a village hall dance and told the caretaker to F-off the village elders would still be shaking their head over it years later and declaring "She is no better than she ought to be!"

I lived in a big city as a student and loved it. The contrast to where I grew up was brilliant.

However, for the last 30 odd years I have lived in a smallish town, about 50,000. I wouldn't say everybody knows everybody else but I do feel that I know enough people from various contexts to feel part of the community. DD grew up here and still has many friends. No doubt she will move away one day (when she can afford a place of her own) but it's not bad

My dad grew up in a small rural area.

he said that soon after he got his first car he was speeding down the High street. But no matter how fast he had been going his mum had already been told about it by the time he got home.

Has anyone made the mistake of joining the ‘local Facebook discussion’ group? I’d be sat at home scrolling through my newsfeed in the middle of the day and hear sirens outside, within minutes there would be posts popping up ‘can anyone hear those sirens? Where are they coming from??!’ With loads of people replying 😂 soon unfollowed

"Elsewhere" made me smile Kilcaple. The equivalent here is "Away". People are either local or "From Away". As far as I can ascertain "Away" begins shortly before the county boundary and incorporates the rest of the Universe. If there was an alien invasion I think the talk in our village pub would be about " those green fellas from Away" - there don't seem to be many degrees of away-ness.