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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

.. to move to a village?

36 replies

MarvEll · 14/07/2021 07:36

We need to move as rental is coming to an end and have enough saved to buy. We currently live quite remotely outside a small town which has all the basics but isn't that nice. DH is very keen to move to a small town / village like how he grew up. Wants DC to walk to school, have local friends etc. This all sounds lovely and I am on board... Except I'm getting a bit nervous about neighbours, lack of space, limited village parking. We have a beautiful house we've put an offer on. Gorgeous house, private road, pretty central in the village - so also quite near the neighbours. Help convince me moving to a village is going to be all we're dreaming of!
YABU - Village life is the bomb, you're going to love it
YANBU - it's hell on earth, you're going to miss the rolling hills currently outside your door

OP posts:
DoorAjar · 14/07/2021 17:10

Think very carefully. I grew up in the countryside (not UK) and have lived all over the world in urban and rural environments, am confident, sociable and arrived with a small baby, a predisposition to like the place and a will to get involved, but the only place I have been entirely miserable was a large, pretty, prosperous Midlands village.

Despite volunteering, attending baby groups, going to the pub, using local businesses, getting involved in local events, having a child in nursery and later the village school, and working locally (as did DH), I have never met people who were so utterly insular.

I concluded after a while that if the majority of a population have never left the locality, and have always known one another, living surrounded by family and people they have known since childhood and marrying among them, they simply never acquire the normal skills the rest of us develop in how to behave around people you don't know.

It wasn't even that they weren't open to making new friends which obviously was their right it was that they'd never had to think of themselves and their environment as not always already utterly familiar to everyone they encountered. It was simply too much trouble to them to have to get their head around someone who hadn't always known them, or who had come from somewhere else.

I did try for seven years, getting involved in stuff and having people over, and then gave up and moved away. I have a rather lovely watercolour of the extremely pretty main village street that I bought from the local art circle's annual exhibition because it's the only place DS remembers living, and obviously it's important for him to remember it and every time I see it on the wall, I remember how miserable an experience living there was.

DoorAjar · 14/07/2021 17:14

@Snog

Regarding finding friends locally, it's much harder to find your tribe from a small pool of people. Especially if your interests or politics aren't mainstream.
Yes, but remember that what you may consider 'mainstream' may not be considered that way in your new environment. I don't see my politics as any kind of alternative lifestyle choice, but when I first moved to the village and ordered a newspaper delivery, the (extremely nice) postmaster looked at me and said, deadpan, 'If you like, I can introduce you to the only other person in the village who reads the Guardian.' Grin
lactofree · 14/07/2021 17:15

I grew up in a village, really liked it however it isn't now the same village

Back then everybody knew each other but now after a lot of house building in the last twenty years it feels like a small town full of strangers

Every village is different though

Snog · 14/07/2021 22:16

@DoorAjar I read the guardian myself but it's not mainstream.

Daily Mail is mainstream.

Check the circulation figures here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ListoffnewspapersinntheUniteddKingdombyycirculation

DdraigGoch · 14/07/2021 22:34

Best way to find out what your village is like is to go there. Have a wander around at different times of day and night. Is it quiet? Are parking spaces available on a weekend?

Ask a few people what village life is like locally, too.

JellyBabiesFan · 14/07/2021 22:37

Also a majority of the other residents were right wing, Tory voting daily Mail readers, so it was difficult to find my tribe

Sounds awesome.

Redhound · 14/07/2021 22:41

I moved to the very edge of a small village/hamlet, best of both worlds; peace, space and fields but a friendly community for events and support if needed.

SarahAndQuack · 14/07/2021 23:00

I'm not sure if I'm understanding what's the most important bit of your question. If I understand you rightly, you're saying you are currently very isolated/rural, so the move to a village would be a move into a community, but you're also concerned about the smallness of a village community as compared to the local town/other places you've lived?

I can't answer the first bit, as the hamlet I live in is the most rural place I've ever lived. I know people who've moved here from somewhere more isolated, who find it smothering how quickly gossip spreads and how much people want to be involved in your life.

Otherwise, though: what's the deal with limited parking? That sounds really dubious. If there's not proper parking, what on earth is the point of being out of town? We viewed a house in a large village recently that had no parking - it was a full 100k less than other similar houses with easy parking. Are they planning to develop nearby?

I mention that because, where I live, there's a lot of building work going on in what used to be sleepy little villages, which are rapidly becoming suburbs of the local city. The town next to me was once a large village with a few shops - pub, post office, butchers, etc. It's served by a one-way bridge over the river, controlled by traffic lights. All very quaint, until someone got planning permission to built a large estate on the edge, and then another beyond that.

I would be really cautious about buying in a village that was about to expand massively, unless you see advantages for yourself in that expansion.

DoorAjar · 14/07/2021 23:09

[quote Snog]@DoorAjar I read the guardian myself but it's not mainstream.

Daily Mail is mainstream.

Check the circulation figures here:

[[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List]]offnewspapersinntheUniteddKingdombyycirculation

[/quote]
But it’s a mainstream daily newspaper, even if it’s circulation is smaller than the DM — it’s not as though it’s some niche hobby paper for Methodist Goths who like caravanning.

AdoptedBumpkin · 14/07/2021 23:12

it’s not as though it’s some niche hobby paper for Methodist Goths who like caravanning.

Quote of the day Grin

SarahAndQuack · 14/07/2021 23:21

There's a fair point about Daily Mail readership though.

I live in a very small village (a hamlet), where I think we are the only non-Tory voters. Everyone is very kind, but our Tory-voting neighbours were shocked and surprised to find we couldn't get married in the local church (it's C of E; we're lesbians), and truly didn't believe that was the case. I expect if we had happened to be black, or disabled, or whatever else, they would have been politely shocked at racism or disablism, too.

It really is a particular kind of problem when you move somewhere where people's main response to discrimination is to be shocked and upset at the idea, and yet where their voting habits/media consumption lead them to presume everything is already ok and no one needs to complain.

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