Partner and I are going to move out of our London flat as we want more space / garden for the toddler and baby.
I’m desperate to use this as a way to leave London and head for a smaller city, think: a Cathedral city so somewhere with culture, history and an identity - basically York or Norwich, but probably York. Somewhere we can get a slightly bigger cheaper house, have a calmer pace of life, make new friends, grow our own veg and not raise children who may be entitled London brats.
Reasons being I find London life annoying is I’ve been here 13 years and it’s increasingly fast paced, crowded, polluted and competitive. Don’t like being so far away from the countryside, living in the same city as friends but it taking an hour and a half to get to them because it’s so bloody big, no real sense of community, the general feeling of stress and busyness that seems to scent the London air.
Partner is not keen to leave, at least not now and gives very sensible reasons. We’d have to find new jobs / retrain as we both have London centric careers and while we do want to retrain now is probably too soon. We don’t have friends of family outside London in the places we’d like to move and raising young kids with no friends or family close by (which would be the case if we moved) is bloody hard. Other places may be less open / accepting of people who don’t 100% fit the straight, white, Christian mould.
I know in my heart that partner is right, and if they also wanted to leave I’d be voicing some of their reasons for staying. But I still get a horrible pang of longing whenever we leave London, or conversely view a house In London that costs double what a bigger house would cost elsewhere.
Help! Convince me that London is worth staying in and that the dream life doesn’t lie in York