Moving out of London with older kids - are we mad?

[Grinstead]

We are seriously thinking of moving from a nice suburb of London full of families to a large market town which is still only an hour or less from London on train - we will get larger house, bigger garden etc and town has everything we need except cinema. My DCs are 12,10 and 7, I worry that we have left it too late to move and that will they hate me when they are a bit older for dragging them away from the bright lights - am I mad? At the moment they like the area of London that we live in but not London per se.

I know quite a few families who stripped the equity out of their London homes and moved out of London, renting out their London homes and buying a new home with the cash.

Depends where you live now. I live a naice west London suburb, good school, decent sized house, smallish garden but all lawn.

I wouldn't move out for all the tea in china, surrounded by greenery but 12 minutes on train into London. My kids are only little but we have a great social network, lots of clubs, etc. which we wouldn't get such a choice if we moved out.

If we moved out we could be mortgage free but are prepared to stay in the rat race as we have such a good quality of life (not in a material sense).

There really is life outside of London, you know. It sounds like you are the one getting cold field rather than DC.

The quality of life and safety for DC is so much better outside a city. You will be able to give them much more freedom as they go through teenage years too. Friendships are much easier to form and maintain outside of school, children find it easier to casually meet up than in a large city.

It does depend on the Market Town though.

*feet.

It is going to depend hugely on your DC. We are on the south coast by a market town and my DC are both quite quirky and never really fitted in here. DD in particular absolutely hates it here and I feel would have fared much better in Bristol where I grew up. She loves visiting us but is like a caged tiger after a couple of days.

We are moving closer to Bristol this month and she is so excited. I suspect she’ll come back from university a fair bit more. DS has found it difficult to find people like him and is very shy. Hard to say what he would have been like else where but I think he would have fared better else where. I’m hoping that university is a positive move for him.

Could you rent your London home out and rent in the market town too?

Zombie thread from 2015!

Though I wonder if @Grinstead and family moved or not and how it went

Yes...

Hi there!
What would be great cities/ town to move to from London with a 3years old? We’ve been living in London for 8 years but it’s getting too expensive and busy.
looking for some place with affordable( for buying later on) housing, nice schools and lots of green spaces. Our thoughts were Cardiff, maybe Glasgow (lack of summer puts us off). What other places you could suggest?
I’m a bit scared to move out of London because there are so many things going on - nice events for kids, museums, play spaces etc.
Thanks for your advice, thoughts.