Remote Countryside 2 Hours from London

[Queefqueef]

Ok I know that’s a bit of an oxymoron. But we are thinking of renting/buying somewhere rural that has access to London easily for work. We like the country (grew up in Northern Ireland) but hate ‘faux country’ aka stuff that’s within an hour of London, that’s just prim and manicured commuter land.

What's your budget and for what sort of property?

Countryside is no longer as cheap as some might think.

We moved to a village Suffolk 6 months ago after living in a commuter town. We aren’t particularly remote but we are surrounded by proper countryside. I travel to London once a week for work and get the train from Stowmarket on the mainline from Norwich which takes about an hour and 20 minutes.

Budget not huge, maybe 350-400k. Only need two bedrooms. Looking at trying out an area before we buy (and would continue renting in London)

Depends on what you are looking for, but Kent is “proper” countryside. So are the Fens. The British countryside in general is pretty manicured, it’s been intensively farmed for centuries.

If you want actual wilderness, you’d have to go out to somewhere like Bodmin, the Dales, or the Lake District. Better yet, Scotland.

We just don’t really have much wild countryside in the south east. There are still proper rural farming areas, but they have fields of cows and sheep not wildernesses.

Lots of parts of East Anglia would
fit the bill

Oxfordshire

France or Spain and fly. Assuming that you can get Irish passports

Lincolnshire is proper farming country and the train to Kings Cross from Newark takes 70 minutes.

The Vale of Belvoir between Nottingham and Grantham is beautiful , with lovely small villages. Train services between King's Cross and Grantham are.frequent and less than 2 hours.

(Belvoir is pronounced Beaver !)

Cotswolds? Direct trains to Paddington from Stroud and Kemble.

Yup, up towards Rutland, Lincs - that way. Great train link to London, A1 for driving, reasonable house prices, plenty of open fields.

Romney Marsh
Suffolk/Norfolk.

This is really insightful and such a good answer imo!

Lincolnshire or Rutland. More for your money than Suffolk. The Lincolnshire Wolds are very underrated and beautiful. Trains would be Grantham, Newark or Doncaster.

Much of Wiltshire would fit the bill - the villages surrounding places like Devizes, Trowbridge, Calne, Chippenham feel very rural and 'proper' countryside - quiet, pleasant scenery, rolling hills, whitehorses on the hills and not too many 'down from Londons' and Chippenham to Paddington is a fast line for your commute or there is a slower line to Waterloo from places like Trowbridge/Bradford/Warminster. Be prepared to rely much more on your car for travel and to have to go to places like Bath and Bristol for city refinements!

Suffolk would fit the bill, and as well as “proper” countryside you’d also have the marshes which feel genuinely wild and remote (despite actually being managed) and the coast (some of which is not at all wild eg Southwold but go a few miles north and you can have a beach to yourself even in summer, just you and the seals and sand martins).

The Home Counties are where you’ll find most of the “faux” countryside- acre after acre of pony paddocks etc- albeit that plenty of proper country people also live there.

Rural Essex or Suffolk.

I see I am not the only person to think East Midlands. The line from Grantham is fast and gives you access to the Lincolnshire Wolds to the East and Rutland / rural Leicestershire / Vale of Belvoir to the West. We used to live near Melton Mowbray and it's definitely rural but you could get pretty much anywhere in 2-3 hours. Depending on where you are, trains on the Nottingham/Leics line are also decent but not as fast as Grantham.
Grantham and Peterborough as towns are a bit shit, but then you have Stamford/Oakham to compensate. There are lots of beautiful villages and very few tourists (except at Rutland Water). I sometimes think of it as the "undiscovered Cotswolds".

Yes I think you need to aim for the less immediately trendy parts with your budget- some really nice rural areas are in lesser known parts such as Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, parts of Bedfordshire and East Anglia (though not the coast probably which is beautiful but really expensive and probably more than 2 hours away).

You can find little pockets of ‘wild’ in almost any part of the country. But they will be little. I fly for a living, and it’s always a surprising thing just how rural Britain looks from the air as soon as you set foot outside the M25. I also take part in a couple of adventure sports, and am always looking at places from the pov of ‘ooh, this place would be great for that sort of competition.’

I could list places but that wouldn’t help you - if you need to be in London for work your ‘2 hrs away’ is going to be very different depending on the nature of your commute. I work at Heathrow, and live in a very wild (but little) place about 40 mins drive along the motorway. But I also sometimes have to go to Gatwick and that takes nearly 2 hrs. DH sometimes works in Greenwich, for that you have to allow 3 hrs no matter whether you drive or take public transport (it can be done in less but only if all the stars align!) DH can get to Paddington from ours in only 35 mins though.

If I were you I would make the bit of London you want to be within 2 hrs of your staring point then find the furthest places you can make the journey from in 2 hrs, and make that your search area. Within that you will find lots of wild. Within my circle of one hour from Heathrow, for example, would be Bracknell Forest, parts of the South Downs, Lambourn and Marlborough Downs, Surrey Hills, even the edge of Salisbury Plain. I could take you, as an adventure racer, and get you lost in any number of those places! (I got a bunch of competitors lost in deep forest only 30 miles from London earlier this year in a place they thought was a bit tame till they got there!)

There are beautiful places, but you have to keep your ideas small (we do, after all, live on quite a small island) as if you wanted endless miles of wilderness you really would need to be looking much further north. Even Dartmoor looks very small when you fly over it compared to the endless forests of France and Germany. (Although flying over eg Belgium you wonder where they’ve put their countryside!)

I know you are looking for ‘remote’ and rural, but it is worth bearing in mind that by moving yourself you will add one more tiny change to an area. Where I live we had a fabulous rural pub. It had 2 rooms, one for locals (where, as an incomer, I would not dream of sitting) and the other for incomers, walkers, cyclists, riders. When the old landlord retired it was bought by a TV chef and transformed into a remote gastropub within 2hrs of London, marketing itself as the sort of non-manicured place you could eat wild game. It’s not a village pub any more, it’s become a pastiche, exactly the sort of place London people come to because they think it’s not one of those other manicured places. I’m probably not explaining it very well. But if you want to be somewhere remote but commutable to the Big Smoke, it will already be full of commuters.

Taunton, Somerset is only 1h 47m to Paddington. Try countryside around there.

We're in rural Hampshire - only just over an hour into London by train but definitely the 'proper' countryside. Parts of West Sussex would also fit the bill.

Hampshire. Outskirts of Andover - not the best town but some glorious countryside!

Look at the line between Cambridge and Kings Lynn, that's a pretty fast line into London...

But it goes without saying it depends where in London you need to be. The East Anglia line go into Kings Cross/St Pancras which is pretty useless if you then need to spend an hour trecking across London

I live in the Weald of Kent. There are nearby roads with grass running down the middle if that fits the bill. It’s what I’d call cosy countryside, it’s very hospitable in its landscape, about the opposite to the wilderness of the Lakes. If you want to feel even further out East Sussex fits the bill as it’s far less commutable, but it’s pricey.

Romney Marsh has a very faraway bleak but beautiful feel about it, very under populated for the SE.

Kent is pretty undiscovered apart from the usual seaside hotspots really, most people travel to the continent through it and think that’s it, but parts are very rural.