About Us
London2Country was started by husband and wife partnership Michael and Susan who moved from London to find a better life for themselves and their family in the country and who have now established a finely tuned group of insightful people who have all made the magic move from London to the beautiful English countryside. Here at London2Country we work hand in hand with a small number of specialist property finders throughout the Home Counties and beyond, able to fully apply our findings and reveal the very best country re-location choices for their clients.
A PERSONAL STORY
"It was one of those grey skied, muggy London days, October I believe, and I was on my way home from work in EC1, trudging up City Road towards Angel, where I lived with my wife Susan and our two young children aged 2 and 4. We had a reasonably expensive 4 storey Georgian town house. One of the fairly grand, flat-fronted, tall but narrow dwellings commonly located in the more desirable central London postcodes such as N1.
As I walked the 15 minute journey up City Road, I was very aware of the stench of diesel fumes that had suddenly engulfed me. I walked quicker in the vain attempt to shake off the toxic pall that had completely surrounded me. It was in now in my lungs and no matter how hard I tried to escape it, that low lying cloud of pollution stayed with me all the way home. It was during that arduous and deeply unpleasant pollution laden walk I pretty much came to the conclusion 'enough was enough’. I could no longer live with the thought of my young children having to grow up breathing in toxic air. I craved fresh air and wanted the same for my family - and lots of it!
Susan and I had been considering moving out of London for a couple of years. Surrey was familiar to us, my wife`s family living in classic green belt, and I knew Sussex well from youthful visits to Brighton as well as other counties visited for golfing breaks, friends weddings and weekend escapes.
We had spent many hours drooling over an increasing pile of glossy estate agent packs. The delights on display were wonderful character filled houses in beautiful rural settings; with big gardens and swimming pools and stables and tennis courts and local village schools and local village pubs and wisteria......all for the price that our tall narrow Islington town house with its claustrophobic 40 foot long, fifteen foot wide patio could achieve.
We embarked upon fortnightly and even weekly visits to rural areas in all directions, spending an endless number of hours travelling to and fro, either dropping the little ones off with family or dragging them around with us. We looked at lots of houses, it was a punishing schedule with only copious note taking preventing houses and villages becoming something of a blur. Many homes we of course fell deeply in love with. Then many further hours were spent checking out details on the local schools. If we had stayed in London we would have undoubtedly had to send our children to private schools (which would have cost a small fortune!), Islington schools at that time having an inadequate reputation. The idea of free, friendly, local village school education appealed greatly! I would have to commute daily back to my London office so train services, nearest stations, length of commute back to London, car parking, all had to be seriously considered and again were extremely time consuming to research. We didn’t know anyone nor did we have any family in the areas we liked the look of. No one was there to confide in or ask any questions relating to the myriad of things we really would have liked to have known or to reassure us that we were making the right decision or warn us of any potential pit falls.
After two years of looking in all directions, we ventured back to rural Kent where we had spent a romantic weekend before children had come and made life more complicated/rewarding. A little under three years from first considering moving out of London to the country and about 9 months after my long disturbing walk up City Road, we finally moved out to rural Kent. We bought a magical 6oo year old medieval hall house set within an acre and a half of land, including a three hundred year old orchard with an ornamental pond with newts and dragon flies and an ancient detached barn, up the front of which grew a glorious spread of wisteria.
That was all about ten years ago. I`m pleased to announce that I now have three very happy children all able to breathe the purest air that Kent can allow. One is at Grammar school, one at prep school and the littlest is at one of our local Church of England primary schools.
I still commute, I play golf when I`m not playing with the children, gardening or sampling the locally grown culinary delights at our village gastro pub!"