I’ve recently changed roles at work and now work from home full time. I’m currently living in the expensive south east, in north west Hampshire on the Surrey border. I’d like to find some-place with a lower cost of living with an eye to taking early retirement in 5 years or so. Can the UK teeming millions offer some suggestions on where to live? I’ve got a shopping list of what the location must/should have.
Must have:
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Reliable high speed broadband. I VPN into a network in Canada all day, I can’t have a slow or dodgy connection.
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Vodafone mobile coverage. This is the network the company currently uses.
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It should be not too big or too small. Small enough to be quiet but big enough to have local amenities. Things I’d like are:
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Local butcher sourcing from local farmers.
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Green grocer
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Pubs. Actually, pubs should be on the must have list. My dream village would have 3. One would be a quiet real ale pub, one a sports pub with Sky, and one a foodie pub.
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It should have a couple restaurant/take away places.
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A weekly market would be nice.
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4G coverage on EE would be nice.
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Does anyone know of places like this? Also, to add some interest to this thread, what would your dream city/town/village be like?
I can recommend Aberdeen and NE Scotland. Many of the houses here have 10 foot ceilings, which I think you’ll particularly like. Houses aren’t particularly cheap close in to central Aberdeen, though.
Aberdeen is significantly more expensive than his current location according to CLI data.
In fact Aberdeenshire generally is bloody expensive, due to the oil industry.
I would suggest one of the smaller towns either near the borders (cheap, great walking/mountain biking/handy access to big cities) or in the Highlands (awesome people, great scenery of all types, and proper remoteness if that’s your thing) but you’d need to make sure it was one of the towns sorted for bandwidth.
Saying you’d like pubs is like saying you want it to have air- I’m pretty sure that’s just a given.
I don’t know much about where the high-speed internet is at the moment, other than to know that rules out where my parents live in Cumbria. My mother has been known to drive home (about a mile and a half) to look up an address, because it’s faster than finding and opening an email on their computer. That is partly their computer, partly simply computer ineptitude, but the network speed is seriously s l o w.
Not sure on the broadband connectivity, but a few that spring to mind:
Honiton, a small and quite beautiful town in Devon, close to Exeter and with good road and rail links to London.
Hebden Bridge a small town close to the Yorkshire moors and only a few miles from Halifax and not too far from Leeds. Thou’ll get proper ale oop there, lad…
Hitchin An historic market town in Hertfordshire. Lovely laid back atmosphere and a couple (at least) of good Real Ale pubs.
Well I come originally from the relatively cheap north-east of England and have been down in the far south-east for 16 years now. (Sandwich, Kent)
Benefits?
Pubs, lots of nice places to eat, fibre-optic broadband (I think we have 80meg speed or something ridiculous), decent phone signal, 90 min train to London, seaside, plenty of places to cycle and walk, lots of countryside generally (outside of the Thanet area is isn’t that built-up at all), great seasonal fresh fruit, veg and fish, much warmer weather than back up the north-east. 30 minutes to the Channel tunnel. (and 4hrs drive from Calais to Amsterdam, 1 hour to Bruges, 3hrs to Paris) House prices are not ridiculous either.
Downsides?
To get to anywhere else in the UK you can’t avoid the M25. the decent airports are at least 90minutes away. No mountains or lakes (but the easy access to Europe goes someway to offsetting that). It is hardly a hotbed of industry over here either but if semi-retirement is your thing then that isn’t really an issue. I’m looking myself at semi-retiring in 5 years or so and just picking up an odd consulting contract here or there and when I do I’ll staying in this area just because it is a nice way of life over here.
So that’s my (obviously one-sided) opinion for what it’s worth.
Thanks mascaroni, I’ll give those a look. I’ve been through Hebden Bridge on the train, nice countryside around there. I am sort of leaning towards Yorkshire. We were in Skipton last year for the Tour de France and thought it was lovely despite the 15,000 tourists crammed into it that day.
There’s life outside the pub? I do like walking and mountain biking, but nothing too extreme.
If I really look at it objectively I’ve got everything on my list right here, it’s the cost and the noise that puts me off. The average price of a pint in my local is £3.50. Even pubs in central Manchester are cheaper than that. My house is paid for so the idea of being able to get something for half the price and topping up the pension pot is appealing. And there’s a constant hum of noise here. I’m only a couple hundred yards from a busy dual carriage way, about 2 miles from the M3, 100 yards from a rail line, directly under the flight path and a mile from the runway at Farnborough airport, and under the path of planes from Heathrow to North America.
My dream village would be in the Lake District, following a minor nuclear accident at Sellafield that decimated the tourist industry, but that none of the locals were arsed about.
There’s so many beautiful places to look at in the UK if you’ve got the funds and flexibility to move. Really comes down to whether you want to feel a little bit of the urban sphere of influence - be a bit connected into that even if it just means having transport links like an airport not too far away or a convenient railway station.
If you’re thinking about moving for retirement - early or otherwise - you should be thinking about how you will cope when you are over 70. If you have children the obvious answer is to move near them, but if you don’t, it takes time to build up local friendships and social support structures, and I would suggest that older people are better off in towns and not in villages, and that moves before then should take that into account.
I think living far from a major settlement would be something of a bore, along with the lack of amenities.
So I suggest somewhere like a market town, usually plenty of pubs, and all the rest and a reasonable social life since these market towns attract folk from the surrounding area.
With use of broadband, there is also the possibility of a career at home, if you have the necessary skills.
I’ll go for one little place, Wetherby on the edge of West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. Both Leeds and York are within reasonable travel time for special shopping events.I would probably not bother with Leeds itself, but York could be an option
You could go for any one of those market towns that are in the A1 corridor, so Ripon, Northallerton, Thirsk, Bedale, Richmond all fit this bill. Some of them also give you rail options
Further north then Durham is well worth looking at - most Southerners are surprised at it.
You might also try Yarm, Leyburn, Otley. Barnard Castle I find these are nice enough for a few days but to live long term - each has some issue that is insignificant for a short while but longer terms, tourist traffic, winter isolation, limited potential for travel to elsewhere.
Ah! my home town. I guess the fact that I don’t long to retire there tells my particular story. It is a nice enough town and the dales and hills beyond are lovely but I confess the weather tends to get me down when I go back to visit family.
I found this broadband map from Ofcom with data from 2013. It looks like Wales is out as well as the remoter parts of Scotland. I’ve put a few of the suggested places in zoopla.co.uk and the prices aren’t as cheap as I’d hoped.
I think Leicester is still cheap, from memory it has the lowest average salary in England. Birmingham is another cheap place, although prices are apparently rising because of HS2. You get a decent pint in Brum for £2 and a fantastic pint for £2.50. Nice people, too, pretty southern in their outlook. Nottingham and Boston might also be options. A village close by to any of those cities might meet your criteria.
Hebden Bridge is quite posh and expensive, as is Skipton, but both are very pleasant places to visit. Hafilax and Bratfort (in the local dialect) are cheap, but maybe not to your taste. Also the weather is quite unlike that in the SE.
I’d say not to look too far north, if you’ve not lived oop thar before. Yorkshire, especially t’locals, can be a bit suspicious of those from t’Big Smoke.
Sorry, I did not pay close enough attention, as all the places I listed are pretty pricey to live.
You might try somewhere in South Yorkshire, but you have to go there and pick your spot, its dead easy to fond somewhere that looks ok , but half a mile down the road its not so good.
You could zero in somewhere that is not as well known, you could try Methley, its plenty cheap enough area to live and close to Leeds. Its also not a bad area to cycle from - IIRC you do ride, or perhaps you no longer do that any more.
You need to consider what price housing you can afford, the prices are so variable around the country that what you call cheap might be quite a lot in some areas.
Perhaps you could give us some sort of boundary on housing costs, and also what sort of house would you be looking for?
