A MILLENNIAL MALAISE: FLEEING THE CITY FOR GOOD?

"Look at this house", my husband said from his laptop, ten weeks into lockdown. We had been vaguely thinking about moving before March, scouting out areas near Kentish Town and Dalston, from where we could easily travel to our Central London workplaces, and visit our London-based families and friends, and eat at the London restaurants which we respectively run and write about.
"It's called The Old Farmhouse and it's perfect. It's got five bedrooms, Grade II listed. Amazing kitchen. And it has a fruit garden. And a vegetable plot. And a barn!"
"Right", I said. "Where is it?"
"The Lake District."
"Amazing. Let's get it."

Haha, good one- except... After two months of lockdown in a flat without outdoor space, breaking up with London and moving to the countryside seemed like less of a joke. And others were already deadly serious. In the first week of May, the number of searches for homes in rural locations on Zoopla was up 68% compared with the first week of March, with parts of Devon, Monmouthshire and Surrey showing the biggest increases. According to estate agent Savills, by May almost four in 10 people considering a house move were now more inclined to pick a countryside location than they were before Covid-19 struck. Houses in Cornwall were being snapped up sight unseen. Could we, should we..?

It's not just forty-somethings with school age kids thinking of moving out either. For millennials, the city suddenly doesn’t glitter half as brightly. Even pre-coronavirus, the average age of someone relocating from a city had been falling, from 47 in 2008 to 37 in 2018, according to Hamptons International. Might coronavirus kickstart a millennial mass migration outta London? As soon as estate agents reopened in mid-May, a 30 year old friend and her 38 year old fiance, who live in a two bed in W1, raced off to view houses in Suffolk, the Cotswolds, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, shown by an estate agent overrun with millennial urbanites desperate to buy outta-London properties. Phoebe, my extremely zeitgeisty editor at BURO, tells me that "my boyfriend and I talk about moving out of London ALL. THE. TIME. I have Right Move alerts on." Quick, I think. She might nab our Old Farmhouse. Should we just…?