‘Londoners searching for more space during Covid are buying up English country manors,’ said a Wall Street Journal headline in January — and that was certainly the trend reported by eager out-of-town estate agents. The middle classes,spurred by a temporary stamp-duty cut, were deserting the city in search of green pastures, home offices and the safety of low rural infection rates. Except for me, that is. I was going the other way, swapping my ‘country manor’ for a flat that’s as compact as it is uncompromisingly urban in the historic enclave of Seven Dials.
Why? You might well ask — or if you happened to have seen the full-page Yorkshire Post feature on the elegant Grade II Regency house ‘with one of the best settings in North Yorkshire’ where I had lived happily for the past 32 years, ‘What on earth possessed you?’
The answer, of course, is that you just know when it’s time to move.
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