Why I swapped my country pile for a tiny London pad

‘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. Lockdown fever affected us all in different ways, from drink or divorce to domestic contentment and frenzied creativity. In my case it made me want to accelerate a relocation plan that had long been in the back of my mind, to rediscover a grown-up version of the metropolitan life of my twenties, to be in the thick of it again, to embark in the second half of my sixties on a project privately labelled ‘15 More Years of Fun’.

How’s it going so far? Bloody marvellous, thank you. Yes, I’ve traded a classical view across my neighbour’s parkland towards his Ionic temple for a sideways glimpse of the Seven Dials monument and a single distant tree somewhere near Shaftesbury Avenue. And yes, I’ve downsized in square-footage by four-fifths, though I’ve found ways to cram most of my decent pictures and books into the flat.