Every Monday morning, Mickey Bruton, 48, drives from his home, on the edge of
Bodmin Moor, to Exeter, where he catches a fast train to London. A
consultant broker for Lloyds, he is at his desk by lunchtime, and he works
in the capital for the next three days, staying in a rented room in
Hammersmith.
At lunchtime on Thursday, he hops on a train back to Exeter, and is home by
early evening, where, bar a little work when necessary, he spends a
three-day weekend with his wife, Carey, and two children. They go for long
walks, head to the beach or simply relax at home.
Bruton is one of a new breed of British commuters: a busy executive not
prepared to sacrifice quality of life for a job. When he and his wife
decided to sell their house in Ravenscourt Park, west London, five years ago
and relocate to Cornwall, their decision was based on the standard of living
they would have outside the capital.
Even though the couple both travel for work (Carey is a consultant for
Christie’s auctioneers), they feel the hours and distances they have to put
in are a fair trade-off for the rural lifestyle they enjoy. After selling
their five-bed detached home in London for about £800,000, they bought a
six-bed manor house with five adjoining cottages and 25 acres — and had
£250,000 left over. “It's a very reasonable swap,” says Mickey.
The Brutons’ willingness to commute great distances to work reflects a
steadily growing trend. The latest figures from the Office of Rail
Regulation (ORR) show that the distance travelled in Britain by rail
passengers on season tickets reached 8 billion miles in 2005-06 — up from
4.9 billion a decade earlier. It follows research commissioned by the RAC
Foundation in 2003 that found the average UK commuter was travelling 2,906
miles a year, spending eight hours a week — or 47 working days a year —
commuting.
Even counties once considered holiday or weekend spots for Londoners are
becoming commuter destinations. The number of people travelling regularly
between Yorkshire and the Humber and London, for example, has risen 71.8%
since 1995-96, says the ORR; numbers travelling to and from the East
Midlands rose 73% in the same period, compared with a 45.9% rise in the
established southeastern commuter belt. Northamptonshire, Peterborough,
Hereford and Worcester have attracted London commuters as links have
improved.
“There was a time when the distance of commuting was to Chelmsford in Essex
and Haywards Heath in Sussex,” says James Laing, a partner at Strutt &
Parker. “That was in the 1950s and 1960s, and it has been steadily growing
ever since.”
Ninety minutes each way appears to be the maximum tolerable daily commute,
according to research on commuter trends by Savills from ORR statistics; any
longer, and numbers plummet. And depending on the speed of the rail line,
you can get a long way in an hour and a half: north to Doncaster, west to
Bath, a fair way east into Norfolk (around King’s Lynn), or south to much of
the coast.
For Rupert Sweeting, a partner in Knight Frank’s country house department, a
glance at train-station car parks says it all. Kingham station, in the
Cotswolds, about 90 minutes by train from London Paddington, has up to 100
cars parked there each weekday, he says. Twenty years ago, it was more like
10.
“There are certain trains you get on and see the difference immediately,” says
Sweeting, adding that the 5.30am train from Andover, northwest Hamp-shire,
to London Waterloo is full of “hedge-fund boys”.
“The line from Sevenoaks in Kent has a fabulous service,” says Jonathan
Haward, managing director of County Home-search, a property finding agency.
“And the Chilterns line has it made. When I travelled on it a couple of
weeks ago, I had a proper gin and tonic.”
The Savills research reveals some anomalies, though. Brock-enhurst, in the New
Forest, has a disproportionately large number of commuters, despite the 135
minutes it takes to get to Waterloo: some 53% of people passing through the
station each day are season-ticket holders. Pewsey, Wiltshire (70 minutes by
rail) and Battle, East Sussex (90 minutes on a difficult line) are also
popular.
So what is the appeal? It is simply that many are beautiful places to live.
The journey from Exeter to London Paddington, which takes two to three hours
at peak time, can be “an absolute nightmare”, says Haward, “with standing
room only on early and late trains — but people are happy to do it”.
It’s not just people who work in the capital who are willing to commute
greater distances. Peter Worlock, 53, and his wife, Amanda, 52, moved from
Oxfordshire to the Scottish Borders, 10 miles south of Berwick-upon-Tweed,
three years ago. Peter, an orthopaedic surgeon, works two days a week in
New-castle, a drive of about an hour. The rest of the time, he travels to
London and Oxford in his capacity as an expert witness. Getting to Oxford
takes five and a half hours; London even longer.
Worlock says he spends about 20 hours a fortnight driving, but the couple
believe the move was the best thing they have ever done. “It’s tranquil and
beautiful and it means we can afford slightly more,” says Amanda.
Why, in an ever-faster world, are people willing to spend more time getting to
work? Paradoxically, the increased speed of communications may be one of the
biggest contributing factors.
Faster internet connections, BlackBerrys, wireless broad-band and other such
technology means people can — and do — work easily from home. So they might
do four days at their desk and one at home, live further from the office and
enjoy the benefits of a more rural life. Meanwhile, GNER, for example,
offers WiFi on its trains so commuters can work on the trip.
Guy Lintott, 54, who owns a small commercial property company, has commuted to
work in London from his home near Blandford, Dorset, since 1995. He
originally made a five-and-a-half-hour round trip each day, though since
2000, he has worked flexible hours. One day is spent working from the
eight-bed house he and his wife built in 2001, and he travels regularly to
Leeds and Florence, where his business partner lives. “I love London, but
I’d rather be in the country,” he says.
Laing knows a surgeon at a London hospital who carries out a daytime shift on
a Monday, stays overnight, works a Tuesday early-morning shift and then
returns to his home 130 miles north that afternoon. “It enables him to live
in a nicer house, with land, where he keeps horses, in proper countryside,”
he says.
Phil Spencer, the Sunday Times columnist and a director at Garrington, another
property finder, says there is a constant pull between budget and distance
when people seek to move out of a city. “Most people can’t compromise their
budget,” he says, so they will travel further.
There is another compromise that has become increasingly relevant: that
between the needs of two working partners. Dagmar Kershaw, 39, has lived a
“dual life” since 1999, when she moved in with her now-husband.
He works in Cheshire, while Kershaw, head of structured credit products at M&G,
the investment management arm of Prudential, can only do her job in London.
So the couple bought a six-bed farmhouse just outside Alderley Edge in 2002.
Kershaw works four days a week in London and one day at home, flying between
Manches-ter and London City airport twice a week: a trip of about two and a
half hours door to door. Luckily, the service is regular, with about 10
flights a day each way, but occasionally, she says, the connections don’t
work as well as they should and it can be a nightmare. “I see the same faces
week in, week out on my flight. One man I asked says he takes the plane
virtually every day.”
Flying to work appears to be increasingly popular. “What staggers me when I
fly from Newquay to London in the summer first thing on a Monday morning,”
says Haward of County Home-search, “is how many expensive, polished 4x4s
there are arriving at Newquay airport to drop off husbands — and wives, too
— to fly to London.”
Want to get to work even faster? Have your own helicopter.
Sir Anthony Bamford, the chairman of the heavy equipment firm JCB, and his
wife use one to zip in and out of London from their Gloucestershire pile;
so, too, do at least six Isle of Man residents.
Yet quite apart from the envi-ronmental consequences — especially where
frequent air travel is concerned — there are other potential downsides to
long commutes. Time spent travelling is time spent away from families. And
while adults love to live the rural dream, their children — especially when
they reach their teenage years — may not, and can resent being uprooted from
friends and a busy urban life.
Don’t get overly carried away with the financial benefits, either. Travel
costs can be steep. A standard Folkestone-London annual season ticket (a
90-minute trip), for example, costs £3,180; first class, it’s £4,772 — and
that’s not counting the cost of Tube travel. As places farther and farther
away come within commuting distance, prices rise accordingly. A house within
15 minutes of a station and a good London line can carry at least a 5%
premium, says Sweeting.
Liam Bailey, head of research at agents Knight Frank, agrees that even though
London house prices are still soaring, the cost of property in prime
commuter spots is catching up. “In practice, this means that had you sold up
in London in 2001, when house prices there were 87% more expensive than the
UK average, and 20% more expensive than the southeast, you may well have
been able to afford that big country pile,” he says. “But now it’s a little
more difficult. If you had sold your three-bed house in Fulham in 2000 for
£500,000, you could have bought a rather nice five-bed house in the
Cotswolds for £450,000. Try the same thing today, and your Fulham terrace
will be worth £830,000, but unfortunately your dream house in the Cotswolds
is now worth £920,000.”
There is also a growing band of other so-called “backwards commuters” who work
outside London but choose to live in the capital, despite its high house
prices. Among them is James Baulf, 29, who lives in Fulham, southwest
London, but works as a management consultant in Windsor. “London is where my
friends and social life are,” he says. “I’d rather travel to work than
travel to enjoy myself.” And, with most people going the other way, he can
be sure the traffic won’t be too bad either.
