I left London for a blissful life in the country, but was so lonely I moved back to Soho

It's strange being back in Soho, three years after leaving central London for Somerset. I've returned bang into Broadwick Street, borrowing a flat around the corner from where I lived 10 years ago on Marshall Street, and beside William Blake House, where my dad had his flat in his eighties and I visited him as a teenager (as per my parents' custody arrangement).

- BY KATIE GLASS

Returning to Soho feels like a weird reversal of the way other people go back to their rural hometowns. I walk familiar streets finding memories of where I grew up: people I recognise, shops which still exist, remembering places I hid as a teenager to have a cheeky cigarette.

But what strikes me most is the realisation that Soho is more villagey than the actual village I moved to in Somerset.

Londoners leaving the Smoke for rural bliss carry a Famous Five vision of country life trapped in the 1940s; in which farmer's wives drop off fresh milk, the vicar pops by for tea, and everyone knows your name in the pub, like The Bull in Ambridge as featured in The Archers.

In reality, village life is dead. An Instagram couple bought the farm as a tax dodge, the vicar works remote across eight parishes, the local's a gastropub, the Post Office has shut, the church has been converted into an Airbnb.

There is so little infrastructure left in my closest conurbation, a post box is the only sign there is life. At night streets are black because so many cottages are second homes, probably belonging to Londoners.

Soho is a village archetype

By contrast, Soho thrums like a market town in a children's picture book; rich with life, locals and a sense of community missing in many rural places.