‘lescaped to the country... six months in I'm racing back to London'

At a crossroads in life, Harriet Minter quit the capital with her dog, Blue - but her rural retreat came with its own set of problems, she tells Ruth Bloomfield

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Almost 70,000 households moved out of London last year and Harriet Minter was one of them. Six months later Harriet is on her way back home, with a cautionary tale about the realities of moving to a charming historic cottage in a delightful market town - particularly if you are doing so with only an over-anxious rescue dog for company.

Like so many of us, Minter began seriously thinking about moving out during the pandemic. She had split up with her boyfriend, turned 40 and felt at a crossroads. "It was a strange time, London felt really dead - I couldn't get anyone to go out any more and I actually felt a bit lonely," she says.

Back then Minter was living in a one-bedroom flat in Fulham, which she had bought in 2017, and she realised she could rent it out and use the money to rent a place in the country. "I did a lot of scrolling through house porn every night, because I didn't really know where I wanted to be apart from it needed to be commutable, and ideally somewhere I knew someone," she says.

Eventually, she settled on Petworth, West Sussex, because a friend had moved there and was raving about it.

Trains to London from Pulborough, four miles away, take an hour and 20 minutes but Minter wasn't too concerned she was already working from home, as a journalist and broadcaster, so getting to an office wasn't a massive issue.

The deal was sealed when Minter, now 42, found a gorgeous Grade-listed cottage in a village just outside Petworth. "It looked exactly like the cottage in The Holiday, and that was it," she says. She and Blue, a Staffordshire terrier, set off on their rom-com-inspired adventure in June.