Richard and Eleanor with children Jack and Isabel
(Picture: Handout)When Eleanor Davies’ fiancée was made redundant less than two weeks before their wedding she saw it as a blessing rather than a crisis.
She and Richard had already been discussing the possibility of selling their flat in Streatham Hill and moving out of London. The job loss was exactly the push they needed to get on with it.
“We had already actively been looking for areas to live in, even before the wedding,” said Eleanor, who is now 42. “There was no chance for us in Streatham Hill, and we had looked further out, in Epsom and Ewell, and we quickly realised that to buy a house we would both have to work.
“If we were lucky enough to have a family that would mean we would be spending a significant amount of time traveling back and forward to London, and a significant amount of our income would be spent on childcare.
“If we moved further out it would mean I could take a year for maternity leave, and then work part time and that seemed a much better option for us.”
Once they were home from honeymoon Richard, an accountant who had been working for a mobile phone company, began job hunting.
He rapidly found work with another telecoms firm in Bristol. Location-wise this was perfect. The couple’s 2016 wedding had been in Somerset, close to where Eleanor’s parents live, and they had fallen in love with the area during regular pre-wedding visits.
In 2017, by which time Eleanor was pregnant, the couple sold their flat for circa £340,000. She quit her job working in people engagement with a major retailer. And in May 2017 she and Richard, 45, and their first child, Jack, moved into a £600,000 modern five-bedroom detached family house in Nailsea, eight miles south west of Bristol.
Jack is now five years old and thriving at primary school, and the couple also have a daughter, Isabel, two. Eleanor works part time as a store manager.
The couple still miss their London friends and have found making new ones in Nailsea much slower going than when they were younger and child-free and enjoying London’s after-work drinks culture.
The friends they have made have been through joining local sports teams, and on the toddler group circuit.
“Our lives have changed completely since we moved but so have our priorities,” said Eleanor. “The trade off is that now we can cycle a lot, we can walk into town, we can go into Bristol, the coast at Clevedon is only 15 minutes away. It also means that the children have been able to spend a lot more time with their grandparents than they would have if we were in London and that is a real blessing.”
