By most people’s standards Charles Allen’s London life was a huge success. He had a glamorous job with a “generous six figure salary”, he owned a cool apartment in Holborn, he had travelled widely, and his sons were raised and building their own lives.
But something wasn’t quite right. While Allen enjoyed all the trappings of success, money could not buy what he really wanted: purpose.
So, during the pandemic, he left his “amazingly fun” job as head of marketing at Arsenal Football Club, switched his Zone 1 flat for a run-down former Post Office set in a small Suffolk village, and leveraged his almost-fluent Spanish to begin a new career as a school teacher.
“People don’t really need another replica shirt,” he says. “I thought I could find real purpose in inspiring and motivating kids.”
Right at the start of the pandemic Allen left Arsenal to take a short-term role with the disability charity Scope.
With time to think about his future he realised that what he had most enjoyed at Arsenal had been mentoring younger colleagues. He figured he could get the same satisfaction teaching teenagers a foreign language.
Allen, who is divorced, had learned Spanish as a child whilst living in Mexico with his parents, and gone on to take a Spanish degree. Later he had spent years working in South America for a soft drinks company.
At about the same time as he was deciding on his career pivot some friends asked if he would like to join them out in Suffolk. “They said if I was kicking my heels in London during lockdown I would go mad, and I could come and bubble with them,” he says.
Allen agreed and began exploring the hidden-gem county. “I just happened to be driving through a village when I saw a For Sale sign outside a ramshackle house,” he says. “I thought: “Hmm”.
“It was a complete dooer upper, and I thought that this was a good time for me to have a big project. Parts of the house are 200 years old, and it was originally two houses, and it had also been a Post Office, so it needed a lot of work.”
In November 2020 he paid circa £550,000 for the four-bedroom house in the village of Alderton, which he shares with his dachshund Chorizo, and began navigating the process of entering teacher training.
He was guided by Now Teach (nowteach.org.uk), a charity which helps people move into teaching, and enrolled in a hands-on course combining academic studies at the University of East Anglia with work placements at two comprehensive secondary schools.
There, under the watchful eye of a mentor teacher, he went from nervously observing lessons to teaching pupils up to GCSE level. “It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life,” he says.
Allen, 60, who now works at a school in Ipswich, certainly didn’t go into teaching for the money – a newly-qualified teacher outside London earns a little under £33,000pa.
But the thrill of seeing pupils master a new skill is compensation enough for Allen, and there are other benefits too.
“The kids surprise, and delight – and annoy – you all the time,” he says. “One of the great things that I am finding is that at a time of life when the kids are gone and I might struggle for opportunities to connect to youthful energy I am suddenly plugged into youth culture in a way I never would be otherwise.”
Village life has also worked for Allen. “I have only ever lived in huge capital cities,” he says. “Now I live in a tiny village with 300 people and I love it. I have never been busier. I am more socially engaged than I have been for a long time.
“I live right next to the coast so I have taken up open water swimming, I have started playing squash again, I have a little art studio in the house.
“And Suffolk is only an hour and ten minutes from London – a lot of people who live in London commute for longer.
“I didn’t want to become so provincial that I only ever went up to London for a trip to the theatre, so I often go up after school to meet friends for dinner.”
