Gemma, Ben and their three children in York
(Picture: ES composite)When Gemma Sutton arrived in London she was intending to spend a few years having some fun in the big city before returning to her native New Zealand.
But a few chance decisions have torn those plans into a thousand pieces. A last minute invitation to spend a weekend in York with friends, and a Tinder match when she got there, has propelled her onto a completely different path.
Gemma, now 34, arrived in London in 2014. Her sister had arrived before her and Gemma moved into the box room in her rented Islington flat, paying £850pcm.
“My original intention was to have an overseas experience, and at first I loved being in London, spending time with my sister, getting to know the place,” she said.
In 2016 a group of friends invited Gemma to join them on a trip to York on the May Bank Holiday. Even though she had barely heard of it she said yes.
While there she was scrolling through Tinder when she saw a profile she liked and swiped right. Ben, now 40, was a head teacher at a local school and he did the same.
“Even though the first thing he said was that he didn’t want a long distance relationship that was it really,” said Gemma.
A year later Gemma moved to York where Ben owned a two bedroom flat a couple of miles south west of the city centre.
“All the things I had loved about London when I first moved there – the anonymity, the freedom - I had started to hate,” she said. “It was the absolute hustle of the place. People had lost sight of the humanity of other people. I was craving connection. When I went up north the first thing I noticed was that the cashiers in the supermarket all had the time to have a chat with you.”
In 2018 Gemma and Ben got married in New Zealand, and in 2019 had a daughter, Sullivan, now three.
The same year they put the flat onto the market and bought their first family home: a four bedroom 1930s semi in Rawcliffe, north west York.
It cost £285,000 and their monthly mortgage repayments come in at around £1,000pcm, only slightly more than Gemma’s box room in Islington used to cost her.
The city centre is a half-hour walk away and the family – Gemma and Ben also have four month old twins, Miller and Scout – are also close to the Yorkshire Dales and the North Yorkshire coast.
Before the twins were born Gemma was deputy head teacher of a local school, and she has been able to make plenty of local friends through work, her National Childbirth Trust classes, and by joining local clubs, learning everything from Yoga to Irish dancing in the process.
“I feel very lucky that I was able to live in London, there is nowhere really like it, but for at the stage I’m at now I prefer to be in York,” she said. “It is a beautiful city and I love having a home with so much space – people in New Zealand are very hospitable, and I love being able to invite people round and for it to be really relaxed.”
