As a cynical 17-year-old growing up in the suburbs you spend all your time waiting to leave. To go somewhere more exciting, somewhere full of life rather than – what seemed to me – a neverending routine of commuting, complaining, and running errands. Dry cleaners, Sainsbury’s big shop, retail park TGI Fridays. Ad infinitum. Why would anyone choose to live here?
Then, you get older and go through a humbling process of learning that everything you thought you knew was wrong, and start to see the web of reasons that adults make the decisions they do. Sometimes those reasons are deep and complex – romance, career, illness, grief – and sometimes you just really want to get a mortgage and can’t afford one in the city you love.
We’d rented the same flat in north London for four years, and before that a handful of different places all over the city, moving every 12 months when the tenancy ended. Some rents were affordable, but increasingly less so – £1,800 for a flat so small we had nowhere to put a clothes horse and mice that scaled the curtains at night – and by 2022 we were ready to say goodbye (analysis by estate agents Hamptons found 76k Londoners would leave in 2024).
When we started our relocation search, resistant to the gravitational pull of suburbia, we initially looked at Brighton and Bristol. But our money barely stretched further than the capital. If we were going to uproot we should at least make it worth our while.
That is, in a nutshell, how we came to be fully-fledged Essex suburbanites. Now we are owners of a two-bedroom Victorian terrace house in a regional town of 25,000 people, with a garden, puppy, and white picket fence, which is a little on the nose but nice all the same. The reason for moving here was fairly simple: money made it hard to stay inside the M25.
When you make such a move to the hinterlands of suburbia there is a pre-programmed set of questions that everyone asks: Do you still have to go to the office? (Yes). How long does that take (90 minutes, not five days a week). Was your house a bargain? (Sadly, no, good luck finding one of those in 2025). Do you know my friend who lives in Margate? (Wrong county). And: when are you going to have a baby? I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been asked that in the past 24 months.
Having bought a house in the suburbs, as well as signing up for 31 years of mortgage (lovely…) I wish I’d known that we’d unwittingly signed up for the package marked “baby chapter”. We might as well have hung a muslin above the front door and subscribed to Disney+ on the spot. The subtext seemingly being that if you move out of the city, you’re about to start a family.
I understand where this assumption comes from: our ages aren’t helping (early thirties) and I spend enough weekends at kids’ birthday parties that I should consider becoming a children’s entertainer. I can see that we fit the profile of “people about to become parents”. Not to mention, the suburbs historically were the place that people raised their families; 2.4 children, a Volvo estate, and twitchable curtains.
All of our friends have children – that change happened slowly at first, and then all at once. Several of them are parents of two or more children (I literally don’t understand how we got old enough for this to be possible?) Out of school and university pals I am now the only one who is not a mother. We still see each other all the time of course, but it is an odd existence being the only one on a different track. I did have one child-free ally but she has now (brilliantly) moved abroad.
But in an age where fewer people are having children (the number of babies born in England and Wales is at the lowest since the 70s and the average age of new mums is 30.9 and 33.8 for dads) it shouldn’t be that remarkable.
I think that is largely down to where we chose to live: I know there is also a lot to be said about how much of our identity is (incorrectly) hinged on where we live. Both how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. When we left London it wasn’t seen as just a geographic switch, but a personality one too. Someone giving up on certain hopes and dreams and adopting others – even if we never said that. The transition when we moved was so stark.
Everyone assumes you’re on a conveyor belt heading in one direction at a set speed. That if you’re buying a house, you’re doing so to be a better prospective parent, rather than just having had enough of the rental market. That if you’re moving somewhere quieter, you’ve had enough partying (I’ve not) and want parenthood, rather than just a peaceful home for yourself. That if you’re canvassing for a second bedroom, it’s a nursery rather than a home office.
This move has been so positive, I love where we live and the friends that surround us, and yet being here has led me to think a lot about timelines, choices, and the pressure we still put on people – especially women – to conform to a certain template. I don’t know if and when we might have children, but that feels like a moot point. Right now, we do not and so it should be irrelevant.
I can only imagine how difficult it must be if you’re actively trying and having trouble with infertility, or any other reasons it might not be happening. That people feel able to question your choices because they assume you’re living a certain way.
With the price of property rising and cities becoming increasingly unaffordable, more young people are likely to have to choose to move outwards towards suburbia, like us. Research by Harvard University described this trend of millennial suburbanisation having been “motivated by lack of affordable and right-sized housing in urban areas”. Tell us something we don’t know.
There is so much I love about living in the suburbs; on the dog walk this morning I spoke to eight different people (in our London neighbourhood if we’d been struck down by plague, and our bodies eaten by foxes, no one would’ve noticed until the smell got really bad). But it has been hard too when you feel like you’re out of step with what is expected.
I will admit that the abundance of babies in our coffee shops, men wearing Baby Bjorns on the high street, and oversubscribed primary schools in our local area, means that one could argue I’m just splitting hairs: the majority of people who move here do so because they’re at a certain stage in life and I’m thinking too much about my own miscategorisation.
But at a time when people are becoming more vocal both about painful journeys to parenthood, or the empowering choice to remain child-free, can we stop assuming we know what everyone is planning to do with their ovaries based on where they’re searching on Rightmove?