5 best places to live outside of London

It’s been well documented by now that since the pandemic, homebuyers are increasingly looking to move out of London and into the surrounding suburbs or even the countryside.

In fact, research by Hamptons’ showed that an estimated 73,950 homebuyers left London in 2020, with Kent and Surrey showing the largest increase in homebuyer interest. London hasn’t seen an exodus like this since the Brexit vote in 2016.

With more people working from home, certain things that were important before – like commuting distance and transport links – have fallen down the list of priorities.

The need for more space, especially for a home office, and the desire for outside space, is attracting homebuyers to towns where they can get more space for their money.

Now that things are opening up, however, some workplaces have decided to return to the office, or have a hybrid working arrangement where workers are going in a couple of days a week as necessary. So while you might want to live out in the country, you might still want to stay relatively close to London for the days when you do have to trek to the office.

A cursory search on Google shows numerous articles each with their own list of the ‘best’ places to live outside of the capital. But since everyone has their own criteria for what makes a place ‘good’ to live in, every list includes different towns and cities, with very little overlap!

To save you the search, we’ve compiled the 5 places that show up multiple times on different ‘best of’ lists, and which are all within an hour’s train ride of London.