I am watching this program on TV "Back to the country" people looking for houses in the UK. Man its expensive there, or maybe these people are just rich, but it seems so expensive. Yesterday a couple looked at houses in Devon. That looks like a nice area too! Have you been there? What is your favorite parts of UK?
@Carazaa yes they do go for the expensive houses on that programme. I love west coast of Scotland and Cornwall . But there are so many beautiful places here! Northumberland, lake district, Yorkshire dales, Welsh coast and so many more!
@TheWildEcho Today during my lunch I watched the peak district on "Back to the country" love that program. The peak district is so gorgwous too with the majestic mountains and views, wow!
Porthcawl it's a holiday resort it has a harbour boats leave the harbour go out into the Bristol Channel it has a nice town centre and large fairground as well as many sandy beaches ideal holiday resort there's always plenty to do there it must be a strange place whilst this lockdown is going on I find it difficult to imagine it being deserted but know it is. The picture only shows a small part of this very nice seaside town.
I don't have a "a favourite part" because there are too many lovely places all so different you can't really compare or compete them.
Those of us living in Britain are remarkably lucky to live in what is probably the world's most varied country for its size.
Highlights for me?
Where I live for a start - on the so-called "Jurassic Coast" geological World Heritage Site. Elsewhere, just some examples...
The Chalk Downs of Dorset and Wiltshire. The Mendip Hills - and by contrast the Somerset levels. South and North Wales, and the Border counties. The Cotswolds The Three Peaks area of the Pennines; and beyond them, the Eden Valley. Northumbria. Scotland - certainly the few areas I have seen of it.
Umm theres a few places, I've been to Wales, the Yorkshire Dale's, there are lovely royal gardens here in london like Hampton court palace. Really depends where you go and time of year. England is a beautiful country, I'd love to go to ireland next
@SW-User oooh definitely sounds like a plan, as a child we went on a trip to sayer Croft memories of it are pretty woodland with a local river, but I thought it was a far away place, it's in bloody Surrey lmao.
@waleskinder It was part of the UK once we had problems holding on to it nice part of the world though needs looking into will send the Welsh Archers over there.
I'm watching a program right now that's called "Move to the country" where people are looking for properties to buy in UK. And right now someone is looking in Cornwall, Wow that's gorgeous! So I say that's it!🙂
@Carazaa It is a lovely county, yes. Thank you for the compliment although I live 100 miles from its Eastern boundary!
However there is a shadow over what you have said there.
Cornwall is one of many other beautiful areas in the country including my county of Dorset, that attract a lot of incomers from the cities. We cannot blame them, and in their position would probably want to do similarly. Yet it brings difficulties of its own, that most of those Metro-centric off-cumdens do not see, maybe do not want to see.
Those coming as permanent residents with full-time work in the area, maybe having qualified then having to go where the work is, are fine. They help support the area.
Many others though are commuters to distant towns. Huge housing-estate being built in towns even 100 miles from London but with good road and rail links to the capital, are advertised in London, at prices a London commuter would think reasonable. There is little if any employment locally for most of the buyers.
The most controversial and the most resented of the lot, are the well-off second-home buyers. Their main homes and work are around London or other cities. They contribute virtually nothing to the local economy apart from what they might spend in a few pubs and restaurants, they pay reduced Council Tax (local rates) on the homes by virtue of occasional secondary occupancy, and they add to the nation's housing shortage.
Similarly with the "buy-to-let" speculators who buy even brand new homes to rent out at very high cost. Worse, some are foreign investors - countries as well as individuals - so their returns go abroad, a drain on the nation's economy. Many of the eye-wateringly costly homes in the poshest bits of London are owned by these parasites, of whom a few are suspected to be using property-trading for money-hiding and laundering. (The laws have been tightened to try to stop them.)
Those able to pay big-city home prices are helped by the estate-agents working by commission, so having a direct interest in skying the price of homes; and to hell with the locals trying to work and live there.
The attractive areas typically offer little real work beyond serving the tourists and second-home types; so highly seasonal and paying little or nothing above the National Living Wage (legal minimum). Other than that, little more than taxi-driving, supermarkets and fast-food chains - also low skill and pay.
Another but much more sensitive difficulty is the large proportion of retirees. This not only produces a very unbalanced population straining local health services etc. It can turn against the retirees.
They buy when still fit and healthy but eventually it was a big mistake to buy that pretty cottage by the mill-stream: no buses because everyone uses cars; local shops destroyed by the supermarkets and out-of-town shopping-centres. The pub may have closed, the nearest theatre and cinema are miles away. Their doctor and dentist possibly over 10 miles distant, the hospital 20 or 30 miles away. Their investments are shrinking and if financial or medical reasons enforce giving up driving...
... They are stuck, struggling on but eventually having to try to move into something in the town.
Or they might stay but trapped by a re-mortgage trap, by which a money-firm buys the home from them then lends them the money to buy it straight back on hire-purchase! So they no longer own it, are now paying a mortgage on it from what seems a huge nest-egg, and cannot bequest it as they may have hoped. The loan and any savings after the repayments may disappear in paying for care, and if they have to move into a residential care-home, and when they die, the money-trader still wants mortgage repaying despite being able simply to empty the house and sell it at a big profit. Despite their intentions the original owners can end up leaving only a huge care-invoice and mortgaqe-debt in their wills.
That is hard enough in leafy suburbia or a city-centre flat; but in a small village of which many are second-homes, in a deprived county like Cornwall?
I have envied friends who live in a rural village, but not now, not nearing 70, but living in a reasonably pleasant urban area with most facilities in easy reach.
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How does Cornwall fare in this? Very badly I am afraid.
Forget TV programmes advertising picture-postcard homes.
Cornwall is one of the poorest and most deprived areas in Britain. It has lost most of the metals mining that was its main trade. The associated engineering industry and mining-college, with world-wide reputations for excellence, have gone. Its fishing industry has been reduced greatly by over-fishing by several EU countries then by clumsy EU rules designed to prevent that. Its farming is all fairly small-scale and much of the higher land is granite moor that can only really support sheep.
However, Cornwall's road links are quite good despite the motorway ending before Plymouth on the Devon-Cornwall boundary. Cornwall also has regular train services indirectly to Wales, directly to the Midlands and Northern England and Scotland, and directly to London. Go to London and you can also catch trains to Brussels and Paris (through the Channel Tunnel). It also has a regional airport, though that is struggling at the moment thanks to the pandemic and the collapse of its main commercial airline.
Nevertheless because Cornwall is quite remote, and there are hopeful signs of lithium extraction becoming significant - though needing few employees - so far it has struggled to attract much genuine investment bringing decent employment.
Its nearest major centre of such employment is probably the city of Plymouth, home to one of the Royal Navy's main bases.
The locals stand no chance; and I am afraid that is a pattern in many other counties of English and Welsh counties that look oh so pretty in the tourist brochures, home-advertising magazines and the cynical London-made TV programmes encouraging rural life for London's Canary Wharf set.
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Oddly, a few of the ex-city types who have moved to the countryside to tend the roses round the doors of 18C thatched stone cottages, have found it so remote, quiet and unfamiliar they sell up and flee back to cosy, safe suburbia!
A minority make themselves obnoxious by trying to take out injunctions against farm noises and mess, or the church bell-ringing. They must have known of these when they view the houses. One such in my own county several years ago, became very upset when the local infants' school introduced a morning ritual involving lots of happy but noisy, unintelligible shouting. So she tried to have it stopped. Her profession? Opera soprano!
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Ironically, while the wealthier Londoners (in money, law, medical consultancy, high-level IT, entertainments, the "media") regard the rest of England as ripe fruit for picking, huge numbers of the capital's own locals cannot afford to buy their own local homes either. Not just supermarket and MacTuckyCostaBucks staff, either, but also skilled people like teachers and nurses. This acts against those from the provinces who want to live in or near London, as many do; so it cannot help organisations trying to recruit much-needed, qualified people from outside.
City-dwelling MacT..., etc., staff are now struggling too, because the pandemic drove so many of their day-time, office-staff, customers out to working at home.
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I talked about this to a couple who live in a small farming village high on the Mendip Hills, also in SW England. They bought and restored a cottage previously used as an outdoor-centre; in their 20s and both in well-paid employment in towns not very far away. The location is exposed to the weather from all directions. It has a church, a village hall, Primary School and thriving local community. Otherwise though it sees just one bus one day a week, and it has just a small farm-shop, a garage no longer selling fuel and two pubs. Many, many villages are like that now despite, or thanks to, the glossy magazines. The couple, now in their mid-60s but still fit and active, admitted their village "is no place to grow old."
@ArishMell Thank you so much for your information, very kind of you!. I would agree that the world is changing, and some of these jewels are spoiled with non locals who aren't investing in these areas. They do pay taxes on those summerhouses though, and hopefully buy from the local fish markets and add some value to the little towns. Now during Covid-19 season people can work anywhere so I would imagine that there is some influx to gorgeous fishing villages, and hopefully not destroying the towns with plastic trash that kills the birds, fish, the beauty, and the local culture 🙂.
The real problem is that of the effect on housing availability and price.
Moving to another area to work is fine, and I'm an "off-comeden" here as Dad's work-site was moved to this area - in 1959. Retiring to fairly remote places is OK provided you think about your own future, but large numbers of retirees in one area can bring more general problems.
I have a friend saddled with trying to sell a second-home... on a Greek island. Now a widow, she and her husband bought it many years ago and did use it every year.
It's litter generally that spoils everything, not only plastic. Anyway it is only certain types and physical forms of plastics that are actually harmful as well as simply litter.
We had many unpleasant problems in some parts of the Dorset coast, as did other parts of the country, in the Summer when the first lock-down was eased. Many people just went mad in their flock behaviour, and left their self-respect and responsibility at home, and their litter and even discarded, brand new beach-toys etc., on the beach. Not only litter they left, but human waste and in some cases, disposable barbeques that set areas of forest and heath alight.
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Actually I have lots of favourite places, and many are inland, perhaps because I live by the sea. Two for example, are the Three Peaks area and the Eden Valley, both in the Pennine Hills. One of my favourite routes is a road I normally use Southwards after a weekend in the North, that passes through the English / Welsh Border counties.
" Normally", he says..... Not much of that about this year.
@Evilnine86 It's where I drank my first beer, It's where I found Jesus. Where I wrecked my first car, I tore it all to pieces I learned the path to heaven is full of sinners and believers. Learned that happiness on earth ain't just for high achievers
@MartinTheFirst I am calm; and I can assure you London no more represents the country as a whole than any other city.
I have seen only a relatively small part of Sweden and for only a short time - driving through it to Norway - but I don't try to imply I know Sweden as a result.
Nor do I throw silly insults like "calm your tits" about.
