As a west-Londoner, the closest Karen Meloy had come to living off the land was tending the allotment she rented close to home in Hounslow. Today, she and her husband, Chris, own and work their own Norfolk smallholding, raising sheep (and soon pigs), and growing a wide variety of fruit and vegetables.
Meloy knows how to build fences, pickle the produce she has grown to stock her larder and is learning how to spin the sheep’s wool.
Some people move out of London because they want a bigger, better home than they can afford in the capital, a more outdoorsy lifestyle for their families or the novelty of going to the beach after school. Others are looking for a more fundamental change, embracing a simpler life of eating what they grow and finding resourceful ways of earning a living from their land.
The transition from urbanite to farmhand is not always plain sailing. Explaining the brutal realities of country life to city children is tricky and real self-sufficiency is a goal that few achieve. But those who have recently made the transition agree that the challenges are all worthwhile.
‘The first time the lambs went to the slaughterhouse I cried’
Meloy, 48, and her husband, 47, spent the first lockdown cooped up in their two-bedroom house with their eight-year-old son, Hugo. The experience was particularly tough for Meloy because she has an autoimmune condition and needed to shield. She was also furloughed from her job, as a site supervisor for a construction company. “It was horrendous,” she says.
Meanwhile Chris, a manager at a central London university, was no longer required in the office, and the couple began to discuss the possibility of moving. Their wish list was touchingly simple. “I wanted to be near the coast, my husband wanted a shed and my son wanted a monkey puzzle tree,” says Meloy.
In March 2021 the couple sold their house for about £415,000 and spent £425,000 on a three-bedroom Victorian farmhouse close to King’s Lynn, which ticked all their boxes.
The property came with four acres, and the previous owners left behind their six sheep and an elderly ram. During their first week in the country the small herd escaped. “We were running around trying to catch them from a neighbour’s garden, not knowing what we were doing — it was like a Monty Python sketch,” says Meloy.
Over the past couple of years the family have cracked on, building three greenhouses where they grow tomatoes, peppers, chillis, strawberries and asparagus (among other things). They also have a vegetable garden, a fruit orchard, have learnt how to manage the sheep and are now planning to add some pigs to their household.
“It is constant work,” says Meloy, who is also working part-time as a teaching assistant at a forest school and has been charting the family’s life-changing move on Instagram with her account @whindrove_farmhouse.
To add an income stream to their property, the family have also built a yurt and rent it and the field it stands in to families looking for a bit of peace and privacy.
Having got the outdoors up and running this year, the family plan to start work on the “freezing cold” house, which badly needs insulation, as well as a new kitchen, rewiring and replumbing.
Meloy has found her farming neighbours willing to help the newbies. A neighbour shears their sheep and she has traded their wool for spinning lessons with another. She preserves all the food the family don’t eat. “The aim is to become completely self-sufficient,” she says.
This doesn’t mean she doesn’t miss the huge variety of food that was available to her in London. When step-daughter Amy Johnson, 27, visits from the capital she brings with her mercy packages of falafel and baba ganoush.
One aspect of farming life that has been harder to accept has been sending the lambs they breed to slaughter. “The first time the lambs went to the slaughterhouse I cried and was really upset,” says Meloy. “Now the lambs are in the freezer, and my son would be mortified if he knew that. I am trying to explain to him, but it is hard.”
‘We have a TV but I can’t tell you last time it went on’
Kate Symonds and Seb Burns have a bit of a head start on the Meloy family — they and their extended family have been living and working together on a 20-acre smallholding in Norfolk since 2014.
Instead of commuting to work at her old job as an environmental consultant, Symonds now gets up at about 7am to do yoga, have breakfast and check on her chickens and geese. To create an income stream she and her former music teacher partner have built a small ‘glampsite’ on the smallholding (roundthewoods.co.uk), and they will also spend time saying goodbye to guests and preparing their two yurts and self-built straw bale roundhouse for their next visitors.
They then work on their vegetable garden, water plants and tend their colony of bees, and their woodland also takes careful management to keep it in good condition. Their sons, Elliot, nine, and Dylan, seven, who are home-schooled, will be outside playing, reading, woodworking, hanging out with their parents and grandparents or attending regular sports clubs. In the evening, the family reads, plays board games and talks. “We do have a TV but I can’t tell you the last time it went on,” says Symonds.
When they were in London, 39-year-old Symonds and Burns, 38, rented a two-bedroom garden flat in Streatham Hill for £1,880 a month. After Elliot was born, Symonds’s parents — who were based in Devon — stepped in with an idea. Why not pool their resources and buy somewhere together?
In 2014, the family spent £875,000 on a six-bedroom house in Weston Longville — 10 miles from Norwich — surrounded by meadows and woodland, and with an orchard and vegetable garden. They have lost chickens to local foxes, vegetables to marauding deer and rabbits, seedlings to pigeons and bee colonies to the cold. “There are some stresses around money and about being responsible for a lot of buildings and trees,” admits Symonds. “I can’t stand really strong winds — in my head the whole of the land is flat and only the house is still standing.”
Despite the size of their plot, the family is only around 30 to 40 per cent self-sufficient. Meat and other shop-bought essentials make up the bulk of their diet. But solar panels reduce energy use and they have their own water supplied via a bore hole. “We are fairly off grid,” says Symonds. “And it is great to drink water from your own land — it tastes so good.”
‘The grapes are very sensitive’
Spring is orange-harvesting season in Portugal, and from now until May, Louise Denington will be busy picking the fruit she has spent the past few months watching ripen.
It is all a very far cry from her previous life, living in her London flat and travelling the world as a high-end interior designer.
“It is amazing how much things can change in just a couple of years,” says Denington. “People always say to me how brave I have been, but really it all just snowballed. One thing happened, and then the next, and here we are.”
Before the snowball began rolling, Denington was well set up in London with an exciting job and her own two-bedroom flat in Tottenham to come home to. But living the London dream didn’t quite do it for Denington, 36.
“The work I was doing was a bit jarring with the way that I wanted to live my life,” she says. “I was ready for something a bit calmer.”
While working in India, Denington had got seriously into yoga, taking lessons and training to be an instructor. She quit the day job at the start of 2020 and used the start of the pandemic to kick-start a second career, running classes online.
At about the same time she also met her now-fiancé, Jac Timms, 43, and as soon as an air corridor opened up, the couple flew off for a weekend in Portugal. The break was so lovely they began wondering if they could make it a longer-term thing and by November 2020 they had successfully applied for a five-year residency permit.
After a happy few weeks in the west coast town of Ericeira and in the Algarve, the couple booked a house-hunting trip in June 2021 and the last home they saw was the keeper — a five-acre grape and orange farm in a village eight miles from the Algarve coast, with a traditional two-bedroom house and a separate two-bedroom cottage.
Despite their lack of farming experience, the thought of drinking fresh orange juice from their own trees proved too much of a temptation. They paid €470,000 (£412,000) for the property — and the owner threw in the tractor and farm equipment.
People say to me how brave I have been, but really one thing happened, and then the next, and here we are
“It was a baptism of fire,” says Denington, who moved permanently to the farm in March 2022. “The oranges are easier, because the trees are well established and there is an irrigation system, and one of our neighbour’s father-in-laws used to be a farm-hand here and he is really teaching us what to do.” The grape vines have proved much more temperamental and failed to ripen at all. “I think we managed to both over and under water them at times,” says Denington. “We should have picked them in August, but we were away, and there weren’t any bunches anyway. They are very sensitive.”
While their first year of farming has been tough, Denington’s yoga business is thriving. Timms works remotely as a consultant to a clutch of property technology firms. The couple have begun learning Portuguese and have renovated the guest house, which they plan to rent out (see @louloudenington and casamimosa.pt for updates).
In their spare time, they go hiking in the mountains, visit the beach, walk Cosmo, their Tibetan terrier they brought from London, and try — with limited success — to find vegan restaurants to sample. “It is a really outdoors lifestyle here, which is what we both wanted,” says Denington. “It is beautiful, the weather is great and we are having the satisfaction of creating something for ourselves.”
A-list farmers living the good life
It’s a long way from the red carpet to rural Sussex, but when double Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett has downtime she spends it buried in the countryside near the small market town of Crowborough.
She and her husband, Andrew Upton, own Highwell House, a fine seven-bedroom Victorian property set in 13 acres, which they use to keep pigs and chickens, and grow herbs and vegetables.
For celebrities the chance to get their hands dirty growing their own food, raising livestock, and embracing a cottagecore lifestyle is highly on trend.
Ed Sheeran, who has built a £3.7 million country compound in Suffolk, reportedly took to gardening during lockdown and spent the pandemic growing organic produce and caring for a flock of chickens.
The most famous celebrity farmer of all is, of course, Jeremy Clarkson. In 2008 the TV presenter bought the 1,000-acre Curdle Hill Farm, which had been listed for sale at £4.25 million.
Since then he has changed its name to Diddly Squat Farm and has monetised his investment with a popular Amazon Prime TV series showing him attempting to run it and an adjacent farm shop.
Other hobby farmers include the Doc Martin actor Martin Clunes, who has lived on a Dorset family with horses, ponies, 50 Dexter cattle, sheep and hens since 2007.
DJ Calvin Harris has also embraced farmstead life, as owner of the 138-acre Terra Masia, which is Ibiza’s largest organic farm producing biodynamic vegetables, fruit, herbs, edible flowers and free-range eggs.
Closer to home, Strictly Come Dancing’s Flavia Cacace and her partner, Jimi Mistry, quit the city to live off-grid on a seven-acre smallholding in Devon.
Meanwhile, Michelin-starred chef Marcus Wareing splits his time between Wimbledon and a smallholding in East Sussex, where he works on his kitchen garden and tends a flock of sheep with his wife, Jane, and their three children.
