Joe Parker had reached his early 30s and was reassessing his life.
After years of hard work and hard partying in London he'd built a successful career in the advertising industry but had decided to take a break.
"My dad died, I was not in a good place and I took a year's sabbatical from work and went travelling around the world for a year," he told the Manchester Evening News .
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When he returned, Joe found himself reluctant to re-enter the notoriously expensive London rental market.
"The cost of accommodation in London is ridiculous, it's always been ridiculous," he said.
"And I noticed, even in the year that I'd been away, rent had increased noticeably.
"So I used to live in Clapham which is a nice area, young professionals, it's green and leafy, there's parks, it's got plenty to do.
"But it's not Zone 1, it shouldn't be £1,100 a month for a room in a shared house which is what I was looking at paying to go back to Clapham High Street.
"I thought to myself... why am I doing that? Why am I paying that money?"
Joe moved back in with his family in Stafford and found that he could easily manage an arrangement of working from home three days a week and commuting into the office for the other two.
He said: "It wasn't a problem, there's pretty good links.
"I'd go down really early on a Tuesday morning, stay Tuesday night in London, have Wednesday again there in the agencies and come back Wednesday evening.
"And it broke my week up quite nicely, I had a nice balance of in-person in London... there's also a little of excitement to be honest!"
When the pandemic hit and working from home became the norm for so many, it made Joe realise that there was no reason it couldn't be his future.
He had visited friends in Manchester regularly as a teenager and "always fancied it."
"It's always had a buzz, always plenty to do," Joe said.
"And the people are friendly, I've always noticed that.
"Everybody says it but people up North are always really nice. So I started looking at it and actually it took me two or three weeks before I'd actually reserved this place."
With the Help to Buy scheme, Joe, now aged 35, managed to get a two-bedroom apartment for £318,000 in the Crusader Mill development from Capital&Centric in Piccadilly.
He says he would never have got near the same kind of property in the capital.
"In Clapham Junction they knocked down a whole host of old council housing, a two minute walk from station, and built all these studio, one and two bed apartments," said Joe.
"And yes they were high-spec flats but the studios started at £500,000 and they were tiny, they were so, so small, you could see through the windows.
"£500,000 for a studio! There was not a chance I would have been able to afford that and not a chance in hell I would ever have paid that.
"But some people have more money than sense I guess."
Joe is now among what is a burgeoning community of newcomers to Manchester, especially the city centre, who are keeping their London careers without having to live there.
Nana Obeng, 41, and his wife Audrey moved from the capital into a two-bed apartment they bought in the Phoenix development in Chapeltown Street last year.
The couple say the move has completely changed their quality of life.
Nana has a job in the tech industry and was mainly working from home with colleagues dotted around the world.
When he moved to Manchester he kept his job and agreed to visit London once a month while Audrey got a job as a teacher in New Islington.
"We’d lived in London for years and I’ve got to admit, we were in the proper London bubble, where we thought you just couldn’t get the same cultural experiences on your doorstep in other places," said Nana.
"But we were renting a damp basement flat that was costing a fortune and there was next to no prospect of getting on the housing ladder.
"We started looking at other places, including places like Reading so we could commute, but then went for the more radical choice of moving North.
"We’d only been here for a few weeks and were already asking why we hadn’t made the move sooner.”
Nana and Audrey are spending £500 less a month on their mortgage than they did renting their flat Stoke Newington in Hackney.
And they say they've been blown away by everything Manchester has to offer.
"I’m a massive music fan and scrolling through my Spotify playlist, pretty much all my favourite artists have or are planning playing in Manchester," said Nana.
"The food scene is insane at the moment too, it’s literally right on the doorstep, with more places opening all the time.”
The debate over whether people need to return to the office or whether they can continue to work from home after the pandemic is not yet resolved.
The Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently urged people to get back into offices after the Plan B restrictions ended.
But research suggests many companies and organisations are continuing with a hybrid arrangement at the very least.
Joe feels strongly that this is something employers will have to accommodate in the future.
He has just taken redundancy from his last job and will be looking for new opportunities soon.
And he has no doubt that he will likely end up working for a London employer while living in Manchester.
"I don't think I have the luxury, given the area in which I work, the fact you have to work for a big corporate to have any sort of advertising budget whatsoever to make my job interesting and fun, I don't think I have a choice but to look in London," said Joe.
"Don't get me wrong I'll have a look in Manchester but I think the likelihood is I will have to work for a London-based firm again when I start to look for work.
"And I'd have no problem being a day or two a week in the office.
"But I will be stipulating at interview that I don't want to be more than two days a week in the office."
Joe says the pandemic has demonstrated that technology can dramatically change what is feasible.
"Advertising is known for being quite hardcore, particularly in the run-up to campaigns," he said.
"But I've done whole TV shoots remotely, through software they've quite quickly developed given the pandemic.
"We've launched national advertising campaigns with multi-million pound investment, and I've have a team of six reporting into me.
"If I can do that for years, there is absolutely no reason in my mind that I can't do two days in the office and three days at home [from Manchester].
"And if a company doesn't want to support that, then I don't want to work for them going forward.
"But from everything I hear, everybody I speak to, everything I read, I don't see that being a problem moving forward."
Clearly, the coronavirus pandemic has changed attitudes towards working from home in the UK.
In 2019, only 5 per cent of the workforce were regularly working from home and around 30 per cent had 'ever' worked from home.
This increased to 47 per cent of people doing at least some work from home in April 2020.
The question remains as to how long-lasting these changes will be.
Parliament researchers examining the phenomenon last year said that "latent demand for permanent flexible working arrangements, including working from home and hybrid office-home working, have been unlocked by the pandemic."
Joe agreed with the idea that many Londoners - particularly professionals of a similar age - are now demanding more from life.
"Yes I think that's fair to say, I've had colleagues who've ended up moving out to deepest darkest Essex because they could afford something at the end of the central line," he said.
"But it'll take them an hour and a half to get into the office.
"It only takes me two hours from Piccadilly and I live five minutes from there.
"So what is the pull for me to be on the outskirts [of London] when I can be so far away with a well-connected train service? There's no need.
"But I think demanding more almost sounds like demanding without deserving, and people work very, very hard in London and are rightly demanding more for their lives.
"I think we've got a bit more balance with covid, I think people have reprioritised.
"I have friends who didn't take the 'going into the overdraft at the end of every month' route and got much cheaper accommodation.
"One friend in particular, lived in a street off Brixton high street, and it was just and absolute dump. He was there for years.
"He hated it but just didn't have an alternative and you just think... I miss the buzz, I don't miss the stresses that go with it."
For many like Joe, Manchester doesn't just tick the boxes for its relative affordability and connections to London.
It's also about getting a taste of northern life.
"One of the biggest things is actually knowing my neighbour," he said.
"I know that sounds like something small but I lived in three different places in London and countless places in Brighton, and I remember every time I moved in somewhere.
"I'm quite a friendly outgoing person, I'd knock on the door and say 'hi I'm Joe I've just moved in next door', and every single time I was greeted with a response similar to 'And...? So?'
"People did just not want to know you, they didn't care, there was no community or camaraderie.
"One guy almost closed the door in my face in the last place I lived in in London, just was not interested.
"Whereas here, I've been out three times last week for drinks with my neighbours and for dinner and for lunch.
"For me I really wanted that, it's a city where I didn't really know anybody, and I wanted a group of friends and you've got a ready group of friends here, everyone is so nice, so friendly, so willing to socialise and help each other out, that makes a phenomenal difference to life."
Manchester's city centre population was estimated to be more than 65,000 people in 2019.
It is projected to hit 100,000 by 2026.
Many of these new residents may have come from outside the region and still have jobs based elsewhere, like Joe.
Will these potentially younger and wealthier Mancunians of the city centre have different priorities than those in the suburbs and satellite towns?
This is an uncomfortable dynamic already being played out in issues such as the highly contentious Clean Air Zone.
For his part, Joe believes there is a Mancunian 'identity' he has bought into completely.
"I grew up in a small, one-horse town, I love the buzz of a city, I couldn't be in a smaller place, or a non-descript town now," he said.
"Everyone says Birmingham's the second city... is it really?"
"It doesn't really feel as if it's got a cohesive centre or vibe where people are having a good time and living their lives.
"And I think Manchester has that, it's got a lot more growth, it's got a lot more cranes, and people are proud to live here.
"People are proud of the Mancunian accent!
"During Covid when I was watching Andy Burnham going up against Boris it cemented in my mind that actually Manchester, it has a presence and it has a power, I guess.
"It has strength in numbers... there's that spirit of, we are not just another city in the UK, for right or wrong we will stand up to you London and central government because we have the right to a say.
"It has a personality, it has an identity, and yeah... I don't think I would want to live anywhere else in the UK right now, I love it."
Adam Higgins, co-founder at social impact developers Capital&Centric says Joe is just one of many examples of people choosing Manchester after rethinking their work-life options.
“With remote working now the norm, it’s totally feasible to live in Manchester and work from London," he said.
"That’s never really been possible before. We’ve seen a massive uptick in people from London wanting to buy an apartment in our Crusader and Phoenix owner occupier communities in Piccadilly East since the pandemic hit.
"The fact that they’re right next to Piccadilly train station means they can move to Manchester, but stay in the same job and maybe just head down south once a week.
“We’re seeing a real mix of people moving up.
"Some are from the North West and are moving back home, others were born down South and are astonished at what they can get for their money.
"And it’s not just people moving from London, we’ve got residents from Los Angeles, Mexico, Italy, Spain and even New Zealand!
"Our Crusader and Phoenix apartments are spacious and have loads of outside space, and with co-working hangouts like Ducie Street Warehouse just around the corner, they’re perfect for working from home.
"At Kampus, our new garden neighbourhood next to Canal Street, all the apartments are for rent and have been designed for home working, with the option to turn a bedroom into an office and tons of communal spaces for residents to plug in and grab a coffee.
"Even though people are starting to go back into the office they want that flexibility and frankly a more relaxed working environment and Manchester’s got a lot to offer on that front.”
