After a lifetime spent living on the south eastern fringes of London Caroline and Richard FitzGerald began to question whether they were staying put simply out of habit.
The answer was yes.
And so the couple decided to move on to pastures new, in the hope of making a better life for themselves and their 11-year-old son Dylan.
Last summer the family, plus cavapoo Lulu, swapped the Victorian semi in Sutton they had called home for 17 years for a detached new built home just outside Hayward’s Heath, West Sussex, from where they can easily enjoy long walks in the South Downs and day trips to the beach.
“We got to the point of realising that we were in Sutton because we had always been there, not because we wanted to be there. The area has become much more built up and we wanted something new,” says Caroline.
“We are all much more chilled out now. Driving around is less stressful, people have time on their hands and stop and chat, which is odd after London. It has been a complete game changer.”
The move was triggered, in part, when Caroline, 44, was diagnosed with autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis in 2021. She had to give up her job as a teacher, and now works from home as a SEN advisor.
Dylan was also approaching secondary school age. “We knew that if we didn’t do it soon we’d be stuck where we were for another eight years,” says Caroline.
The couple wanted to stay south to be close to family and searched for homes in a wide swathe of Kent and Essex before finding a house they loved at Sigma Homes' Spring Bank development (sigmahomesgroup.co.uk).
Their four-bedroom London home sold for £645,000 and they paid £705,000 for their new property which has three bedrooms, an office, a big garden, and a garage.
“We felt we were getting more for our money – and we would have paid another £150,000 to buy something like this in London,” says Caroline.
The family moved last July and Richard, 45, who is a key worker, commutes to work in London. Caroline works from home and Dylan is at the local village primary school where there are only 30 children in his year group. “There is a farm behind the school, he goes to forest school – the opportunities are just so different from what he experienced in London,” says Caroline .
