experts’ tips on coping with lockdown stress

The Telegraph

Forget about the countryside, now people are swapping city life for the seaside

Radio producer and writer Deborah Coughlin and her partner Steve Bricknall, a TV executive, had dreamed of moving to the Welsh coast for years. “But our income relied on us being in an office in London every day,” Coughlin explains. “The pandemic changed this almost overnight.” With all their work immediately going online, city ties were severed: last summer, the couple, both 40, moved to Laugharne, Camarthenshire – marking them among the 700,000 Londoners to leave mid-pandemic. But while the exodus to country towns has been well documented, it is in fact the seaside that is providing the biggest pull for those fleeing the capital. Analysis from Rightmove, the UK’s biggest property website, revealed the coastal hotspots around the UK, with Sandilands in Lincolnshire, Camber in East Sussex and Benllech in Anglesey seeing some of the steepest rises in house prices during 2020. Meanwhile, Seaford in East Sussex saw the biggest spike of interest in the past year, with buyer searches doubling. The small seaside town of Mumbles, on Swansea Bay, saw average asking prices rise by 47 per cent since 2015, a bigger five-year increase than any coastal area in Britain. Coughlin and Bricknall picked South Wales “because I wanted to be near my parents who live here – my dad ended up in hospital in the first lockdown and I decided I needed to be near them to support them if anything happened,” Coughlin explains. “In the future we know we’ll still need to occasionally be in London, but the balance is now on the other foot – we can now both realistically base ourselves five hours from London, something we really couldn’t have considered a year ago, pre-pandemic. It’s a massively freeing feeling.”