Sometimes we know when we are about to create significant memories:  a marriage vow, a graduation, a last visit to the vets.  But other times they creep up on us and only that wise counsellor, hindsight, recognises significance.  So with us, walking along the South Bank, for a purpose I cannot remember, maybe 15 years ago, when I said ‘I wouldn’t like to live in London with a young family but perhaps, when the children have left home, a little flat near the centre might be fun’. 

It was an impulsive comment which refused to go away.  The seed germinated, persisted and, after much planning and preparation, somewhat messily but nonetheless fundamentally, it came to fruition.  Limehouse wasn’t elegant; it was, perhaps, not the bijou apartment of one’s dreams, but we had, indubitably, moved to London.

And so, to September 2020 in the Rococo splendour of the Gilbert Scott Bar, for burger and cocktails, when we asked ourselves if, after weeks of lockdown and more likely to come, we still enjoyed living in London.  Yes, we agreed:  we’d been enjoying it before the pandemic and, despite lockdown, despite the theatres and galleries and gigs, all the things we loved being closed and cancelled, we still enjoyed it.  There was not a flicker of regret that we weren’t in Hampshire;  we had loved pacing through the near-empty streets of the city, affirming our identity as residents, always finding new things to notice, admire and learn about.  And so, we realised, if we wanted to stay longer, was there anything we wanted to change?  Well, the flat was perfectly adequate, but a little restricted for space – especially with my husband working full-time in what had been the spare bedroom and was now an office with a bed shoved in and covered with paperwork, making it difficult to have one guest let alone being able to accommodate both our children on the rare occasions they might coincide:  it was, as it were, too small for Christmas.  And indeed, after the first brave cramped year in the flat, we’d had itinerant Christmases – in West London, in Northumberland, back in Hampshire camping out, in an empty house in air beds.   

The logical thing, really, was to do what we had never envisaged: sell the house in Hampshire,  to which we now had no intention of returning, and buy in London.  Midway through a pandemic when every newspaper told us that people were fleeing the capital for leafy shires, this was clearly a mad thing to do:  but you have to eschew rationality at times.   And so the dream of a ‘two and a half bedroom Victorian terrace’ was born.  To be fair, we knew exactly the perfect house:  it was my brother’s and it was in Northumberland.  So dismantling that and moving it brick by brick to London did not appear practical, but the image remained.  The hunt began for this ur-house:  how far out from Limehouse would we need to move to find properties of that type, at a price which equalled the proceeds of a Hampshire sale?

The answer, it appeared… or one answer… was West Ham.  So here we are, in West Road, a Victorian terraced street, one property very like another I suppose, but this, this is the particular little house that called to us.  The area is a tad shabby but there is a beautiful park and excellent, flexible, transport links – direct trains to both Tower Hill (Bridge Theatre) and Kings Cross St Pancras (British Library) so anything else is a bonus.    We are now at the stage of assimilating things which were in storage back into our lives:  much of the furniture is inherited and well-used, and of an age and style which looks strangely in keeping, more comfortable here than any prevous places we have lived.  We have reunited my parents’ big mahogany dining table and the grandfather clock made by my father-in-law with the piano which had been kept in Suffolk and even with a bureau which hadn’t previously been ours at all, but which my brother no longer has room for and belonged to my great-aunt.  They seem happy to be together. 

Even before these familiar items arrived, my daughter had said the house seemed more like a home than the flat ever had. Indeed, the flat’s very anonymity was for us, for myself and my husband, a relief and liberation.  I’m so grateful to have had that space.  But it’s very lovely now to be settling, consolidating into a single location.     The buildings insurance and the contents insurance are once again combined.  At the flat – where we parked our car a short distance away – I had three different significant locations stored on my phone and was accustomed to finishing a journey to be told by Mrs Google ‘you have arrived at your destination’.  Now I just have one place and today, returning from a short break, I was greeted by ‘Welcome home’.  I didn’t even know Google did that, but I was rather touched.  This year, it’s already unanimously agreed, Christmas will be in West Road.