Moving house may not make us happier, but feeling at home certainly does | thearticle

Rightmove, the property comparison website, has insinuated itself so completely into our lives that it is now branching out beyond house prices to define what we mean by happiness. The Happy

at Home index, based on a national survey of more than 20,000 users of the site, ranks every town in the UK according to criteria that include “a sense of belonging, the friendliness of

local residents and being able to be yourself in an area”. Needless to say, Rightmove claims that “moving is making people happier”. Whether or not location really plays such a big role in

wellbeing, the unspoken purpose of the index is to encourage people to believe it. Top of the geographical happiness charts this year is Hexham, a small town in Northumberland. The average

price of a home there is £297,088. This is just above the national average of £288,000 in England, or £270,000 in the UK, according to the latest figures compiled by the Office of National

Statistics in September — an annual rise of nearly 12 per cent. The pandemic has been catastrophic for many, but it has prompted an exodus from the cities. We are living through the largest

boom in house prices since 2008 — a crash that began when the American real estate bubble burst, bringing more misery in its wake than any index could measure. Despite a gradual return to

office life since the last lockdown, the “working from home” phenomenon does seem to be here to stay. This doesn’t have to mean urban families moving into rural communities, but it often

does. Provided that these demographic shifts remain within bounds, they need not alter the character of small towns or the rhythms of country life. The newcomers may even enhance their new

neighbourhoods, bringing youth, health and wealth with them. Communities accustomed only to second-home owners, holiday lets and commuters, leaving them desolate except at weekends, are now

finding that home-workers are a visible presence all year round. Not every insider will welcome these outsiders. Unlike tourists and other visitors, however, those who work from home are not

merely passing trade but regular customers for local businesses, creating new jobs in places where lack of employment causes young people to leave. The Happy at Home index reveals that

economic disparities don’t always translate into existential ones. The average monthly salary in Hexham is just £842, just over a quarter of that in Richmond upon Thames, the runner-up,

where earnings are £3,235 and homes cost £1,196,892 on average. But Hexham is prosperous compared to Llandrindod Wells, Powys, in Wales. There a home costs only £193,601 and wages average

just £445 a month. These figures don’t tell the whole story, of course, because many people live not on salaries but on pensions, savings, benefits or are self-employed. Still: we all know

that money can’t buy you love, but it seems that it can’t buy you the happiness that comes from feeling rooted in a community, either. For Londoners, what is striking about the present

situation is how easy it has been to ignore all but a tiny proportion of the rest of the country. The scales have well and truly fallen from the eyes of city-dwellers, as they realise how

much Britain has to offer when they venture out of their comfort zone. The slightly condescending vogue for the “staycation” may be ephemeral, making a virtue out of necessity, but our love

affair with rusticity is at least as old as the United Kingdom. It is also one of the things about this country that foreigners, especially Americans, have most admired. “Of all the great

things that the English have invented and made part of the credit of the national character,” that loquacious Anglophile Henry James observed, “the most perfect, the most characteristic, the

only one they have mastered completely in all its details, so that it becomes a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered,

well-filled country house.” There is nothing new, either, about the urban snobbery that still renders many denizens of the capital blind to the green and pleasant land that surrounds them.

Aesop’s gently satirical fable of the town mouse and the country mouse, retold by Beatrix Potter in _The Tale of Johnny Town Mouse_, reminds us of this ancient fact of life. Yet it is

remarkable that the first English definition of “provincial” in the pejorative sense of “rude, unpolished” comes in Johnson’s _Dictionary_ of 1755. He cites Swift sympathising with “a

country squire having only the provincial accent upon his tongue, which is neither a fault, nor in his power to remedy”, but who must nevertheless content himself with marrying “a cast

wench”. Neither the ancient Romans, for whom _provincialis_ was a neutral term for the administrative regions of their empire, nor the medieval English, for whom the word was associated with

the “province” of an archbishop or a religious order, invested the notion with such disdain. Only in the 18th century, when London grew into the world’s greatest metropolis, did its

inhabitants grow too big for their boots. The provenance of “provincial” tells us less about those to whom it refers than about those who use it maliciously. Now we are living in a time of

rebalancing. Happiness is elusive and moving house doesn’t necessarily bring it any closer. Neither is the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow to be found on Rightmove or Zoopla. The

real treasure is, of course, the rainbow itself — which, like the night sky, is one of the sights, sounds and smells that are only noticeable outside the city. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We

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