“Four generations of us have moved from Croydon to Cornwall”

I I lived in and around Croydon, South London for the first 57 years of my life and loved it there. My sisters were nearby and I had a lot of friends, but during the pandemic I realized that I don’t need to see everyone every day (says Louise Clay, 60).

We were running a babysitting agency and a dog grooming company at the time, and obviously we lost all of our business. My husband Simon, 54, had a construction company that was also struggling.

At first we were going to move to Sussex but it was too expensive so we started looking further and further west until we ended up in Cornwall. I had only been there once before, but it was the big draw