Each week, my wife, Hanna, packs her bag, leaves our home in Norfolk and heads to London for two days of on-site work. We have this routine where our young son and I see her off at the train station and meet her when she returns. The headline is: we’d rather she didn’t go. But a deeper examination reveals something more nuanced. We get to live and move independently, share new stories, and have a little reunion. Life is enriched between absence and presence—enriched in the contrasts.
The journey tells the story. Leaving Norfolk means trading wide, unbroken skies for London’s vertical maze, swapping the sound of wind through beech trees for the honk and hiss of traffic. But it also means trading solitude for stimulation, quiet for collaboration. Both have their place; both are necessary.
It has long been tacitly understood that much of work, especially in the knowledge economy, is not really location-dependent. Yet a post-industrial shadow and outdated management science notions have had us stuck in the endless daily commute.
That was until 2020—a once-in-a-generation inflection point. The year of Zoom and Teams, when remote dial-ins became as familiar as birdsong, drifting through the open windows of locked-down home-workers everywhere. Suddenly, that nature mattered. The view from the window mattered. Access to something beyond concrete and glass became not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity.
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As much upheaval as the pandemic was, it threw into sharp relief our ways of living, prompting many to reevaluate priorities. Once the work-home dichotomy became semi-dissolute, one big question emerged: what kind of life do I really want? It’s not that this wasn’t important before, but global events prompted genuinely deep reflection. A choice endlessly deferred became urgent. And in many cases, people wanted out of the city—London, for example, lost about 75,000 residents around that time.
Half a decade on (hard to believe), we’ve settled into a new equilibrium somewhere between the old and the new. London’s population has recovered, though notably mainly through international arrivals rather than domestic returns. There has been a return to the office, with an acknowledgement that work doesn’t just happen at desks and in meetings, but also at the margins—that teams are far easier to build and maintain when people are physically together. Yet this shift goes hand in hand with a more permanent cultural change—an expectation that, for many types of work, you definitely don’t need to be on-site for 40-plus hours a week. Indeed, it may be counterproductive. It’s this switch between being ‘on’ and being ‘off’ that matters, and a change of physical environment punctuates this most obviously.
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Research shows that switching off isn’t just a nice-to-have, but fundamental to creativity and productivity breakthroughs. Time spent in natural settings allows the mind to process and reset in ways urban environments cannot provide. These periods of focus and of ‘freewheeling’ allow the best of both worlds—greater industriousness refreshed by open landscapes, and an increased urgency because your timeframe in work mode is constrained. Removing yourself to somewhere very different facilitates a deeper disconnection; a hard reset, if you will. When we lived in Copenhagen, it was normal for parents to leave work at 4.30 pm to pick up children—they still got the same work done. In the Netherlands, from where my wife hails, they speak positively about ‘Niksen’ — [doing] ‘nothing’—primarily as a response to ‘always-on’ culture and burnout. Despite their hardworking Calvinist roots, the Dutch manage to blend a healthy attitude to ‘idle’ time and the highest rates of part-time work in the OECD, alongside excellent productivity and considerable wealth.
Back in the UK, places like Norfolk exemplify this balance. Close enough to London for regular connection—just under two hours by train—yet fundamentally different in pace and character. Places like Holt or Burnham Market offer community and history, while the coast provides that particular restoration that comes from the meeting of land and sea. Walking along the Norfolk Coast Path provides a visual perspective impossible to find in London. The Marriott’s Way, and the Old Chalk Way—both cycle paths—allow conveyance through an ancient landscape at human speed. What looks like disconnection from one perspective is in fact reconnection from another. Our usually endlessly divisible needs shrink to something very concise, often no more than: can I stay warm, dry, nourished? The simplicity is liberating. Sand between toes, the roar of a gale, a sudden downpour. Everything stops while we take shelter. It’s the best thing to amble along country lanes, picking blackberries, or to do a forest walk especially on a hot day, for the ultimate in ‘air conditioning’!
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Life is, of course, all about trade-offs—not least the matter of where you dwell when living this hybrid existence. While ways of living and working were compromised but sustainable during the 2010s, life in the 2020s is pushing hard against old ways. The upheaval has forced us to ‘live between’—though many were already seeking this balance between big city and countryside, between human-made and natural environment, between social and solitude.
If data reveals what is happening, the ever more frequent conversations I have reveal why: so many of us are tilting more towards space… mental… physical… natural space. The city remains essential for work, but the drive to retreat grows stronger as modern life becomes increasingly pressurised. Ex-Londoners, just like us, are now common in Norfolk.
The city gives so much, but in many ways takes even more. Stepping away from all that, is the physical equivalent of an internet blocker, or a timed lock box for your tech. Perhaps another way to put it is this: in an endlessly optimised world, we need ‘friction’. Not the friction of waiting for your Uber, but the ‘friction’ of the natural world. What life beyond the built environment, the big city, gives us is that feeling of being on nature’s time and therefore ultimately on human time.
