London leaver: 'I miss the edgy, fashion-forward vibe of Hackney'

Nicole Bremner loved her life in London – her house on a garden square, her close knit group of friends, and the sheer vibrancy of being in Hackney.

What drove her out was not the painful expense of life in the capital or even a desire to be closer to nature. It was schools.

Bremner has three teenagers – Ralf, 17, Timo, 15, and Romy, 14. And when she was starting to think about secondary schools she came to the realisation that even though she was planning on a private education there was no guarantee all three would get a place at the same school.

“My two boys are in a bulge year and it was incredibly difficult to find schools for them – and I didn’t even think about what would happen with my daughter,” she says.

“I was facing a situation of having three children at three different schools, and trying to coordinate that seemed really daunting – three school plays, holidays that didn’t coordinate.”

Bremner, 46, started looking further afield, looking at schools across Kent and Essex, both independent and grammar.

Eventually she settled on a school in Rochester, Kent, which impressed her with its great range of extracurricular activities including sport and music.

“It had a lot of opportunities my children would not necessarily have in an inner city school,” she says.

So, in 2019 the family moved east.

Bremner runs a social enterprise, Your Prosperity CIC, offering accessible financial advice, so she can work from anywhere.

Initially Bremner, who is divorced from the children’s father, rented while she looked for the right property.

Last year she paid £600,000 for a four-bedroom 1990s house overlooking the River Medway. “The outside of the house is not that pretty but the views are amazing,” she says.

The London house, in de Beauvoir Town, meanwhile was sold for “several times” more than the Kent property cost.

Trips back to London are easy since the train journey from Rochester is only 37 minutes, and Bremner has worked hard to embed herself in her new community, becoming a school governor and volunteering as a treasurer for two local charities.

She has also made friends at the school gates. “Now I can walk along the high street and I will bump into people I know which I really enjoy,” she says.

The children are thriving in their new home and Bremner is glad she made the move.

But as well as her friends she misses London’s amazing choice of restaurants, its public transport system, and its atmosphere.

“I miss the vibe of Hackney and the eclectic mix of people that you get,” she says. “People are so edgy and fashion-forward, and it is a different vibe here.

“I would love to have one foot back in London if I could.”