On Friday evenings Tori Halman and her boyfriend Rob Overall would be cosy at home, cooking pasta and enjoying a glass of wine, while listening to the shrieks and shouts of twentysomething revellers beginning their big nights out.
“We were going to bed as they were just getting started,” says Halman. “It made us ask ourselves why on earth we were living in Clapham.”
Last summer Halman, 31, and Overall, 30, finally decided that their London years were behind them, and they moved to Cheshire, where they now spend their downtime walking their labrador puppy in the countryside, exploring country pubs, and wrangling cattle.
They have also been able to buy their first home, something that would have been impossible for them while living in the capital.
Halman was born and raised in Cheshire but, after university, headed straight for London to start her career. “It was just the norm,” she says. “I didn’t even question whether other options were available.”
Her first flat was a tiny “absolute hovel”, shared with three friends and a number of rodents. “I woke up one night to two mice sitting at the end of my bed,” she says. “It was the stuff of nightmares.”
Over the years Halman worked first as a journalist and then in public relations, and found better places to rent. By the start of the pandemic she and Overall were sharing a flat in Clapham which cost around £1,500pcm.
Enforced frugality during the start of the pandemic left them with some savings, and they used the money to go travelling for nine months in South America.
“We decided that we didn’t really want to go back to London,” says Halman. “It is easy to get stuck in the London bubble and almost forget that there is life outside the M25. While we were away we had time to slow down and reflect, and I realised that the place I would feel the most peaceful and content in was Cheshire.”
The couple made the move last summer, buying a four-bedroom, £650,000 house in the village of Winterley, near the market town of Sandbach, in August.
Halman works from home and Overall is a data engineer and works mostly remotely, travelling to London one day per week.
Halman was not the only member of her family to have changed her life.
Her dad, a chartered surveyor, realised a lifetime ambition and bought a small beef farm with ten Aberdeen Angus cows, and now that Tori is a local she helps out with the animals, learning how to birth cows on YouTube and helping set up a family business, Brode Hall Beef, selling organic beef boxes.
She and Overall recently expanded the family with a puppy, Inca, and spend a lot of their time out walking.
Halman has also joined a running club and gym and the couple have picked up friends easily.
“Everywhere you go, everyone wants to have a good chinwag,” she says. “Apart from that we cook a lot, we grow vegetables. If we need more excitement we will get the train into Manchester, but we came here for the slow life and that is what we love about it.”
