The Best Place to Live in the Country

Back in 2002 Country Life magazine informed their readers that the Northumberland market town of Alnwick was the best place to live in the UK.

If I’m completely honest, I’m not sure the readers of Country Life would have been greatly interested in this piece of information, because all of the property advertised for sale in Country Life is usually in possession of the term POA; and Alnwick doesn’t have many available properties like that.

Nevertheless, Alnwick with its famous castle was apparently the most fulfilling place to live in our Country and one of the main reasons for that is because the evening rush hour lasts 18 minutes. This could not be further from the truth, but let us not allow this piece of invention to get in the way of a good story.

Alnwick Castle was the home of Hogwarts for the first and second Hazza Potter films and if you visit the Castle now, you can still have a flying lesson. I will point out just for your information, that Alnwick Castle should be reported to Trading Standards for using this terminology. Britney (Not her real name) was left bitterly disappointed when she discovered that her flying lesson consisted of jumping as high as she could in front of a green screen whilst straddling a broomstick.

To put it mildly this was something of an anticlimax for Britney who had obviously been envisaging sailing over the castle ramparts playing Quidditch.

To be fair, Quidditch looks like a fairly dangerous activity and if you were to combine that with the lack of experience shown by a first time flyer, you’re looking at one hell of a dubious risk assessment, so perhaps Alnwick Castle are just erring on the side of caution.

Anyway, shit flying lessons aside, Alnwick Castle has been used as the setting for many a film and TV programme. A great deal of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves was filmed at Alnwick, some scenes for Downtown Abbey were also made there and Rowan Atkinson rode a horse around the Castle in the snow for the first series of Blackadder.

But an article which I found in the Daily Mail (so it must be true) says that Alnwick is “no chocolate-box fantasy of rural living” because “it has all the facilities required for life in the real world”.

I’m no expert, but I would say this is because it is in fact a real place where people actually live and do normal things, such as take their children to school and go to work. I suppose the residents should count themselves extremely fortunate that they only have an 18 minute rush hour to contend with when they are heading home at the end of the working day.

The judging panel for this Best Place to Live in Britain took into consideration the transport links to cities (the bus), traffic congestion (none, aside from that dreadful 18 minute rush hour) and how the contender was expected to develop over the coming years (rapidly I would say, like everywhere else). And do you know what happened after the glossy Country Life published this information? House prices shot through the roof and every property that was small enough to be affordable to local people became a holiday home. This quickly put an end to the “cheap homes” that had been advertised for free throughout the competition.

Country Life editor Clive Aslet said he was not surprised Alnwick had won, although it was not as wealthy as the other towns shortlisted. He added: “Money doesn't necessarily make you happy”. No it certainly doesn’t Mr Aslet, but if you are attempting to get onto the property ladder in your home town, money does assist an awful lot.

The reason that I am dredging up this information, (although it is still fresh in the mind of any Alnwick occupant 15 years on) is because last Saturday I read an article in the Daily Mail (so it must be true) that was entitled: Market towns with England’s cheapest property revealed: North East is the place to go for historic markets and low house prices.

So if you are a home owner in the North East you can rest assured that the value of your property has just doubled and so has the cost of your shopping.

I think we are very lucky with our quality of life here in the North East. We might have to drive a little further to get to a B&Q but we have the added bonus that we can use our broadest Geordie accent should a situation become rather heated. Honestly, nothing cools the flames of an argument like a thunderous roar of “WHEY AYE, PACK IT IN MAN”.

Although this article was published in the daily Mail (so it must be true) the findings regarding these house prices that were quoted were made by Lloyds Bank. Frankly I have no idea why Lloyds Banking Group plc would be making reference to cheap house prices. Oh, and I must mention that there were three adverts for mortgages half way down the page that were most interesting.

So, Ferryhill has the cheapest average house prices in the country at £78,184 and the Daily Wail has most helpfully compared this to the Buckinghamshire market town of Beaconsfield’s average of £1,049,659. They also described Ferryhill as being near Durham, which it is; but it’s even nearer to Spennymoor but this doesn’t sound nearly so glamorous. After all Ferryhill is a former mining town that “suffered some of the socio-economic problems associated with the industry’s decline but in recent years has seen infrastructural improvements and still has its weekly Friday markets”.

Well, that’s good. If you need 10 plastic cigarette lighters for £1, a pint of fluorescent slush puppy, some nettle flavoured cheese and a coaster with a flower on it, get yourself off to Ferryhill on Friday.

I do think that it’s particularly useful to hold a market in a market town, when everyone is at work and I also fail to understand why the status of a town is raised by the fact that it has a market. Back in the day when I was a child and all of this was still fields, the Saturday market was a bustling place where you could buy meat, fruit, vegetables, a hammer and some wheel trims for your car.

Now, because everyone buys from the internet those markets are a thing of the past. In fact some market towns advertise Farmers’ Markets just to let everyone know that they really can purchase meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables and a strange coloured alcoholic beverage made from distilled blackberries. These days I only go to the market to buy Britney a pint of slush puppy that is so iridescent it is sold with a tool for removing small children from the ceiling; and to purchase juice for my vaping implement. The bloke who sells me this liquid crack cocaine for my fake cigarette resembles one of Eddie Stobbart’s lorries. The writing is a bit smudged on his bottles of vaping juice but it is reasonably priced and he adds enough nicotine into it to stop me becoming suicidal by 7.45 each morning.

I did breathe a colossal sigh of relief that nothing north of Durham featured in this “cheap housing in market towns” critique. Aside from Ferryhill the other 9 places on the list were Crook, Stanhope and Saltburn in County Durham, Guisborough and Marsden in Yorkshire, Cartmel in Cumbria, Boston and Immingham in Lincolnshire and Tickhill in Derbyshire.

They had kept this list to the very end of the article for a very important reason. And this is because Lincolnshire, Derbyshire and Cumbria are definitely not in the North East.

If you live in Ferryhill, enjoy your Friday market and the peace while it lasts.

The masses are coming to join you.