Coming Soon: The Age Of Exurbia
I started prepping for Coronavirus in September 2019, after I heard about Disease X. A World Health Organisation staffer told me of plans to war-game a major pandemic – create a dummy Situation Room where various luminaries would form a world government once deaths reach a million.
The world ignored them then, but I didn’t ignore them.
In November 2019 I bought an acre of land in the West Country at auction, without even seeing the plot.
After the hammer fell, I did my research. It took about a day to pinpoint the exact location of my remote field, in a hamlet of smallholdings dotted with sheds and horseboxes. At least I have neighbours.
Some of those neighbours won’t welcome an outsider, especially now.
But they will have to learn to accept people like me. I am part of a megatrend. As successive waves of the pandemic break over Western society, hundreds of thousands of newly-unemployed workers from the big cities may begin to think along similar lines. After all, how long will the state be able to pay everyone even a basic income? The gig economy is set to explode, and many of those part-time jobs can be done from anywhere with a phone and a computer.
Zoom Boom
The move from the suburbs to remote rural locations started a decade ago, as the ratio of house prices to income steadily increased. That migration is turning from a trickle to a flood. This is set to to be the Age of Exurbia, defined by Washington Think Tank the Brookings Institution as places at least an hour from the nearest city, with housing density in the bottom quartile. And the boom in video-conferencing during the lockdown has shown tens of millions there is a way to stay in touch with friends, family and work colleagues. That will be a huge benefit to the environment.
Academics and demographers pooh-pooh the idea of a really major exodus from the cities, pointing to a lack of broadband and scarcity of medical facilities. These are serious obstacles, but if you are determined to leave the city behind there are two ways to overcome them. One is to make do without broadband, live a disconnected life, and ensure that your community includes a doctor, or at least a nurse.
This has its attractions, but I chose another way: my newly acquired land was purchased for its location – near one of the greatest concentrations of internet bandwidth in the United Kingdom – Morwenstow, the northernmost parish of Cornwall, and home to GCHQ’s Composite Signals Organisation Station. In other words, the nerve centre for hundreds of spooks. There are excellent community hospitals in the area.
“If you think the world will end tomorrow, plant a tree today”
I’d bought my agricultural acre both as an escape route from society, but also to plant a wood. I …
