We moved out in stages, the way people do when they\u2019re not ready to admit what\u2019s happening. I grew up in London, switching from the leafy west of the city to its more urban east in my twenties, after a painful break-up. By the time I met Alex, I felt part of the community in Hackney, and we moved together into a one-bedroom flat in the borough. Our next stop was Walthamstow in the east, a short hop, two and a half years in a terrace that was our first proper family home. Then, in 2020, we went properly. We had two small children and a house we\u2019d outgrown. We wanted a garden with actual grass. Somewhere Alex could teach the boys to play football and I could grow vegetables.<\/p>\n
We were looking in the outskirts of London, but I started casting the net wider and then I saw it. The kitchen of dreams. It was so big you could ride a bicycle around it. I\u2019d never heard of Buckhurst Hill but figured we couldn\u2019t be the only ex-east Londoners to wash up there. It had Epping Forest on the doorstep, a Central line station, and the closest supermarket was a Waitrose.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d be proud to live there,\u201d Alex said, after we first viewed the house. I nodded. It was only a few stops on the tube. How different could it be?<\/p>\n
Very, it turned out.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t see the sign until the day we moved. A short drive from the house, at the top of a long, sweeping forest road: Welcome to Essex. That was the moment it hit me. I\u2019d accidentally left London<\/a>.<\/p>\n That night, sitting amid the boxes, another realisation crept in. \u201cDo you think this is a Tory seat?\u201d I asked Alex. It was. For almost the first time since returning to my hometown after university, I had stepped outside my London bubble<\/a>.<\/p>\n Buckhurst Hill is a strange little parish. Technically Essex, spiritually neither here nor there, hovering in a kind of postcode purgatory between leafy London suburbs<\/a> and twee countryside villages. In the early 2010s, it became a haunt for the cast of The Only Way Is Essex \u2013 who frequented its cute cafes, bouji boutiques and swanky pet groomers.<\/p>\n The high street looks, at first glance, like it\u2019s filled with independent shops. A good florist, a better butcher. A friendly pharmacy. Look again and you\u2019ll notice the door you assumed was a trendy bar is actually a filler clinic. As is the one next to it. And the one three doors down. I made that mistake the first week we arrived, lured in by a neon sign that reminded me of my Hackney haunts. Instead of happy hour, they offered bargain Botox. Over the years, I did grow partial to a quick glow-up between the school run and bath time. But at the time, I was disappointed by the lack of decent Negroni spots.<\/p>\n Our social life started well. We met Margot \u2013 our yoga-loving Irish neighbour, grandmother of 12, who still found space for us. When we threw a party, Margot didn\u2019t complain about the noise; she came over with a bottle and joined in the fun. If I had a problem, I would pop over for a glass of wine and a chat. But beyond Margot, we never quite fitted.<\/p>\n The elderly neighbours on the other side, we only met properly when they tried, unsuccessfully, to oppose our loft extension. We invited them over for a tense tea during which nobody ate any biscuits. I resolved to win over the school gate by throwing a children\u2019s disco for my eldest\u2019s fifth birthday. There would be Bucks Fizz, foam and a fireworks finale. It all went wrong. Lots of small children and sparklers are a recipe for disaster. One child ended up in A&E. Thankfully, her injury fully healed, but I had left my mark \u2013 for all the wrong reasons.<\/p>\n A few years in, we installed a large bike box topped with a living garden and ripped out the Victorian railings that matched Margot\u2019s house. A rusted monstrosity, apparently \u2013 we overheard it whispered about in the pub. Then last summer, the flag wars started in nearby Epping. Union Jack bunting appeared on the iron rails outside the local pub, and I discovered the landlord was also a GB News presenter. The St George\u2019s flags never quite reached Buckhurst Hill\u2019s lampposts. They became a feature of the surrounding villages instead \u2013 a quiet, insistent fringe I noticed whenever there was a birthday party at a far-flung soft play.<\/p>\n At first, I brushed off the feeling that we didn\u2019t belong. It didn\u2019t matter that there seemed to be no like-minded people in the area; we had our friends, and our children had strong friendships outside school. But when my eldest son, who is more interested in skateboarding and music than football, first started talking about feeling lonely and like he didn\u2019t fit in with his schoolmates, I realised that our differences were trickling down to them. The other parents on the WhatsApp group were all perfectly nice people, but they just weren\u2019t our people. The niggle grew until it started gnawing away at me. It became all my husband and I talked about. We loved our house, but it had started to dawn on us that it might not be our forever home after all.<\/p>\n The thing that finally moved us was the schools.<\/p>\n Hackney had, in our absence, quietly become one of the best places in England to go to a state school. Mossbourne Community Academy, a five-minute cycle from the last flat I lived in as a single person, routinely ranks among the top comprehensives in the country. Its results rival those of schools charging around \u00a38,000 a term. Almost half of its pupils qualify for free school meals<\/a>. They still outperform the national average by about a grade in every subject. The borough has pulled off something close to a miracle: secondaries well above the national average, sixth forms sending kids to Russell Group universities and a feeder system that actually works.<\/p>\n What we had moved to, by contrast, was an area where the state secondary offer was, for all its affluence, or perhaps because of it, somewhat lacking. There is no secondary school in Buckhurst Hill itself. The nearest comprehensives in our catchment zone were typically rated Good by Ofsted, with some signs of progress, but not enough to reassure me. Parents who could afford it tended to hire a private tutor<\/a> to help their offspring into grammar schools or local independent schools such as Bancroft\u2019s or Forest, leaving a talent gap.<\/p>\n![\"Serena](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SEI_294675848.jpg\")
\u2018The feeling that we didn\u2019t belong there had been gnawing at me for years\u2019, says Serena (Photo: Teri Pengilley)<\/p>\n