It used to be that I loved working in the city…but now, as the middle age years creep up on me, I have started to yearn for the quiet of the country. And so I started to search for the perfect village to buy in. I wanted picture postcard England, all thatch, beamed pub and humpback bridges over chuckling streams – Oh, and also close to some commercial property or at least a serviced office. And that is where the problem came. On the whole when you get a beautiful secluded village it has farms and such what on its borders and residential dwellings in the centre. And the chances of getting a change of use permission to turn one of the little cottages into a commercial premises are pretty much zero. So, if I wanted to live the rural idyll the I would have to commute every day to the nearest town with its commercial properties or serviced offices…and that sort of ruined the point of the whole exercise.
But then, on the advice of a friend, I approached a specialist in rural commercial property and they showed me how wrong I had been. What I had neglected to take into account was the fact that, in years gone past, the centre of the village was actually the hub of local business. Blacksmiths, the town hall, the market, caters, bakers and so on all had their premises in the centre of the village. This can be seen when you take a drive through rural England and notice how many of the house are still named, the old forge or the old bakery etc. But what I was not aware of was how many of these were actually still zoned for commercial use. Eventually I found a place in a delightful village in Kent called Ickham, it was the old forge and had been sitting empty for about eight years and was still zoned – commercial.
Now I live in my little village and my office/showroom is bang in the middle, right next to the pub.
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The modern traveling businessman
